I was planning to write a Light ‘n’ Fluffy™ piece about my TV viewing habits today, but the news about American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners keeps intruding into my thoughts. I have to admit that this story took me by surprise, partly because I’ve kind of tuned out the war news over the past couple of weeks and this has forcibly reclaimed my attention, but also because this sort of thing just isn’t supposed to be how Americans behave. I am disappointed by my countrymen and I am gravely concerned about what this incident will mean in the long-term.
I doubt that my three loyal readers will be surprised to learn (if they didn’t already know) that I opposed our nation’s headlong plunge into war with Iraq. My opposition wasn’t because I’m a pacifist — I’m not — or because of any particular left-wing ideals. I believe that liberals can and should be more willing to talk about using force for valid reasons. However, in the case of Iraq, I was never convinced that there were valid reasons. I didn’t believe the Bush Administration was being honest with us about their reasons for wanting to go, and I feared that thumping on Iraq would either open a hornet’s nest we weren’t prepared to handle or would prove to be a distraction from the real enemy, namely Osama bin Laden and his people.
I didn’t think, however, that the hornet’s nest would include such a colossally bone-headed public-relations nightmare as this. American GIs are supposed to be the Good Guys, the ones who give chocolate bars to the little refugee kids and fire their weapons only when fired upon. It’s what we’re taught in school, it’s what we see in old movies, and it’s what we’re trying to convince the rest of the world. Except now we have a story, complete with illustrations, indicating that at least some of us are not Good Guys at all, but are in fact every bit as bad as the Bad Guy we’ve just fought a war to depose.
How can I possibly compare Our Boys (and Girls) to the Butcher of Baghdad? Well, there’s what the guards did to their prisoners, of course — you can read the details in this New Yorker article — but there’s also the location where they did it. You see, Abu Ghraib, the prison where these abuses occurred, isn’t something U.S. forces built. It was there when we moved in. It was, in fact, one of those torture chambers that the strident voices like James Lileks keep telling us were justification enough to invade a country that hadn’t directly threatened us. Abu Ghraib was one of the Hussein family’s perverse little pleasure domes, a place the average Iraqi prayed he’d never see from the inside. It was the sort of place that was supposed to have been closed for business as soon as that big statue of Saddam came tumbling down. Our forces should have obliterated it, as a sign of our good will. Instead, we apparently moved in and reopened the store. I don’t know about you, but I find that idea pretty disturbing. So how do you suppose this little revelation looks to the average Arab in the street? It looks like what it is: hypocrisy of the most outrageous sort. While the U.S. President offers up content-free slogans about bringing freedom to the Iraqi people, many of whom still don’t have electricity or clean water a year after the “mission accomplished” fiasco, U.S. troops are practicing Saddam’s old methods on civilians, including women and teenage kids, in one of Saddam’s very own torture chambers. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Look, I’m not so naive as to think that atrocities aren’t a natural, if regrettable part of every conflict, or that “our boys” are above such things. Two examples that immediately come to mind are the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam conflict and the horrors Americans perpetrated on other Americans at Andersonville Prison during our own Civil War. War is essentially an insane situation and even the most honorable soldier is inevitably infected by that insanity, to some degree or another. It goes with the territory.
I’m also not so idealistic as to believe that torture isn’t used by every side, including ours, or that it isn’t sometimes necessary, no matter how reprehensible it may be in principle. Wartime is painted in shades of gray, even when our leaders refuse to acknowledge that truth. There are, sadly, situations that demand immediate knowledge obtained by any means that are practical. Say, for example, that we had managed to capture one of the 9/11 hijackers on September 10th, and that we knew something big was going to happen the following day and that this guy knew the details. Would it have been appropriate to torture that prisoner if it meant saving 3,000 lives? Would any American citizen who watched the towers fall honestly not be willing to have made that trade-off to prevent, well, everything that’s happened since 9/10? It’s a difficult, ugly choice, but sometimes one ugliness is the only thing that prevents a larger ugliness. However, much of what went on at Abu Ghraib can’t be justified by such a hypothetical situation. The Taguba report, which was the basis for much of the information in the New Yorker article that I mentioned above, determined that over 60% of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were not involved in the insurrection, were not terrorists, and were not theats to U.S. forces or interests. So why were they even being held, let alone interrogated?
