Note to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: Freedom is messy. Untidy too.
I blogged last week about whether the Bush administration gets it when it comes to freedom, liberty, democracy and all the other good things we're busily promoting around the world. At the time, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez was chastising wayward members of the legislative branch that Congressional inquiries into whether the president broke the law with warrantless wiretaps were undoubtedly making the cave walls at al Qaeda headquarters echo with happy laughter. This, Gonzalez said, was a bad thing.
I disagreed, arguing that the terrorists laugh because they do not understand how freedom, liberty and democracy work, because they do not understand the strength inherent in the system. My question was then, and still is now: Do the Bushies get it?
Rumsfeld does not seem to. Friday he castigated the free press for, well, being a free press. Specifically, his nose was out of joint because the media failed to bury the story when they discovered that the Pentagon was planting false reports in Iraqi newspapers.
Rumsfeld correctly worried about the fact that the United States is losing the information war, then fell back to the bipartisan practice of losers all throughout politics: Blamed the media. Since the message -- in this case U.S. policies -- cannot possibly be wrong, there must be something wrong with messenger.
But the media's job is not to fall into lock-step and do its part for the propaganda effort. This is not the old Soviet Union after all, or even the old Iraq. (Note: This is not to suggest that the media does not have an obligation to balance national interests against the need to disclose -- see, for example, the restraint showed during the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
The problem is one of underlying philosophy. There has long been a political science debate about whether democracies can effectively fight wars -- with things like popular will, a free press, really all of the untidiness endemic to our system can we maintain the collective discipline for a long struggle? (The Confederate States of America and the Third Reich to name two might have something to say about that.)
The gimlet-eyed, tough-guy world-view of the Bush administration seems to fall into the democracy-is-weak camp. In order to make the world safe for democracy we have to be as ruthless as our adversaries, the thinking goes, and if that means putting liberty on a shelf to protect it, well ...
As Maureen Dowd puts it in her column today:
Rummy is genuinely perplexed about why it's wrong to subvert democracy while promoting democracy.
I love it when Shooter and Rummy call us unrealistic for trying to hold them to standards that they set. They are, after all, victims of their own spin on Iraq. Mr. Cheney thought we'd be greeted with flowers; Rummy said we could do more with less.
Rummy misses the point: we're supposed to be the good guys, the beacon of freedom. Our message is supposed to work because it has moral force, not because we pay some Lincoln Group sketchballs millions to plant propaganda in Iraqi newspapers and not because the press here plays down revelations of American torture. If the Bush crew hadn't distorted the truth to get to Iraq, it wouldn't need to distort the truth to succeed there.
"Ultimately, in my view," Rummy concluded, "truth wins out."
Bad news for him, and his pal Dick.
Amen sister.