Funny how attitudes change when the provocation comes from the news media instead of Republican foreign policy.

The latest meme from the pro-war side says that the media -- 60 Minutes in particular -- should have sat on the Abu Ghraib pictures because airing them has inflamed the Muslim world, and will likely spark retribution against U.S. troops and American citizens -- see Nick Berg.

Jonah Goldberg's latest column contains this sentence:

"Well, CBS' scoop has gotten someone killed and there will be more deaths, on both sides, as a result of this story before it becomes history.

Human rights groups have been reporting abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo for months. The military has known about Abu Ghraib since January. We heard nothing of any courts martial between then and now. Then, less than a week after 60 Minutes broke the story, the Pentagon announces the first round of charges. I doubt that's mere coincidence.

These charges against the press are all the odder considering that conservatives were quick to point out after the abuses came to light that we're different from Iraq and much of the rest of the Middle East in that we expose these kinds of things, we throw light on them, and we then hold responsible those who were accountible (I agree, by the way). You can't make that point, then follow up with an argument against releasing the photos to the public in the first place.

The pictures were needed to get our attention, which was necessary for us to demand accountability from our government and our military.

I don't doubt that those pictures will further inflame Muslim ire. I don't doubt that they'll get plenty more Americans killed. But that abuse -- even filmed and taped abuse -- would crop up somewhere in a fighting force of some 130,000 troops was inevitable. Just the law of averages that you'll get some bad eggs. Our military and political leaders should have anticipated and calculated that risk into the original decision to invade Iraq. War is ugly. It spawns ugly pictures. Ugly pictures don't win us friends. Which is (merely one reason) why we ought to be awfully selective about when and where we go to war in the first place.

It's looking more and more like the abuses at Abu Ghraib were far more widespread than we'd like to believe. Reports of the latest round of pictures suggest that the abuse wasn't the result of expressed or implied military policy, but of massive, wholesale dereliction of duty and lack of supervision from commanding officers. We had truck drivers, restaurant managers, and auto mechanics supervising POWs and captured combatants -- folks with little or no training whatsoever in what they were being asked to do. Anyone who's taken a 100-level psych course has read about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Why were these people assigned to guard the prison? Are we stretched that thin?

But I digress.

My point here is that actions either have consequences, or they don't. If CBS should have considered anti-American blowback when deciding whether or not to air those photos, our elected leaders ought to keep the same thing in mind when deciding to what extent we should fund/support Israel, what Arab country we ought to invade next, and when and where to position our troops in the Middle East.

It's unfathomable to me that considering how our actions might resonate with people who don't much like us should factor into whether news executives decide to hold our military accountable, but not into how, when, and where we use that same military in the first place.

Read here, here, here, and here.

At first, I thought this was the stuff of your usual nutso conspiracy theorists. But it's looking more and more like there are some decidedly weird angles to this story.

UPDATE: In the comments section of my website,"Dave" points to this bizarre bit from a CNN story on one of the court martialled soldiers in Abu Ghraib:

Paul Bergrin, attorney for Davis, said his client was ordered to do what he did, but denied Davis" committed any criminal acts."

...Davis' superiors, Bergrin said, told the specialist it was important to"break the prisoners" in order to"save the lives of innocent soldiers on the outside and civilians and individuals like Nicholas Berg."

Berg was the Pennsylvania businessman whose beheading was posted on a Web page this week. The Abu Ghraib abuses depicted in the photographs took place last fall.

Of course, it could also mean that Davis should get himself a competent lawyer.

The youth have even revolted against beards in a way that is reminiscent of the generation of Peter the Great (who, in his quest to Westernize Russia, actually imposed taxes and license fees on the unshaven in his war on orthodox religion). Well, at least this generation's fight is against any government intrusions of this sort.

Kristoff concludes:

There's a useful lesson here for George Bush's America as well as for the ayatollahs' Iran: when a religion is imposed on people, when a government tries too ostentatiously to put itself"under God," the effect is often not to prop up religious faith but to undermine it. Nothing is more lethal to religious faith than having self-righteous, intolerant politicians (who wince at nose studs) drag God into politics.

I know these have been an extraordinarily difficult couple of weeks for you, and I'm very sorry about that. The unending fighting in Iraq after we've been there for over a year, the accelerating race to the June 30 deadline -- even though we don't seem to have the slightest idea who or what it is we're going to be turning"sovereignty" over to or what the hell that"sovereignty" might consist of, the inability of our Secretary of Defense to figure out even what the military chain of command might be (you'd think he'd at least know that, right, since he is the Secretary of Defense and all? -- but maybe he doesn't want to go into it too much, since it appears that chain might lead to, whaddya know, General"Satan Is Our Enemy" Boykin), and then those pictures from Abu Ghraib. And we're told there are much worse photos to come: of rape, and perhaps even of murder.

