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ILLUSIONS AND IMAGES OF WAR
Jeremy Moore
Since I am not in the middle of the action, I can not be absolutely sure of how long it took the outrage industry to move from the actual images of the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad to the fact that President Bush had not apologized appropriately. Yet I am willing to bet it could have been measured with an egg timer rather than a calendar, and the fact that Bush has apologized since will not make a difference.
Demands from the left commentariat that Bush apologize are hardly new; only the issues change. I often think that some columnists and elected officials would still not be satisfied if Bush stepped before the microphone and apologized for having the gall and audacity to exist.
What is new about Abu Ghraib is the role played by the right commentariat. With the exception of Rush Limbaugh, who admittedly became a little too glib at times given the severity of the situation, columnists, television talking heads and elected officials have universally condemned the actions of the Abu Ghraib guards, called for some higher official be held accountable, and, in the most curious vein of reasoning, insisted that this is not representative of America.
The controversy caught fire when a handful of images from Abu Ghraib were obtained and widely distributed by the media.
One picture shows a female soldier holding an Iraqi prisoner, who is naked and appears to be in pain, on a leash.
Another shows a hooded Iraqi prisoner chained to the bars on his jail cell.
Another shows a prisoner chained to his bed with ladies underwear on his head.
Still another shows a prisoner attached to electrodes while wearing a hood and balancing himself on a box.
In one of the most disturbing photos, two guards stand near a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners with smiles on their faces.
Nine pictures have been archived at the Washingtonpost.com, along with warnings about their graphic nature, and there are allegedly more to come.
Viewing the photos is a profoundly disturbing experience because, while accusations from human rights groups have always been ubiquitous, this is the first time average Americans have been allowed to see what goes on inside a prison in war time.
Seeing the photos made me sick. Yet when I had time to process my reactions, I realized that they might have been due to the fact that I viewed the images on a laptop computer in a comfortable office where I make a decent living at a relatively low-stress job. I go home every night at roughly the same time to a nice home in the suburbs where the only gunshots I have ever heard come from the television set.
The war, for all its dominance in the news I consume, had been an abstract idea. Perhaps it was the removal of the abstract, rather than the actual images of the torture, that was the root of my disgust.
American debates over war are an interesting dynamic. Between the principled-pacifists who would let Al Qaeda have a base of operations in their home before they retaliated, and the war hawks who would go nuclear on any nation with intentions of attacking the United States, the majority of Americans struggle to weigh the moral issues of war against the consequences of inaction.
And somewhere beneath nearly all of these debates is the idea that maybe war is not really as horrible as some people say it is. A generation raised on G I Joe seems willing to believe, perhaps is even desperate to believe, that American guns never miss and American soldiers never act in a way that would be unacceptable to a public school teacher in Peoria, Illinois.
The images from Abu Ghraib shatter those illusions, but the almost universal voice of the commentariat, with its constant apologies and insistence that this is not the way Americans act, shows that maybe we are not yet ready to give up the images we once saw on G I Joe.
We need to, however, because while the images provoke a reaction, there are facts to consider.
According to Army Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick, Abu Ghraib was severely undermanned. He told 60 Minutes II that by the end of his service there, "there was only five soldiers, plus two non-commissioned officers, in charge for those 900-over 900 inmates."
And these inmates were hardly innocents. A report from Bill Gertz at the Washington Times said the prisoners kept at Abu Ghraib are "security detainees."
"Security detainees are those who are considered an imperative threat to security," an anonymous source told Gertz. "These are people who have been identified through means such as intelligence and reconnaissance as being a threat to coalition forces or Iraqis, or people living and working in Iraq legally."
The source continued: "The goal is to gain intelligence. Under the rules of the Geneva Convention, those in detention can be exploited for intelligence."
Which brings us to the final alleged fact. Due to short staffing, intelligence personnel had all but taken over Abu Ghraib and ordered the guards to soften up, a euphemism for terrify and humiliate, the prisoners for interrogation. However much our public figures want to feign disgust over the Abu Ghraib photos, it remains that a few previously unfamous soldiers may have been doing exactly what they were told to do.
America has an odd relationship with torture. We claim to be above it or abhor it, but we routinely hand prisoners over to countries with no such moral qualms because we know that the intelligence that can be gained from uncooperative prisoners sometimes justifies a gruesome means of extraction.
Being in war time does not justify every incidence of bad behavior, of course, but if all that comes out of this is empty apologies and feigned disgust from public figures and punishment for a few low level soldiers, then we will have learned nothing. America is fighting a war that is not pretty or cool, and if we are going to have dialogue about its necessity, then we need to do so without illusions.
History suggests that Americans may be more forgiving than the hand-wringing commentariat. In 1971, a court of law convicted Lieutenant William Calley for his role in the My Lai massacre, but the court of public opinion rendered a different verdict. Polls showed that 79 percent of Americans disagreed with the decision, and on the day it was handed down President Nixon received over 50,000 telegrams demanding clemency. Within days, "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley," had sold 200,000 copies, and Nixon sprung Calley from jail citing "public support."
Perhaps when we know everything that happened at Abu Ghraib we will similarly forgive the soldiers. Perhaps we will not. Yet what these images have offered us is a chance to debate this event, and the larger war of terrorism, without the illusions that our actions are always pure, clean and wrapped in the ultra-cool language of shock and awe.
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