Jonah Goldberg has been out front on the issue of the hypocrisy, inconsistency and double standards of Big Media in their treatment of the Abu Ghraib prison torture/abuse images versus their treatment of the images of the grisly slaughter-by-beheading of Nick Berg by Islamo-fascists. In fact, he was arguing from the beginning that the Abu Ghraib images needn't have been shown, or at least shouldn't have been shown uncensored, with numbing repetition, and in some cases without being fully vetted as to whether they were fakes. He's completely right. And, the Big Media types, essentially everyone in Big Media, who nattered on in their tiresome way about the "First Amendment" "Censorship", "the need to show the whole story" etc. etc. are completely wrong. The media choose, with no government involvement so it has nothing to do with censorship, not to show stuff all the time - the Daniel Pearl execution video, footage of jumpers from the twin towers. It's a matter of professional judgement and responsibility.
Right in the middle of this debate, Islamofascists, possibly led by Zarqawi himself, perpetrated the animalistic, brutal murder of Nick Berg and videotaped it, creating an ideal test for Big Media and their purported new policy of showing all images, no matter how graphic. As Andrew Sullivan said:
Let's start an internet campaign to insist that the major media - including the New Yorker, the networks, the major newsweeklies, and every major paper - run a picture of Zarqawi holding up Nick Berg's severed head. It's time to release the Pearl video and stills too. Enough with the double standards. The media were absolutely right to show the abuse photos. But they are only part of the story. It's about time the media gave us all of it, however harrowing it is.
And later:
The mainstream media is driving me bonkers. They keep referring to an al Qaeda website that carries the video of the beheading of Nick Berg. But they won't tell us the name of the website! Not only will they not show what al Qaeda really is, they won't even allow us to know how to find it. If anyone out there has a link, please let me know. We can get around the Washington Post, which has a "slideshow" of American abuse but won't even provide a link to the horrors perpetrated by the enemy.
Sullivan is right. It was not wrong to show the images from Abu Ghraib, though they certainly shouldn't have been hyped and repeated so relentlessly, and should have been more thoroughly vetted to make sure they were all real. However, it's equally if not more crucial that the media not hide from images which show us the sheer brutality and evil of the enemy we are fighting.
Today Goldberg has a well-written new column , responding to his Big Media critics, such as Aaron Brown of CNN and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. Mickey Kaus defends him, but in doing so tries to throw Jonah a bit of a Jedi Mind trick. Kaus writes that Jonah's column, in which he says things such as: "The revelation of those humiliating pictures and the political opportunities they created lead to Berg's beheading." is an endorsement of the "blowback" theory, so favored by the left. I think Jonah is wrong on this point. Sullivan again:
The photographs emphatically did not get Berg killed, no more than they got Daniel Pearl killed. Al Qaeda may have exploited the photographs as a propaganda tool, but we know they need no "reason" to behead or massacre Americans. The only reason they need is that the person is an infidel and in their captivity. Believing that this is an actual response by Zarqawi to Abu Ghraib is to accept Zarqawi's own spin.
Kaus, however, also accepts Zarqawi's spin, and tries to pull a "gotcha" on Goldberg for doing the same:
4)A basic debate over the war against terrorism has been between two models. In one model, there is a finite number of bad guys who want to kill us, and who need to be defeated, deterred, overawed or killed. In the other model, there is a large amorphous group of "swing voter" Arabs who might support terrorism but who might also be persuaded to live in peace with the encroaching forces of globalization. Model #1 is associated mainly with proponents of aggressive military action. Model #2 is largely associated with liberals who worry about "blowback," root causes and the Palestinians (though some neocon idealists envision spreading democracy winning over the "swing voters"). If you buy model #2, as do many of Donald Rumsfeld's critics on the left, and as do I, then you really didn't want these photos published, because they are what will lose us the swing voters and produce the blowback--if not in Iraq then elsewhere in the Arab world. Not only does it follow that the photos are best left unpublished; it also follows that the Pentagon was doing the right thing when it attempted to keep them secret. And it follows that the revered Senator McCain, who has been declaring that he wants all the remaining photos released, is acting like a posturing, media-mad fool. ""We need to assure the American people this won't happen again," McCain says. Huh? The current crop of stomach-churners isn't enough to do that? We need to make a few hundred million more people want to kill us!
5) At the same time, it would be nice if conservatives like Goldberg would apply the logic of their argument about the photos to larger questions of foreign policy--weighing, say, the arguments for invading Iraq without the U.N, against the costs of rising Arab and world anger. The next time a Democratic peacenik (or Frenchman) frets about "blowback," let's have no more hoots of derision from Goldberg or from any other conservative who's argued for photo-suppression.
Okay. Everybody got all that? Good. Here's where I come in: I think Sullivan is right and Goldberg and Kaus are wrong. The photos had nothing to do with what happened to Nick Berg. They were just a pretext. These people have been engaged in this kind of barbarism for a long time already. But, even if Goldberg thinks that the photos are what pushed these particular Islamo-fascists over the edge, this doesn't mean what Mickey Kaus thinks it means. He, like most who use the term, is trying to use "blowback" to limit US policy. Plenty of things we do inflame hatred in the Muslim Arab world: supporting Israel, allowing women to vote, not being an Islamic caliphate etc. etc. By that logic, all terrorist strikes against us are "blowback". However, that doesn't mean that these things aren't the right thing to do to begin with. Similarly, trying to build democracy in Iraq surely creates "blowback" in the short term, but the long term goal of creating a stable, democratic, non-terrorist-sponsoring, America-friendly Iraq are well worth it in the long term. It seemed fairly obvious to me that there might be a spike in terrorist attacks in the short term, (worldwide, there's actually been a drop, but, obviously, in Iraq there's been a rise) but that it was worth it for a plan of working towards a long term solution of the problems in the Middle East. The fact that something creates some short term "blowback" doesn't mean that it isn't worth doing. However, you should avoid "blowback" where it hurts you and does no conceivable good. The relentless exposure of the photos were all "blowback" with no upside.