What makes the situation really bad is that this doesn’t appear to be the work of a handful of bad apples. The Taguba report as well as testimony from a number of soldiers who were at the prison indicates that this is a systemic problem, that it was also happening in Afghanistan (and probably still is), and that the soldiers who abused those Iraqis were only doing what they were told by the intelligence officers who were calling the shots. In a way, the notion that the abusers were only doing as they were told is even worse than the idea that the abusers were bigoted jackasses operating outside the system, for their own amusement. I’m sure a lot of Nazi soldiers only did what they were told, too.
I’m not comparing our troops to Nazis, so please don’t send me any hate mail. I’m just trying to make a point about perception. We perceive Nazis either as Evil-with-a-capital-E or as robots mindlessly carrying out their Evil Orders. This perception was probably incorrect for the vast majority of kids who wore the uniform of Nazi Germany, and it is probably incorrect for the vast majority of kids who wear the uniform of the United States. But the Arab world is already inclined to see us as little different than the Nazis due to a century of foreign policy that seemed, from the Arab perspective, to be tilted against them. And this is why this prison incident could become a big enough issue to win or lose not only the War in Iraq, but the entire War on Terror.
The old show-biz cliche is that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but I don’t think that applies here. The thing that Bush and his neo-con buddies have never appeared to understand is that the War on Terror cannot be won through military action alone. As they used to say during Vietnam, we need to win the hearts and minds of the Middle East. We need to convince Arabs and Muslims in general, and Iraqis in particular, that we really do care about what happens to them, that we aren’t just in their lands because we want their oil, that we’re really not the Bad Guys. Every case of torture and abuse undermines that goal. How can we convince the Iraqis that we’re on their side when we’re doing exactly the same shit that their former dictator used to do? Answer: we can’t. And so those photographs of men with electrodes on their fingertips and penises become fuel for a fire that our president started and doesn’t seem to know how to put out.
Here’s my fear: that crap like Abu Ghraib will lend credibility to the anti-American rhetoric that was flourishing long before we fired on first shot on Iraqi soil, and that the average Arab in the street will start to believe that we really are as bad as Osama bin Laden has been saying all these years. Maybe that average guy won’t be moved to join al-Qaeda — probably he won’t be, because you have to be nursing a particular kind of anger, I think, to become a terrorist, and most people just aren’t that pissed off — but he might just stop feeling so cooperative and sympathetic toward American goals. He might just start looking the other way when he hears of an al-Qaeda cell operating in his neighborhood. And he might start to cheer, at least silently in his heart, when he hears that a terrorist bomb has killed American GIs or that a hijacked plane has been used to kill American civilians. This is how we could lose the War on Terror… not through a military failure, but through a propaganda failure. Because terrorism isn’t really a military tactic; it isn’t about securing targets and land. It’s about swaying opinions. And right now, opinions aren’t running in our favor. And that’s very bad indeed.
The next few months are going to be interesting…
“U.S. troops are practicing Saddam’s old methods on civilians, including women and teenage kids, in one of Saddam’s very own torture chambers”
You’ll have to show me proof of this one.
Although I completely disagree with the manner in which this select group of troops has behaved and I mean select because it is not a fair representation of the entire military as you should have pointed out, the treatment of some of these POW’s of the war is inexcusable. There will always be a few bad apples that at the lack of their own common sense, will spoil the whole barrel, yet I do not think these few should be clumped in there with the entire US military.
Comparing this treatment to Saddam’s reign of terror is bullshit, excuse the terminology but you’ve fired me up on this one. Yes, we’ve gone too far and yes we’ve mistreated some Iraqi prisoners. Is it torture? Mistreatment? I dunno what to call it for the sake of photographs. How far have we gone? No one knows until an investigation is done. To assume we’re just reopening a torture chamber “under new management” though is only just another silly argument from the left against the war.
