I know Tom Friedman takes a beating in liberal circles, but I really thought he brought up an important point yesterday about the violence in Afghanistan, supposedly/maybe not linked to the Newsweek story: Muslims get blown up every day in Iraq to no reaction in the larger Islamic world, but this story of Koran abuse by the U.S. drives people in Afghanistan to murderous rioting?
Let’s leave aside for the moment the possibly spurious connection between Newsweek and the Afghanistan rioting — personally, I wonder how many copies of Newsweek are sold in Afghanistan in any given week.
As Friedman notes, the real problem is that Shiite life to Sunnis (and vice-versa) is cheap. Before the war, life was cheap but stable in Iraq. (I never thought that Michael Moore intended anything more than that in portraying pre-war Baghdad in Fahrenheit 911.) Now life is cheap and harrowingly unstable. They used to have "rape rooms, torture chambers, mass graves" (the Sean Hannity litany); now they have suicide bombs, kidnapping, and daily assassinations.
Friedman feels that the solution lies in the Sunni leadership, to lay down the law and declare the violence to be un-Islamic. But with all due respect to Friedman, the problem is deeper than that. It springs from a total despair that human life on earth — one’s own, or one’s enemy’s — is worth a plugged nickel. The rottenness of life on earth, and the rage, fear and humiliation that the insurgents feel are overcome only by the promise of vengeance and martyrhood.
The U.S. has not contributed positively to this moral problem: the seeming indifference to looting of national treasures in Iraq immediately following the fall of Saddam made it more difficult to maintain a national, shared identity. Donald Rumsfeld lauded the "humanity" of our bombing of Baghdad. We had Abu Ghraib. We have doubtless killed many thousands of civilians. I am not under any illusions as to the realities of war — it is horrible, under even the "best" of circumstances. But is there any question that we Americans discount the lives of Iraqis? We liberals are guilty of this: most of us know that about 1,700 American troops have died in Iraq. As for the Iraqi death toll, military and civilian? Well… those lives are cheap. We don’t keep track. It’s not that important to us.
Friedman is partly right: Sunni leaders need to inveigh against the unconscionable cruelty of random murder. All sides — including ours — need to make good faith efforts to value the lives of those on other sides. I have little doubt that it happens every day in any number of cases. That is why I have felt that a modicum of good-faith and competence — not even brilliance, necessarily — by our people in charge would make a huge difference.
There is precedent, for instance, in South Africa, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for groups that have hated each other to come together and tell their stories. Perhaps in the midst of chaos, that is unrealistic. But it will need to happen in Iraq and the larger Middle East, and it should also happen in our attitudes towards people who live on the other side of the world. It is only decent and human to recognize our shared essential natures and interconnected fates.
Speaking of devaluing life, anyone who hasn’t read today’s NYT’s devastating article about the death of two Afghan inmates in US custody should take the time to do so. But be warned: it’s really, really not pretty.