Abu Ghraib, or how to lose some perspective on a very foul affair
By Michael Young
Special to The Daily Star
Thursday, May 06, 2004
The mistreatment of Iraqi detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison has been a rancid egg in the face of the Bush administration, the US military and those of us who have defended the Iraq war as a possible gateway to a pluralistic Iraqi political system. However, the way the prisoners' story has been conveyed has made many observers lose perspective of the implications of what happened.
What did happen was that American intelligence and military police officers, in actions probably condoned (or at best criminally neglected) by their superiors, humiliated Iraqi prisoners in clear violation of the laws of war. According to an army report on Abu Ghraib uncovered by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, there were also at least two Iraqi fatalities at the prison - the photograph of one of them is readily available on the internet.
By any yardstick, what occurred at Abu Ghraib was unacceptable and shameful. On Monday, the military reprimanded seven individuals who had command responsibility at Abu Ghraib. It is expected that others directly involved in the abuse of Iraqis will be punished more harshly. For any judgment to be fair, individuals in the entire chain of command must be investigated and, if guilty, sanctioned.
However, widespread disgust with the photographs shouldn't detract from a number of significant facts. The first is that the prisoners' story has been driven mainly by Americans - specifically by the American media, feeding off military investigations on prisoner mistreatment and photographs and testimony provided by discontented servicemen. If nothing else, this underlines that the US has effective institutional mechanisms for reversing its own wrongdoing.
Yet this message has been overwhelmed by another, drawing precisely the opposite conclusion, namely that after Abu Ghraib Iraqis will never see anything valuable in US behavior in their country. That may be true, but it won't be because the system didn't work: Once the abuse by the Americans took place, the system did try to regulate itself, making a cover-up very difficult. That's something Iraqis might want to take to the bank as they remember how Saddam Hussein promoted his torturers.
How did the institutional mechanisms work? Within the US military (and bearing in mind that US congressmen have accused the Pentagon of slackness), investigations were or are being prepared detailing the mistreatment. The army has initiated two reviews of American interrogation practices and one on the prison system in Iraq. However, it was a 53-page report by Major General Antonio Taguba completed last February that provided the most devastating account of delinquency. Hersh's expose was to a considerable extent built around a leaked version of Taguba's report, which found a pattern of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib.
The second mechanism was provided by the much-maligned American media, hitherto collectively condemned as a confederacy of yes-men when dealing with Bush administration's policies in Iraq. The CBS television program 60 Minutes broke the Abu Ghraib story, while Hersh and other reporters were instrumental in delving into its details. Again, and for purely self-serving reasons, Iraqis have a vested interest in applying such an example if they seek to prevent further abuse by the Americans or, more significantly, by a future Iraqi regime.
Much has also been made of the fact that the brutality at Abu Ghraib would further alienate Arabs from America. One doubts this: The Arabs were already deeply hostile to the US before the photos surfaced, so that the latest episode will have merely confirmed the long-held attitudes of a majority. Moreover, the US never enjoyed Hussein's magic. When he was murdering tens of thousands of innocents in his vast archipelago of prisons, particularly Abu Ghraib, this coincided with a time when many in the Middle East, who knew of his abuses, held him up as a champion.
Does one show moral laxity by comparing Saddam's crimes to those of the Americans - a comparison the US is bound to benefit from? The question has been posed in recent days, in the West particularly, as commentators have denied the validity of judging the behavior of a democracy against that of an especially savage dictatorship. What they implicitly propose is an absolute benchmark for morality.
Absolutes are appealing, but in imposing them, moralists must consider two points: That only a system which responds to censure through amelioration can eventually set lawful standards of behavior; and that some of Washington's more zealous Middle Eastern critics often avoided applying a universal ethical yardstick when considering what took place under Saddam - even as the US today accepts their moral privilege to condemn its actions in Abu Ghraib.
There is no justification (let alone a politically expedient rationale) for a host of recent American undertakings in Iraq - whether the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners or the bombardment of civilians in Falluja. However, there is also no excuse for denying that what we have seen in the past week in the US has been the thrashing about of a democratic system that feels disgraced by the behavior of several of its citizens, and that intends to rectify matters.
The Egyptian playwright Ali Salem told me recently that the true indignity of the Iraq war was that it was not Arabs who had overthrown Saddam Hussein. He was right. As Arabs examine the photographs from Abu Ghraib and read about American misconduct there, they might reflect less on what this says about the US, which usually ponders its worst excesses, than what it says about their own systems, where such images could only have been glimpsed over the carcass of an overthrown regime.
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