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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (187882)	5/5/2004 4:30:51 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578411

A huge setback in Iraq By The Des Moines Register Editorial Board 05/05/2004 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- After all the other excuses for invading Iraq turned to naught, President Bush clung to a humanitarian justification - the good that was achieved by ridding the country of Saddam Hussein's torture chambers and rape rooms. Now the world recoils in disgust as it is revealed that American soldiers tortured and humiliated Iraqi captives in one of the very prisons that Saddam made notorious. It is almost impossible to overestimate the damage this has done to the American cause. It's true that the abusive jailers at Abu Ghraib prison represent only a tiny fraction of U.S. forces in Iraq. It's true that the abuse does not represent official U.S. policy and that it has been condemned in no uncertain terms by President Bush and every other top U.S. official. It's also true that American officials should have seen it coming, or something like it. War is a brutal business, even when it is waged for noble purposes. In war, good people sometimes do bad things. Soldiers far from home end up doing things at a former dictator's prison near Baghdad that they would have never done back in Cumberland, Md. Acts of brutality may be especially difficult to prevent in a guerrilla war, where the combatants don't wear uniforms and where success depends on extracting information from captives. One of the big questions yet to be answered is to what extent the abuse was done under the encouragement or direction of U.S. intelligence officers or private contractors hired to interrogate prisoners. The fact that the United States is using private contractors in such sensitive work is a surprise in itself and worthy of an investigation. The vast majority of American troops in Iraq are serving honorably under difficult circumstances, yet it took only a handful of military police abusing prisoners to cement a terrible image of the United States throughout the Arab nations and much of the rest of the world. Americans are seen as replacing Saddam's tortures with their own. American talk of liberty and freedom comes off as mere propaganda. The United States can punish the abusers and reaffirm the goal of helping the Iraqi people, but it will be a tough sell now. Even before revelation of the tortures, a recent poll showed a majority of Iraqis wanted Americans to leave. Surely the news will have the effect of intensifying the insurgency and hardening the hatred of America. It is the nature of war that, sooner or later, brutalities are likely to occur. In that sense, what has happened should not be surprising. That the "good guys" are capable of committing outrages shows the underlying folly of believing democracy can be imposed on a country by military might. Force a pro-American democracy into being in Iraq? What was always an extraordinarily difficult job may have now become impossible. desmoinesregister.com.