i think there's something a bit new here. the US killed people, more of them and sometimes just as wantonly, in Indochina and Korea, but the media environment was such that the US public only understood that slowly, only understood it fully long after the fact. 1/

one can believe that is the scale and brutality of US actions had been fully public in real time, they would have been politically impossible. 2/

during the Gulf and Middle East wars, the US was carefully attentive to perceptions of atrocity. again, of course there was atrocity anyway. there always is in war. 3/

but the scandals of the period, perhaps paradoxically, suggest a great deal of success. the biggest scandal of the Iraq War, the one that basically ended any possibility of "success" nation-building a democratic demonstration project, was Abu Ghraib. 4/

it was one facility, a relatively small number of perpetrators and victims, and it was a profound, earthshocking, incredible scandal that completely overthrew an epistemological deference, domestically, about how we were conducting the war and what our role was there. 5/

perhaps I am being unfair here, but my perception is that Abu-Ghraib-level torture and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees and worse is routine conduct in some Israeli facilities, and that this is something US publics basically know and now tolerate. 6/

(again, to distinguish, this is not waterboarding of high-level intelligence targets or the kind of ticking-time-bomb scenarios sold to the public to blur black and white views about torture. these are low-level, mass detainees.) 7/

there have been incidents not so far from Gaza that the US perpetrated — Mosul, Raqqa. but real time information about whatever degree of atrocity occurred was largely suppressed, and even ex post, one can distinguish their characters, no population was trapped. 8/

US publics have swallowed something quite different with Gaza and now Lebanon, a style of warfare promising to a certain degree to pay some attention to civilian life, but visibly offering a very high threshold for "proportionality", and intentionally eliminating civilian infrastructure. 9/

We've swallowed it with little more than a shrug. Which I understand given particulars about particular political realities, domestically and diplomatically. You could say it's only happening because the stars are particularly (mis)aligned. 10/

But it is happening. It's a kind of precedent. Hypocrisy was always at best the tribute vice pays to virtue, but I'd much rather we keep at least that tribute. A more "honest" embrace of atrocity we never completely eschewed does not strike me as a positive development going forward. /fin