Here chuck, this article is talking about folks like you and the other neocons who bring disgrace to this country. It is very reddeming to know that there are many in the Arab world who consider most of us Americans as decent. Happy reading.
Echo of the Neocons at Abu Gharib
Fawaz Turki
You were appalled, and justifiably so, by those images last week of US soldiers sexually humiliating and otherwise abusing Iraqi prisoners? But hey, take heart: so were the overwhelming majority of Americans, including — and trust me on this one — the 150,000 other Americans who are serving in the military in Iraq at the moment.
No doubt the photos served to reinforce Arab mistrust of US intentions in Iraq and anger at its policies in Palestine, and drove the media in the Middle East to have a field day describing the mistreatment as “savage acts” that are “indicative of the entire criminal operation being conducted in the region” — and the rest of it.
Before we get on our high horse, poking ordinary American folk in the chest for being barbaric hordes, let’s step back and consider that the dozen or so perpetrators of these acts at the Abu Gharib prison facility were a few bad apples not representative of the sensibility that animates much of American society, a society made up of people who come, or whose ancestors have come, from every country in the world.
These American folk are socialized by their family system, educational system and value system, not to mention their historical experience as idealistic immigrants searching for social justice and freedom in the New World, to abjure such practices. Ideas about how all men are created equal, of inherent rationality, held since the Founding Fathers wrote the constitution — ideas still intensely valid in the politically correct posture that most Americans demonstrate in their everyday cultural life — have not broken down because of the atrocious acts of a handful of soldiers.
Already three separate investigations have been launched since the abuses were discovered, and criminal charges have been filed against six soldiers, and could be filed against four others. Administrative charges, including court-martial, have been recommended against seven officers. Moreover, since those shocking photos were broadcast around the world, initially via CBS’ “60 Minutes,” nary a single commentator or editorialist saw the torture of prisoners as a nebulous issue, or for that matter ignored how profound and permanent the damage was to the image that America has tried to project of itself as a liberator in Iraq.
In the end, however, after this furor has quieted down, the bad guys here will turn out to be not those kids who didn’t know from a hole in the wall what they were doing but the neoconservative elite in government, with their sick fixation on power, pursuing the mirage of imperial purpose and manipulating a clueless president into going to war in Iraq on the flimsiest of excuses.
These ruthless ideologues, with a sinister agenda of their own, who are credited with a virtual takeover of US foreign policy under George W. Bush, see a world full of five-headed monsters, of mysterious evil, lurking behind every lamppost in our region, that America — now the only superpower around, with moral superiority coursing through its body politic — should take on.
What we saw at Abu Gharib last week was but massive echo, in a trickle-down effect, in an overlapping of events, of that imperial posturing. Imperial posturing, though, is fragile and its exercise is finite, as colonial overlords learned at the beginning of the last century, and the Israeli entity in Palestine is yet to learn.
“You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,” Secretary of State Colin Powell presciently told the president on the eve of war, we read in Bob Woodward’s new book, “Plan of Attack.” “You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You will own it all.”
In the business world this is known as the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it. In the movie industry, it’s known by a more telling rule: You play, you pay. In real life, it’s called: Why the heck did you go to Iraq in the first place, bringing on the collision of two modes of consciousness, thereby releasing explosive tensions there and anti-American sentiment around the world!
arabnews.com |
