Worth a Thousand Words
“He who fights monsters,
Take care he does not become a monster.
And if you gaze into the abyss,
The abyss also gazes into you.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
If our media printed pictures of American POWs or civilian detainees being sexually abused and humiliated by foreign soldiers, we’d be ready to drop a nuke on someone and every American to the right of Noam Chomsky would be shouting “Amen.” One can only imagine what Iraqis and other Arabs of any political affiliation must think about the events that gave rise to these images. Are these pictures a fair characterization of the entire American occupation? Almost certainly not. But in this case, a few bad apples are more than enough to spoil the bushel.
The next few days will tell whether the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an aberration or part of a systematic program of psychological stress and interrogation. Certainly the latter would be far more serious than the former, but in either case, the damage has been done. President Bush’s oft-repeated line about putting an end to the torture chambers and rape rooms of Saddam’s prisons doesn’t sound so good when it turns out they are merely under new management. Our management.
Whatever remaining legitimacy our presence in Iraq may have had is gone. The images of American troops – including women and dogs – gloating over naked and helpless Arab men, have exceeded the wildest fever-dreams of Al-Qaeda recruiters. Honestly, Bin Laden himself could not have cooked up pictures more precisely calculated to inflame Muslim rage, shame and hatred and demonstrate the arrogance, blasphemy, and cruel hypocrisy of the West.
So what if it’s not typical of the conduct of our troops? So what if Saddam did the same thing and worse? In a culture that has difficulty distinguishing news from paranoid rumor, all it takes is one concrete instance to vindicate people’s darkest fears. These pictures are as explosive in their emotional impact as the planes slamming into the Twin Towers. They will tar the reputation of America and Britain for generations, condemn anyone foolish enough to speak out for American values and interests as collaborators and traitors, and serve as the irrefutable justification for any manner of atrocity that revenge-bent terrorists can cook up. We could build schools and hospitals from Casablanca to Islamabad and invest ten Marshall Plans in the Middle East and not wipe away this stain.
Our Commander-in-Chief claims to be disgusted, and who can blame him? These images depict unvarnished evil perpetrated by men and women wearing the uniform of the United States. The carefree glee of the soldiers as they pose with their victims is chilling. It implicates all of us in its arrogant cruelty. Everyone knows war has its dark side, but this particular war has been so encrusted with sanctimonious declarations and lofty rhetoric that the disclosure of these abuses is simply devastating. Despite the failure to find WMDs and the willful confusion of responsibility between Iraq and the 9/11 hijackers, the one thing we could say about the war is that whatever we made of Iraq, it would be better than Saddam. Will we ever be so shameless as to make that claim now?
We were led into Iraq because our leaders promised us security, stability, and the moral satisfaction of pursuing justice. Well, as Bush might say, we just hit the trifecta on that one. Bounding into Iraq on a whim and a prayer has compromised this country in every conceivable way and left us without a hope of achieving any kind of lasting victory. This goes beyond electoral politics, beyond partisanship. What we’ve witnessed in the last two years is national insanity on a catastrophic scale, and I’m beginning to think that simply replacing the President is not sufficient to salvage the situation.
9:07:17 PM 
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