A committee of devils scheming to thwart American intentions in Iraq could have done no worse than turning a group of loutish, leering U.S. soldiers loose with a camera on bound, hooded, naked Iraqi prisoners.
The U.S. intervention in Iraq is troubled, to say the least, and now our own forces have handed our enemies a propaganda coup that trumps their best efforts. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison portray Americans as exactly the sexually obsessed, crude, arrogant, godless occupiers that our enemies say we are. They have even succeeded in uniting those on both sides of the war issue at home. Everyone is outraged and disgraced. The two sides are competing for adjectives to properly express the depths of their revulsion. And rightly so. There is no excuse for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The individual soldiers involved ought to feel ashamed, as should our military and our nation. The photos we have seen so far come in two categories: one suggests a complete lack of order; the other, even more disturbing, a systematic, inappropriate use of coercive interrogation methods. In certain rare cases keeping a prisoner cold, uncomfortable, frightened, and disoriented is morally justified and necessary; but the danger in acknowledging as much has always been that such abusive treatment will become the norm. This is what happened in Israel, where a newly introduced regime of officially sanctioned "aggressive interrogation" quickly deteriorated into a system of routine physical abuse. (The Israeli Supreme Court reissued a ban on all such practices in 1999.) Routine physical abuse appears to have resulted already at Abu Ghraib, where such torments were apparently employed wholesale, and where a climate of dehumanization and sadism took root. The responsibility for that extends way up the chain of command, in ways that will become clear only with time and investigation. There are predictions (including one by Karl Rove, no less) that it will take a generation to repair the damage to America's image in the Middle East.
In the face of this horror even the most measured attempts to add context or perspective seem almost beside the point. Have there been exaggerations? The photos are said to prove that American forces are no better than Saddam Hussein's jailers. Well, no: whatever the Americans did, it is not the equivalent of cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, lopping off limbs, stringing people up with piano wire, and executing people by the tens of thousands. One former Iraqi prisoner was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that he would rather have been tortured by Saddam—an opinion that, like a boast of bravery, is easier to hold to when there is no danger of its being put to the test.