He called this “a historic moment to bring peace to the world.” He said introducing democracy in the Middle East was the key — “the long term solution to terror.” He spoke of the “Taliban-like vision” of America's opponents, a vision based on fanaticism and oppression. And he maintained, as he has before, that “freedom is the Almighty's gift to every person in the world.”
At one point in the conversation Bush made a genuinely surprising statement. “The job of a president is to help culture change….I can be a voice of cultural change,” he said. Say this for George W. Bush — he's no cynic.
Against this background, one can't help thinking that the man who was most betrayed by the events at Abu Ghraib prison is the man who sits in the Oval Office. If he also feels that way, he isn't letting on.
America is now noisily engaged in what is likely to be a long and exhaustive process of finding out how the abuses at Abu Ghraib could happen. Issues of policy, command and control, who said what to whom, and much else will be closely examined. The systemic flaws and foul-ups that made Abu Ghraib possible will be remorselessly probed. All that is as it should be.
But this scandal has another dimension likely pass largely unexamined in congressional hearings and on the Op-Ed pages of our leading journals. The name for it is sin. And the particular aspect of it that needs to be recognized in this case — but usually won't be — is the corrupting influence of media sex and violence on American youth.
One commentator who had the nerve to make that necessary point was Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council, a think-tank of largely evangelical inspiration.
Urging that Americans “ask some hard questions about what kind of society our children are growing up in,” Perkins, citing evangelical leader Chuck Colson, remarked: “When you mix young people who grew up on a steady diet of MTV and pornography with a prison environment, you get the abuse at Abu Ghraib.”
Yes, I know — you can't blame it all on MTV. The systemic problems that produced this disaster need to be identified and rooted out. But even as that necessary work is being done, it should be acknowledged that 12 or 15 years of immersion in media perversity and violence do produce effects in impressionable young people. One familiar name for those effects is Columbine. Now we can add Abu Ghraib to the list.
“America is in a perilous situation,” Perkins warned. “In the eyes of these Muslims we are the enemy because we are Christian, but in many areas of our culture our conduct as a nation is anything but Christian.”
Perkins was right. That underlines the irony inherent in George Bush's view of the American role in Iraq. The president wishes to serve American interests, the interests of Iraqis, and the entire world by transferring the values of Western democracy to the Middle East. But those values are no longer as univocally wholesome as Mr. Bush idealistically assumes.
Russell Shaw is a free lance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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