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Ceding the Moral High Ground

Shana Pearlman on the hypocrisy among American "Progresives".

By Shana Pearlman

25 Feb 2012, 19:02

On Tuesday this week, US officials apologised for military personnel “inadvertently” placing Korans in an incinerator on Bagram Airbase and burning them.  Today, violent protests have swept Afghanistan for a second day; the death toll stands at seven and dozens people have been injured.  President Obama has apologised for the incident.  You’d expect the American progressive community, always so quick to decry any perceived outrage towards Islam from US military personnel, would immediately call for the heads of the Obama administration’s Defense Department, as they rightfully did during the Abu Ghraib incidents, or when interrogators supposedly flushed a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay, a story that turned out to be a big fat lie.   But instead of rising up in outrage over the insensitivity of NATO troops to ordinary Afghan people, all we hear from the progressive community is...total silence.

I suppose we shouldn’t be particularly surprised.  Ever since the Obama administration came into power on the 20^th of January, 2009, things that were unbelievably awful from 2000-2008 are suddenly A-OK.  The vast majority of progressives suddenly are totally hunky-dory with extraordinary rendition and torture, violating the Geneva Convention by secretly holding and interrogating detainees on a ship in international waters (and you can bet his interrogation didn’t consist of playing checkers),  the PATRIOT Act, the expansion of warrantless wiretapping, and many, many other things that used to be the ultimate expression of evil. 

There was a time when putting doing something like copies of a Koran into an incinerator would earn a speech from Al Gore, red-faced and sweaty, shouting repeatedly “HOW DARE THEY!” to an ecstatically applauding audience.  Or, at least, a denunciation or two from progressive media outlets like Mother Jones and MSNBC.  People are dying because of NATO troops’ negligence; shouldn’t Defense Secretary Leon Panetta be held to account like Don Rumsfeld surely would have been?  Instead, we get a massive yawn from everyone who at one time claimed to care so much about the welfare of the inhabitants of this part of the world.

I’m not the first person to remark on the end of the antiwar movement, which conveniently coincides with Obama taking office.  I guess, after the excitement of the Bush years, progressives are just really tired of worrying about torture and ill-treatment.  Or, maybe this stuff never really mattered to them in the first place.  In a February 2012 ABC News/Washington Post poll, 56 percent of progressives said they agreed with keeping the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay open.  I remember when Gitmo was the Worst. Thing. America. Has. Done. EVAR, and now apparently a majority of progressives think it’s just fine.  What a difference a change in presidential administrations makes.

In addition, 77 percent of progressives told the pollsters that they agreed with drone attacks against terror suspects abroad.  Progressives used to loudly approve John Kerry saying that terrorism was an “intelligence and law enforcement matter,” not a matter for aggressive military action.  They used to call for terror suspects to be tried in civilian courts; now they are more than happy to have automated drone missiles rain down fire and destruction on the heads of anybody the FBI or the military deems to be a terror threat, no matter who might be in the vicinity.  Progressives these days are more likely to get het up about a Republican presidential candidate’s feelings about contraception or Satan than they are about unauthorised military action overseas – it’s as though, for American progressives, the lives of innocent brown people are just collateral damage in the culture war. 

At this point, a dispassionate political observer can only conclude one thing; American progressives, who claimed to care deeply about the United States’ reputation on the world stage and the way we treated those with whom we were (and are at war), and the way actually only cared about political expediency.  Their doubts and fears about the War on Terror magically evaporated the moment a Democratic President took office; as an advocate for torture victims told me, “I know that torture is going on, but I’m just such a huge fan of the President’s health care bill.”  All the wailing and gnashing of teeth about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib were just crocodile tears; they just wanted Bush out of office, they certainly didn’t care about the lives of people in faraway places like Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan.  Any moral high ground that progressives once had has now been ceded to the new realpolitik: Democrats must win at any cost.  Of all the betrayals of the spirit of the 2008 election, this one cuts deeply.