America has been dealt a nasty body blow by the whack pictures that came echoing out of the steel corridors of a sleazy Baghdad prison, where Saddam Hussein's rape rooms and torture chambers have come under new management. A whole slew of gritty developments have knocked the wind out of the Bush administration, but nothing has done more damage than Abu Ghraib.
In the minds of both critics and admirers of America around the world, all that's wrong with US power has been glaringly, neatly, symbolically encapsulated by a few twisted images of humiliation and abuse. Someday when historians look back on the decline of the American empire (which I believe is what we're dealing with here), Abu Ghraib may well stand out as a turning point, a moment when the empire's veneer of moral supremacy faded dramatically and the world's view of America changed.
Much of the heavy hand-wringing and solemn stick-waving coming from politicians and pundits is, of course, nothing more than insincere grandstanding and shallow sensationalism. As usual, moral outrage is a popular currency, because it requires no substance or vision and it buys a facade of superiority.
Needless to say, what happened in Abu Ghraib is horrible. Torture and sexual abuse are horrible. War in general is horrible. War is about one thing: killing human beings. In order to get normal people to switch off their natural conscience and kill other human beings, armies of all nations train their soldiers to dehumanize their enemies, to view them as subhuman beasts who deserve to die. It's obvious at a glance that this is how the Americans in the Abu Ghraib photos view their Iraqi captives. It's the look of amateur hunters on a safari posing proudly before their trophies, or of white folks at a lynching, smiling for the camera below the swinging corpses of black men. It's the look of cheap conquest.
Still, let's drop the pretense that what happened in Abu Ghraib is all that shocking or unusual. It's no secret that prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanemo Bay — most of whom are apparently innocent of any wrongdoing — are quite commonly tortured. Furthermore, worse things happen in Iraq's war zones every day, like children getting their heads and limbs blown off. Indeed, worse things happen in America every day, like prisoners being tortured and raped by their guards. Torture may not be a politically popular word in America, but it's certainly a fairly popular practice according to well-documented research by humanitarian groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Moreover, let's get real: Many Americans supported Bush's war in Iraq precisely because they wanted to retaliate against Arab Muslims for 9/11. Let's call them the "nuke-the-ragheads" crowd (a far more accurate label than "fair and balanced"). From what I've seen, they probably represent around 15% of the American populace and 25% of the electorate (to their credit, many of them do vote). Sadly, the nuke-the-ragheads crowd has become the Bush administration's strongest electoral constituency. And as crazy as this sounds, a distasteful number of these bozos probably liked what they saw in the photos from Abu Ghraib: Americans humiliating "hajis" (that's the word US soldiers use to describe Middle Eastern men, like "gook" in Vietnam), "hitting them back" for 9/11.
The White House panders shamelessly to these dullards by fueling their confusion and hatred with adolescent macho rhetoric about revenge killings. In case anyone didn't get it, Bush's promise to get terrorists "dead or alive" was a promise to kill without regard for courts or laws. In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush intoned in his best Clint Eastwood voice: "More than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States."
When a commander-in-chief talks like this, soldiers pay attention. It may not be a formal military order, but the overall message is unmistakable: Don't fuss with laws or process, just go in there and rough 'em up real good and don't hesitate to pull the freakin' trigger.
The consequences speak for themselves.
UPDATES: The Washington Post reports that "the Army has opened investigations into at least 91 cases of possible misconduct by U.S. soldiers against detainees and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan". And USA Today reveals that "more than a third of the prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were shot, strangled or beaten by U.S. personnel before they died, according to death certificates and a high-ranking U.S. military official."
Comments