BLAMING THE VICTIM?

I have mixed feelings about today's Frank Rich's column, which is called "The 'Good Germans' Among Us," the central thesis of which is this:

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq....

[But] As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

My first thought is: What the hell were we supposed to do that could possibly have been effective? Vietnam, as always, is the reference point -- but the two presidents most associated with the Vietnam War actually felt some need to respond to the opinions of ordinary citizens who disagreed with them. The current president, by contrast has made it clear since before the first bombs dropped that he doesn't give a rat's ass what anyone on the planet thinks -- to stop him, we would have had to drive him from office, or at least reduce his base of support in Congress to the point that it was mathematically impossible for him to have his way.

On the other hand, Rich has a point -- not only did we fail to mount an effective resistance to the war, we didn't seem particularly upset at stories of torture and the lawlessness of mercenaries from Blackwater and other companies.

I think the public has to get a pass on the latter -- how often were our private armies on newspaper front pages or on the nightly news? We all saw burned bodies hanged in Fallujah a couple of years ago; the stories that told us what these guys were up to were buried on page A17, where most Americans didn't read them.

But would we have cared? We basically gave the administration a pass on Abu Ghraib, putting Bush back in office mere months after we learned about the abuses. That's why I can't completely dismiss what Rich says.

Clearly, Americans are far more upset about fellow citizens dying for no good reason and with no end in sight than we are about fellow citizens committing atrocities. People on the left care about Abu Ghraib, but the average American is looking out for himself, mostly because no one else gives a crap about him in this dog-eat-dog economic order, and that self-interest is what's driving opposition to the war in the heartland.

That, by the way, makes me think about the '08 elections, and the possibility that a Republican nominee who seems like a fighter but not a failure could appear to be a good choice in the eyes of Middle America. I worry that a lot of Americans won't mind being told that we have to do a lot more fighting and killing and brutalizing, even in ill-conceived wars fought with relaxed standards of common decency, as long as they think that there'll be victory this time.

Of course, maybe Middle America is willing to tolerate Abu Ghraib because 9/11 is still unavenged. I'm not defending that point of view, but I understand it. It's a morally horrifying version of kicking the dog -- we still fon't have bin Laden dead or in custody, so a lot of us may not feel it's time yet to show any compassion to anyone we think is the enemy. How convenient for Bush and the war party.