Interigation had been a method of gaining information on our adversaries through the history of the world. It can be ugly and it can be not-so-ugly. Would we have tortured a pre-911 terrorist on 9/10? Maybe my views of torture are not the same. Interigation had a means to an end. Torture does not. Saddam didn’t torture his people for information, he punished them for misbehavior. Maybe here’s where it’s gray between the military personel who have participated in the actions against the Iraqi prisoners, but I can assure you that we’re not electracuting then, we’re not bleeding them out, we’re not poking out their eyes… that’s torture. Have we treated some inhumanely? Yes, absolutely but all of the facts have to be laid out.
You say we’re opening the same shop and then in another paragraph making sure you’re not being seen as comparing our troops to Nazi’s. I don’t understand.
We’re there to do a job whether everyone’s for it or not. We undertook a responsibility that had we not, it’s hard to say if things would be different or worse right now. So many people think this is a war against Iraq or Afganistan.. it’s not and it’s not going to be over soon. We’re taking on a brutal adversary and it’s going to cost lives. It sucks but I don’t think we should have just stood by and tried to talk it out either.
Sorry for the rant.
Well, Cheno, I expected that this post would provoke a response from you, but I didn’t think it would be so… effusive. It appears that I genuinely offended you, for which I sincerely apologize. My intention with this blog is to articulate my own feelings and provoke discussion, but not to piss people off. Mind you, I’m not backing down from my position, but I don’t want there to be a personal problem between us because we don’t agree on a particular subject.
Now, as to my position, I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. Hopefully I can clarify a few things now.
First of all, I am not “one of those people [who] think this is a war against Iraq or Afghanistan,” nor am I a stereotypical left-wing hippy fruitcake whose knee-jerk reaction to any potential conflict is to start singing, “Give Peace a Chance.” As I said in the original post, liberals have got to get past that Flower Power crap and realize that there are times when you need to stand and fight, and we entered into one of those times the morning the planes hit the Towers. I understand that the United States is currently engaged in a struggle called the War on Terror, a vague and overly broad title that really should be termed the War Against Al-Qaeda. As far as I’m concerned, any action we engage in that serves to cripple and destroy large, organized terror groups that transcend national borders is a good one.(Let’s be honest here, however — we may destroy al-Qaeda and similar groups, but we will never completely elminate terrorism, which is a tactic and an idea, not a specific enemy). In that light, I fully supported our actions in Afghanistan which was, at the time, a major al-Qaeda stronghold.
However, in my opinion, the Bush administration failed to make a strong enough case that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein prior to invading Iraq. Because I don’t accept that such a connection existed, I opposed the invasion of Iraq. I believe that our resources could have been better used in other places and other ways (such as better securing Afghanistan, which is still seeing plenty of action of its own). I see Iraq is a distraction from a larger and more important goal, which is ferreting out and killing the members of al-Qaeda. Even worse, and this ties into the point of my original post, our continued occupation of Iraq and any atrocities our people commit there have the potential of actually increasing the terrorist threat against our country by angering ordinary Arabs enough to make them start believing the anti-American crap spewed by bin Laden. If they believe it strongly enough, they might even want to join the struggle against forces they see as corrupt imperialists, namely us. There is some indication that this is, in fact, happening already. Which means that as a battle in the War on Terror, Iraq is a failure.
In my book, however, Iraq is a separate conflict from the War on Terror. It is a war of choice which G.W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors wanted to pursue from the moment they entered the White House. (This isn’t left-wing spin or liberal propaganda. There have been too many former White House officials of all political persuasions saying the same thing for it not to be credible: Bush and his neoconservative advisors wanted Saddam’s head. The War on Terror simply gave them a reason. I might have been in favor of going after Saddam if [a] we hadn’t already been engaged elsewhere, [b] felt like Bush was being more honest and up front about his reasons for wanting it to happen, and [c] we had obtained more international support before bulldozing our way in there. I’m not saying that we “needed permission from the U.N.” — a favorite taunt of the conservatives — but rather that going there would have been a helluva lot easier if we had a mandate and the full support of ALL of our allies. That’s something that the first President Bush understood but his son does not.)
