The pathetic middle

In yesterday's Times, David Brooks opined that the left was "unhinged" for seeking evidence that U.S. interrogators actually had desecrated the Koran, after Newsweek retracted a story about an internal Pentagon investigation that had uncovered such abuse.

"Would it be illegal," Brooks whined, "for more people on the left to actually be happy that a story slurring Americans may turn out to be unproven? Could there be a few more liberals willing to admit that prisoners routinely lie about their treatment?"

This odious statement appears in an Op-Ed that strives to be even-handed by dishing out abuse right and left, hobbling down that inglorious middle of the road where, as Molly Ivins once said, there isn't anything but a yellow line and dead armadillos.

As if reality swooped in to rebut Brooks, today's paper has a story by Tim Golden that opens with a heart-rending account of a man tortured to death by U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan. This story gives the lie to the war apologists who assert that the recent riots against U.S. military aggression have been the manipulations of wicked mullahs who exploit the fact that muslims care more about a desecrated book than about the deaths of fellow humans. My guess is that they care about both. And, while stories like Dilawar's, who by Golden's account was a taxi driver unlucky enough to have been driving past an American base at the wrong time, are probably pretty mundane at this point, they are still the tinder for which the Koran story, true or not, was the spark.

To expect the left to be happy that not every single accusation levelled against the U.S. is true to is to expect the left to be sort of happy about the war and our country's conduct of it, sort of glad that maybe sometimes the U.S. military can kinda do the right thing, like interrogate prisoners without committing war crimes. This, when the official guidelines, as reported in books like Mark Danner's Torture and Truth, read like a "how-to commit war crimes" manual. This, when the war itself, illegal at core, is itself a crime.

This isn't moderation; this is pathetic. The left is not glad that stories like Dilawars are true, and that the Koran story very well might be. The left is glad that such stories are coming out, because they are the best chance we have for breaking the immense wall of denial that Bush's aggressions are a criminal mistake and have backfired on us and on humanity.

And guess what, David Brooks? You can't lie about your treatment when you're dead.