Into this very demoralizing mix came the video of the beheading of Nick Berg. And in an odd, disturbing way, while you proclaimed the horror and revulsion that we all feel at this particularly barbaric death, it almost seemed that this stomach-churning snuff video provided a much-needed sense of justification for the policies you support. As White House press secretary Scott McClellan said," It shows the true nature of the enemies of freedom. They have no regard for the lives of innocent men, women and children. We will pursue those who are responsible and bring them to justice." (Some people, meanwhile, had a somewhat more clinical and even self-admittedly cold view of Mr. Berg's fate. Whatever one might think of that perspective, at least it is grounded in facts, which seems to be more than can be asked of many others at this particular moment.)

And our philosopher-king President says that,"[t]here is no justification for the brutal execution of Nicholas Berg, no justification whatsoever," as if we might not realize that on our own.

Mr. Bush, Mr. McClellan and many other warhawks seem to offer such statements as if to remind us, and themselves, of how savage and brutal"the enemies of freedom" actually are. Um, excuse me. We knew that, didn't we? We knew that on 9/11, when they flew airplanes into buildings, and killed almost 3,000 of us, correct? That's why they're our enemies and why we're at war with them, right?

But, as unspeakably uncivilized as it may be for me to name this (although perhaps not as uncivilized as the fact itself), from the point of view of the public debate about where we are at this moment in our foreign adventures, Mr. Berg's horrifying death seemed almost propitious. While most people were properly and justifiably horrified at the abuses of prisoners in Iraq, you now proclaim with moral righteousness:"See? See? Rush Limbaugh is right! Compared to beheadings, those prison abuses really are just like frat house hazing incidents! Our guys were just blowing off steam and having a good time! But those people are really, really bad! We're not bad like them!"

Is this truly where you have arrived? Is this genuinely the moral argument you are now reduced to? We proclaim war on the terrorists precisely because they are murderous savages, who want nothing more than to kill as many of us as they can, in the most brutal ways imaginable, and now we justify our own mistakes, miscalculations and disastrous lack of planning and accountability by noting that we're not as bad as the people we proclaimed war on to begin with?

I think you need to reconsider this. If we are actually fighting for freedom and the value of human life, I think you need to offer a moral perspective which is a bit more inspiring than that represented by this kind of argument. The fact that we're not as bad as barbaric savages doesn't quite cut it.

And perhaps you ought to rethink just what the hell it is we're actually doing in Iraq -- not what you might hope we're doing, but what we're actually doing. There is a difference, and that difference becomes more apparent to much of the rest of the world every day. We aren't exactly winning friends by insisting on pursuing our present course to the bitter end. And this time, the end could be very bitter indeed.

I don't think that's what you really want, is it? I certainly hope not.

You might want to rethink as well your adoption of all those arguments you used to reject: cultural determinism and moral relativism, to name just two. It doesn't fill the rest of us with confidence to see you so desperate to cling to the moral high ground by your fingernails that you use the arguments of the people you used to ridicule and condemn every single day. It makes us think that maybe your moral center has been temporarily misplaced.

Anyway, these are just a few thoughts I thought I'd pass along on this morning filled with very depressing news. I don't expect any of you to adopt these suggestions, but I wanted to offer them anyway.

And I truly am glad that we're not as bad as Al Qaeda. That clears up a lot of things for me, and I'm sure I'll sleep much better tonight as a result. Thanks for that.

Cordially,

Arthur Silber

(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)

* Terrorism that's mostly low-tech, yet nonetheless terrifying; bus bombings, buildings levelled (including FBI counterterrorism headquarters) and no supervillain WMD;

* Terrorism that's decentralized and cellular, and that feeds off of military attempts to neutralize it:"Is this the last cell?""There is no last cell!!"

* Terrorists that make no demands for concessions and no attempt to negotiate, but simply seek to kill as many Americans as possible, as visibly as possible;

* Calls to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act--opposed, but nonetheless acquiesced to, by the military establishment;

* Annette Bening protesting to bad guy Samir that"Islam is a religion of peace!" and getting punched in the face for her trouble;

By the time they show the Army interrogating a jihadist and having the Dershowitz debate with considerably less moral agonizing, I'd have been floored if I wasn't already couched. The guy's tied to a chair, naked.

Sure, the notion of the FBI as the guarantor of our liberties and the American way of life was tough to credit. But otherwise, I can't think of another major motion picture that got so many predictions so right.

One wrong note: In contrast with the events of 9/11, many of the terrorists are Iraqis, enraged by U.S. foreign policy. But here again, it may be prescient.