Minipundit
Monday, August 20th, 2007Had Megapundit been in session last week, I would have struggled to explain briefly just how objectionable I found Rosie DiManno’s August 17 effort. Let’s start, conveniently, with the lede: “When Omar Khadr purportedly tossed the grenade that killed an American infantryman, he was neither child nor soldier.”
The second thing is a discussion point; the first is like saying the world’s flat, and the justifications DiManno deploys in defence of her bizarre position are understandably, unavoidably weak. “At 15, he was age-appropriate for marriage in Afghan culture and old enough to enter military service,” she proffers. But then, mere words later, she dismisses the idea that Khadr was a soldier on grounds that he “and his Al Qaeda-affiliated father weren’t part of that combat structure.” So the age-appropriateness and military eligibility would seem to be off the table then, all the more so since the international treaties the United States and Canada have signed with regard to child soldiers (the definition of which, admittedly, Khadr may not technically meet) have nothing to do with either concept, but simply with age.
“Khadr… is routinely presented by his advocates as a naïve whelp blown about by the winds of war, putatively innocent of any actionable crime and left to rot at an offshore detention facility, denied basic legal rights,” DiManno continues. Other than the noticeable sneer with which she writes that, her only rebuttals are as follows: Guantanamo was created by Congress, and thus has legal status; Khadr hasn’t “recanted” whatever ideas his “wicked father” may have instilled in him (on myguantanamoyears.blogspot.com, perhaps); he has fired his American lawyers; and - wait for it - he looks much older than the 15-year-old he was when he committed the crime.
The craziest part about it all is when DiManno recalls visiting a child soldier rehabilitation camp in Uganda and finding, as I think most reasonable people would, naught but sympathy for its inhabitants. Those children’s circumstances and experiences will have been more gruesome than any of the Khadr clan, I suspect, but I don’t get how the unqualified absolution DiManno offers the Ugandans for “their sins” doesn’t translate into at least a single wretched crumb of understanding for Omar Khadr’s.
It would be madness to ask a 10-year-old to rebel against the abduction and tried-and-true brainwashing techniques used by African militias. Seems to me like a similar if marginally less offensive dementia to ask the same of a 13- or 14-year-old Canadian boy against his deranged mother and father, particularly since this country couldn’t even find the balls to protect the remaining minors in the family against the remaining parents - and that was after Omar got nabbed and the last 10 oblivious Canadians finally learned just what awful people Maha and Ahmed Said Khadr are and were, respectively.
The minute details of the Geneva Conventions seem like precisely the wrong place to search for one’s moral position on this matter. And the completely understandable position that one doesn’t give a crap about Omar Khadr simply isn’t relevant to this debate. It’s the ability to identify matters of principle that separates us from the primates.