The Blame Game

So far I've avoided blaming Newsweek for the rioting in Afghanistan, but its defenders make me want to reconsider.

In the Los Angeles Times, Margaret Carlson claims what's fueling "Arab" (the piece uses the word "Arab") anger is Bush's policies, not a few paragraphs in a magazine. She raises the spectre of Abu Ghraib, natch. She thinks she's giving us the big picture, but the picture is still way too small.

First, we've had Arab resentment of the US for quite a while before Bush, so it can't simply be Bush or his policies. Carlson might then claim it's American policy, but I don't buy that. We have made mistakes, but the hatred is too intense and based on too many outrageous lies to be mainly in our court.

The Bush policy, in fact, has been very favorable to Arabs and Muslims, religious or otherwise, who want freedom and fairness and oppose dictatorship. Yet they continue to hate us. I'm not saying this impression can be changed overnight, and the fault still mostly lies in the horrible untruths their dictators have been using for decades to keep their own people down. But that doesn't let Newsweek or the smug Carlson off the hook. Any reporter or editorialist who leaves a false impression of what America is honestly doing, by simplistic and/or flawed reporting, is adding bricks to the wall. That's the real big picture, which is so foreign to Carlson and other partisan editorialists (on both sides), that I wish she'd spend a long time thinking about it before she dismisses it.