However, all of this debate about whether we should be there is moot at this point. We are there, right or wrong, and as you say, it’s not going to be over soon. Even if Bush loses the White House come November, his successor and quite possibly the next president after that will still need to deal with Iraq. That, however, is the subject of another post.
Now, as to the issue you raise of interrogation vs. torture, I define interrogation as questioning someone to obtain information, and torture as the practice of inducing extreme physical or mental discomfort. Interrogation is a process, torture is a practice. This practice is often used during an interrogation. As you mention, it can also be used for punishment or simply for the hell of it, without any end for the means. Whether it is ever acceptable to use torture for any purpose is a moral question that’s up for debate. As much as I hate to admit this, I could condone it under certain circumstances — such as in the 9/10 example I mentioned in the original post. Whether torture is an effective means of obtaining information is also up for debate, but I do believe that it is often used, even by us Good Guy Americans.
You ask me to provide proof of what was done to the prisoners. Very well. I quote from the Taguba report, a fifty-three-page report written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, which documents the abuses that have occurred in within the Army prison system. This report formed the basis for that New Yorker article I mentioned. While I acknowledge that TNY may have placed some leftward spin on their conclusions (although the article reads as quite fair and balanced to my eye), the following block quote is verbatim from the original report (which is available in its entirety online, though I admit that I haven’t read it all). The wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib included:
“Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee. ”
That sounds like physical and mental torture to me. In addition, prisoners were forced to perform or simulate sexual acts that would be humiliating to an American but are especially horrifying to Muslims (Islam is even stricter about sexual behavior than most flavors of Christianity). As for electrocuting prisoners, one of the photographs that has been released shows a man with wires attached to his fingertips, and the article quotes a soldier who saw a similar rig attached to a man’s penis. I’ve read no explanation as to the purpose of these wires, but electroction –or at least the threat thereof — seems pretty likely. I will grant you that there was no bleeding or eye-gouging. Whether these techniques were being used in conjunction with questioning or simply to humiliate and frighten these people, I don’t know.
This is documented by the US Army itself. What proof do you offer of the techniques used by Saddam? I’m not denying that he tortured people — I’m certain that he did — but I’ve never heard what, specifically, he did to them or how we know it, therefore we can’t make any kind of judgment about whether his torture was crueler than our torture. Certainly, his was more widespread and capricious than what appears to have perpetrated by our people, but torture is torture, especially when we’re talking propaganda, which I will be in a moment.
As to the exact breakdown of who was treated in this manner and who was not, I’ll admit that I gave in to my tendency towards melodrama when I mentioned women and children. All of the abuse victims in the photographs that I have seen are male, and I would like to think that even the stupidest redneck dumbass American would at least be decent enough to not abuse women and children. But you never know, do you? According to the New Yorker article, which presumably picked up these facts from the Army’s own reporting, most of Abu Ghrain’s inmates were civilians and their numbers did include women and teenagers — who qualify as children in my book — who had been picked up in street-sweeps. The possibility that they were mistreated certainly exists, and those men who were definitely mistreated were, as likely as not, civilians themselves.
Moving on, I grant that the group responsible for these atrocities does not represent the entire US military. When I said that this appears to be a systemic problem, I was referring the Army prison system, not the entire army, and you’re right in chiding me for not being more clear about that. To again refer to Gen. Taguba, however, this appears to be more than a few bad apples. This abuse was not solely the responsibility of the half-dozen GIs whose names are floating around in the news. The entire company, including its commanding officer, seemed to be aware of the abuse and did nothing (with a few notable exceptions), while the actual abusers were apparently being directed by officers from military intelligence and “other government agencies.” One ray of light in all this gloom is that the Taguba report specifies that some soldiers who witnessed this stuff were outraged and refused to participate, and that the Army itself initiated an investigation into these allegations months ago. That investigation is now completed. The result of the Army’s investigation was the Taguba report. Congress will probably launch its own investigation, but basically we already know what happened, or at least the Army does. It’s just that the civilian press and the public didn’t find out about until more recently.
