In a futile but personally revealing gesture, President Obama sent a letter of apology today to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the American military’s burning of copies of the Koran. Though the burning was not a deliberate offense — the Times reports that the NATO personnel who burned the Korans at a landfill apparently didn’t realize the significance of the act — it nevertheless stoked rioting in Afghanistan, where the Taliban encouraged the protests and urged Afghan security forces to “repent for their past sins . . . by turning their guns on the foreign infidel invaders.” Two American soldiers were shot amid the furor.
I won’t pretend to understand the thinking behind killing people over a burned book. The response is not only bizarre to Western eyes but should be seen as disproportionate by anyone, of any religion, who values human life. But the riots hardly come as a surprise, considering the similar outrage in 2005 over cartoons of Muhammad and a firestorm in the same year over reports that guards at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down the toilet. The uselessness of apologizing is obvious; apologies have not stopped these riots in the past, and President Obama’s latest didn’t stop the violence today. Part of me certainly feels that an apology, especially one from someone as important as the president, is only legitimizing such a destructive reaction, but the practical side of me realizes that Obama did the right thing. Looking down our noses at the Afghans’ passion for the Koran will do nothing to help the American troops still attempting to put Afghanistan back together. We’re not going to change the cultural dynamics, as the struggle against the insurgency quickly proved, and so we are forced to work within them. If anything, the death of the two soldiers proved that the president cannot afford to be stingy with apologies; he must do everything in his power to end the riots. Obama must have known that an apology would mean little to the people shouting in the streets in Afghanistan, but he had to at least try to calm the violence.
That Obama apologized despite knowing that conservatives would crucify him for it speaks to his character. The entire Republican presidential field has criticized the president for his non-existent “apology tour,” and Mitt Romney has repeated “This president apologizes for America” so many times that he is blue in the face. Sure enough, Newt Gingrich wasted no time in labeling Obama’s letter “astonishing” and “an outrage.” The AP reports that, at a campaign event in Washington state, he said, “There seems to be nothing that radical Islamists can do to get Barack Obama’s attention in a negative way and he is consistently apologizing to people who do not deserve the apology of the president of the United States period.” The Wall Street Journal adds that Gingrich announced that Obama “refuses to defend the integrity and the lives of the people who serve under him and instead abjectly crawls to apologize to the country whose religious fanatics.”
Lovely. Newt Gingrich is the epitome of classless cluelessness. As president, how would he have responded? By egging the rioters on? That surely would have preserved “the lives of the people who serve under him.” Gingrich also ignores the fact that the NATO military commander in Afghanistan also apologized. Was General John Allen also refusing to defend the lives of his troops? The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, was right when he said Obama’s “primary concern as commander in chief is the safety of the American men and women in Afghanistan, of our military and civilian personnel there.” That’s the difference between being president and wanting to be president — one actually has the responsibility of being commander in chief, while the other only has the responsibility to demagogue and campaign. Gingrich’s faux-indignation was as predictable as it was distasteful, but Obama nevertheless acted like a president, not a candidate. During an election year, it’s often hard to see a separation between the two roles, as Obama conveniently chooses swing states in which to make major policy speeches. It wasn’t a coincidence that he chose to unveil his 2013 budget at a community college near Washington, D.C. — job training and support for community colleges are priorities not just for his proposed-yet-unpassable budget but for his reelection campaign. In the case of his apology to Karzai, however, Obama clearly put necessity above political expediency. The meme of Obama apologizing for America is a dangerous one, and one which Republicans are determined to keep alive until November. If they are able to convince enough Americans that the president really does, as Gingrich claims, “bow to a Saudi king,” Obama could be in trouble.
The president obviously knows this. But today he did the right thing anyway. That, as much as anything, shows why he’s worth reelecting.
. . . So Well Read. . . 