WHY AREN'T YOU LISTENING TO WHY AREN'T YOU LISTENING TO US? I had saved this Matthew Parris article last night to blog today, but fortunately discovered that Steven Den Beste
had already done a much better job on it than I would have done. I don't
agree with everything he says (I don't think we're needed now to keep the
peace among the nations of Western Europe), but he expands upon an obvious
explanation for American attitudes that Parris, and commentators like him,
never seem to consider:

We're not interested in listening to European advice because the Europeans have proved that their advice is worthless.

Reading Euro-commentary is sometimes like stepping into some knock-off Mark
Twain parody, where suave Europe is confident of impressing the wide-eyed
American naif with its sagesse. When the naif does not respond according to script, the commentator comes up with stuff like this:

But how we define terrorism, where we diagnose it, and to what resorts we think it right to go in combating it, are debates in which we Europeans and the United States may find our preferred positions sliding apart. I think that slide began this week, as the unsavoury pantomime took to the stage in Guantanamo Bay. Take Donald Rumsfeld’s angry brushing aside of concerns about the treatment of prisoners, an outburst which, from the Prime Minister down, members of the British Government have been trying to sidle past, looking the other way. Said the US Defence Secretary: “I do not feel the slightest concern at their treatment. They are being treated vastly better than they treated anybody else.” In a saloon bar this will do, but is that the standard? How much does the Secretary of State really know about these individuals? And why are they not prisoners of war? Face it: Mr Rumsfeld does not care about the niceties and cares little who knows it.

But what's the issue here? The question is: is it a fact that these prisoners are being abused? And people like Parris seem far more occupied with Rumsfeld's brusqueness than they are with the facts of the matter. The denunciations and accusations began before the Red Cross had even arrived for inspections at Guantanamo. It can hardly be the case that Americans are willing to throw away civilized values, or lack "a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind", for critics would not cavil at real savages for allowing prisoners to get rained on along with their guards. Rumsfeld is not an uncivilized man, nor are his countrymen, and the fact is, he has been listening to unfounded accusations of "violating human rights" - of torture, of massacre, of indifference to civilian casualties - since the campaign began. His brusqueness is more a comment on the credibility of the critics than an expression of contempt for civilized values. "Rumsfeld is popular because Americans are simple-minded Manichean rubes" is a comforting, but false, explanation for American attitudes.
Posted by Moira Breen at January 19, 2002 12:19 PM