I was planning to write a Light ‘n’ Fluffy\u2122 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.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> — 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/i> 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?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The next few months are going to be interesting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was planning to write a Light ‘n’ Fluffy\u2122 piece about my TV viewing habits today, but the news about American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners keeps intruding into my thoughts. 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