America and Its Moral Superiority Complex
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By Patrick Jarreau
Le Monde
Friday 07 May 2003
The humiliations and tortures inflicted by American soldiers on Iraqi detainees in a prison close to Baghdad force America, once again, to face the contrast between the moral superiority to which it lays claim and the violence that it produces.
The spectacle of the treatment which American soldiers inflicted on prisoners who were "at their mercy", as Colin Powell emphasized, bears a terrible contradiction to the good intentions George Bush constantly puts forward to justify his policies.
Without being naive or attempting to outbid American morality, what happened inside Abou Ghraib prison, and, most probably, elsewhere, has nothing to do with fear or panic responses of soldiers in a hostile milieu. Colin Powell, once again, brought up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to emphasize precisely the difference between the two situations. The scenes in the prison, photographed by the soldiers themselves, bear witness to a gratuitous, sadistic cruelty.
The debate about words is not a strictly formal or secondary issue. Always erudite, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was anxious to make a distinction between what the American calls "abuse", and torture. It's true that torture in its strict sense is the act of inflicting unbearable pain on someone to force them to hand over information they are suspected to possess. It has not yet been proven - even if it is, unfortunately, probable - that the Abou Ghraib prisoners were subjected to those kinds of treatment.
It appears that the American specialists' interrogation methods are based, rather, on fear and humiliation. The interrogators and their assistants in the military police create a climate of terror, in which prisoners are led to believe that their jailers are allowed to do anything and that anything could happen to them. Degrading acts obey the same logic. There again, it's a question of demonstrating that anything is possible, that human respect does not obtain, that the detainee has lost the elementary right to dignity. However, if these techniques of manipulation avoid torture strictly speaking, they no less reveal the identical logic of coercion.
What the photos show, however, is of yet another order.
Whether or not they received instructions from their superiors, whether or not they behaved in conformity with "technical" directives, whether or not their conduct's final objective was to get the prisoners to talk, these soldiers took pleasure in what they were doing. They found it so entertaining that they took photos of it for their souvenir albums. To force men to undress, to pile them up on each other, to practice or to simulate sexual acts derives from a violence which, if different from torture, is no less unbearable. What these photos show is that ordinary Americans, young students, men and women, married women or fathers of families, are ready to strip men of their humanity because they suspect them of being terrorists or enemies, because they're different, because they're Arabs, because they're defeated.
These photos send back to America an image of itself that clashes with its pretensions to incarnate good in the war against evil. George Bush has systematically used this rhetoric, in January 2002, adapting Ronald Reagan's formula for the Soviet Union - "the Evil Empire" - to denounce "the Axis of Evil", which, according to him, comprised Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. While terrorists kill blindly, he has often repeated, Americans are essentially "a good people", "decent", respectful of others, and anxious to see the whole world profit from the benefits of freedom, which is "a gift from God to men". Suspected ever since the opening of the camp at Guantanamo Bay on a naval base the United States occupies in Cuba, a different reality has come to light.
The conservative Right, from which Mr. Bush draws his support, is not ready to acknowledge this reality. One of its most influential spokesmen, Rush Limbaugh, whose radio program is listened to every day by 20 million Americans, talked about what the photos, eye witnesses, and reports revealed as simple hazing. Reserving his compassion for the soldiers in question, he compared their acts to what happens during "initiations" practiced by certain university fraternities. "They're going to be destroyed because they had a good time;" he waxed indignant, asserting that "these people - who get shot at every day" have a right to "blow off some steam."
Confession of Failure
The White House spokesman took care to distinguish himself from Rush Limbaugh, although his audience can't be neglected and although Vice President, Richard Cheney, ordinarily smothers him with kindness. Mr. Bush's spokesman pointed out that on the subject of the prisoners' treatment, Mr. Bush had expressed a point of view very different from that of the Right's radio herald.
It remains that, as Senator Joseph Biden has said, if the President is furious about what has happened, it's not enough that he say it, he must show it. Can he explain that he was not properly informed about this affair and then fail to punish anyone? If, in truth, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Joint Chief of Staff General Richard Myers, neither told Mr. Bush, the commander-in-chief, about the report completed in late February by Antonio Taguba, nor about the existence of the incriminating photos, how can he continue to trust them? On Thursday, however, Mr. Bush said with regard to Mr. Rumsfeld, "he will stay in my government. It is difficult to decapitate the Pentagon while 140,000 soldiers are deployed in Iraq and 30,000 in Afghanistan. The departure of such an important Cabinet member six months before a Presidential election would be a confession of failure, sure to be taken badly by part of the Right and to be exploited by the Left. Many in the military would be glad to see him go, but his replacement - which would undoubtedly make necessary that of his assistants also - would not be easy.
All that is true, but by keeping Mr. Rumsfeld in his position, Mr. Bush sends another message. Beyond the apologies that he finished by offering Thursday for the consumption of the Arab world, the American president rejects anything that could be considered confession of a mistake or of a changed approach in Iraq.
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