Now, to the issue that really torqued you off, my remarks about reopening the store and comparing our folks to Nazis. Let me be absolutely clear that I don’t really believe those things myself. However, I do believe that the Arab world — and I’m not just talking Iraqis or bin Laden’s people — sees it that way. And this is the core of my whole damn post, and this whole damn debate, which is that propaganda wins wars just as surely as bombs. Maybe even morseo. And we have a major propaganda mess on our hands.
I know conservatives cringe whenever the spectre of Vietnam is invoked, but there are some useful comparisons to be made (granting, of course, that our current situation is radically different from ‘Nam). We lost in Vietnam because even the Vietnamese who were ostensibly on our side did not want us there. We failed to “win the hearts and minds of the people,” and so the VC were able to hide among innocent civilians and pick us off a few at a time until we finally shrugged and walked away. We will lose the War on Terror (never mind the War in Iraq) for much the same reasons if we don’t begin changing the average Middle Easterner’s ideas about America. This is something the neocons don’t appear to get. All the smart bombs and drone planes and bullets and troops in the world will not win this for us. We could flatten Iraq if we had to. We could kill every Iraqi in the country if that seemed like the only way to settle the place down. And it wouldn’t do a damn thing to stop al-Qaeda. In order to truly stop al-Qaeda, we need to do more than kill existing members; we need to prevent them from recruiting new memebers. And to do that, we need to be much, much smarter about our foreign policy towards the Middle East and especially about the propaganda about us that exists there.
Based on everything I’ve read on this subject (which is quite a lot, and includes a lot of work by conservative — and pro-Iraqi-war — commentator Thomas Friedman), Middle Easterners, by and large, distrust and fear America. They see us as bullies. They think we only care about their corner of the world because of the oil. They see us supporting the corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia while the average Saudi suffers incredible poverty (if Bush really wanted to remake the Middle East, he should have started with Saudi). And they see us supporting Israel no matter what, even on issues when Israel is blatantly in the wrong. These things predispose the average Arab on the street to see us as, if not Bad Guys, at least not Guys on Their Side. We need to convince them that we are on their side. And this incident in Abu Ghraib is not likely to do that.
Symbols have great power. Often, they don’t necessarily reflect reality, but that doesn’t stop them from stirring up feelings and sometimes even provoking action. Abu Ghraib was one of Saddam’s prisons, a place where he tortured people. We should have blown it up and set up a prison somewhere else, for symbolic value. That’s what the allies did when they reached Berlin in ’45. They blew up Nazi HQ and set up shop elsewhere. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference strategically, and it might have been easier to just move into the existing government buildings. But it looked better to blow it up instead. And that’s what we should have done with and every one of Saddam’s old prisons. Instead, we settled in to use it for our own purposes. That might have been OK, if a tight rein had been kept on things and no abuse occurred. But that’s not what happened.
What I was trying to say in my original post is that to an average Arab, symbolically speaking, nothing has changed. Saddam tortured people there. The Americans tortured people there. You and I know that the whole US Army isn’t like that and that American citizens back home are outraged by it. But the Arab guy in the street won’t differentiate. He’ll just say, “those fucking American pigs!” Just like we always say, “Those fucking raghead bastards,” when we see some poor journalist kidnapped and mistreated. It’s not reality, it’s not the way all Arabs behave or think, but we tend to lump them all togther, don’t we? And that’s what Arabs will be doing now with their ideas about Americans. And that may have a very large impact on our ability to operate effectively within Iraq, to accomplish our mission there, and to continue fighting the War on Terror. It’s not a “silly argument from the left against the war.” It is a genuine concern based on logic.
I see on the news tonight that President Bush has issued an apology for these actions. It was the right thing to do, and I approve of him doing it (and I very rarely say that about this president). Hopefully, this symbolic act will help to offset some of the negative symbolism associated with this story.