Abstract

Hawks Eating Crow

The author asks why many conservatives and journalists are claiming they could not, prior to the war, have anticipated the mistakes made by the Bush administration in Iraq. Most of the regretful hawks blame the Administration for its failure to execute what they consider a noble endeavor. While it might have been nice to liberate Iraq from Saddam's clutches, it was a lot more likely that under Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Co., we would end up arresting innocent people, holding them without trial and systematically torturing and sexually humiliating them; all the while saying, as the "Daily Show's" Rob Corddry so brilliantly put it, "Remember, it's not important that we did torture these people. What's important is that we are not the kind of people who would torture these people." Take a look at the sequence of events leading to the revelations of the Abu Ghraib scandal in "The New Yorker:" It began, as Seymour Hersh notes, with Rumsfeld's desire to extract information from informants about the location of certain "high-value" targets in Afghanistan along with his unwillingness to apply the terms of the Geneva Conventions to prisoners captured in the War on Terrorism. Excuse me, but just what was so hard to understand about this bunch? We knew they were dishonest. We knew they were fanatical. We knew they had no respect for civil liberties. Just what is surprising about the manner in which they've conducted the war?