It is hard to overestimate the damage that has been done, not only to the US occupation of Iraq but to the cause of democracy and civilisation as a whole by the exposure of torture and sexual humilation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, formerly used for the same purposes, though of course on a much more brutal and extensive scale by Saddam Hussein[1]. If these pictures had been staged by the Al Qaeda propaganda department they could scarcely have been better selected to inflame Arab and Muslim opinion against the West, combining as they do the standard images of torture with scenes specially designed to show the determination of the West to humiliate Muslim men in every way possible.
It goes without saying that those directly involved, or who knew what was going on and failed to act, should be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law. In addition, those in the chain of command whose lapses contributed to the commission of these crimes should be dismissed out of hand. It seems clear that this latter class must include nearly involved in organising the policy of detention without trial, and particularly those involved in the interrogation of prisoners – scenes like these could not occur if the general practices of the prison were not already violent and degrading. But these steps, necessary as they are, will do little more than to prevent the further aggravation of the damage that would be done if these crimes were seen to be condoned in any way.
Only a response on a dramatic scale has any hope of significantly reducing the damage. My suggestion[2] is that the Administration should immediately evacuate and demolish this awful place, and should announce that, before June 30, all those detained by the CPA will either be released or charged with a criminal offence, and, further, that anyone detained after that date will be brought before an Iraqi court. It might be useful to propose a memorial for those who died there and in similar places, though the design and construction should be left to an Iraqi governent.
Of course, this will mean releasing many people who are either insurgents themselves or have given aid and comfort to the insurgents. And, of course, the Iraqi court system is far from satisfactory. But the policy of detention has created far more insurgents than it has captured, as have the raids and searches associated with it. And if Iraqi judges are good enough to produce an arrest warrant for Muqtada al-Sadr, they’re good enough to deal with ordinary Iraqis caught up in military raids,
fn1. I say “of course”, but even the most charitably disposed commentators in the Arab/Muslim world are unlikely to concede so much. The most favorable view that Arabs and other Muslims are likely to hear is that the Americans are no different from Saddam, neither better nor worse.
fn2. Not mine alone, I’m happy to say. As pointed out in the comments thread at CT, Scorpio at Eccentricity made the same suggestion, a couple of days before me. Let’s hope this idea has also occurred to someone with the will and capacity to implement it.
John Quiggin 
You are going way over the top with this John.
a:) If the new Iraq is going to have the rule of law, they are going to need prisons. Demolishing this one in order to build another one somewhere else seems a little stupid.
b:) I’d like to see your proof that the policy of detention produces insurgents at all, let alone more than it has captured.
I think John is winking towards a “Bastille” effect here. Iraqis will identify this prison as the French sans-cullottes identified the Bastille, as a symbol, even if not a particularly menancing, of evil and oppression.
Destroying it would send a statement, rather than changing facts on the ground.
Overall, I’m afraid that the chance of failure and a Saigonesque exit is now greater than 50%. This is probably going to go down as one of the great disasters. But I hope not.
How on earth can this incident set anything back? The people who could be influenced by it already got that message, from earlier warning signs.
Right now there are Americans saying “we’re not like that”. Not only were they always like that (just like everyone else), it is only people who are true believers in civilisation and democracy who ever believed that or were willing to give them – or civilisation and democracy – the benefit of the doubt. true believers in civilisation and democracy will continue to believe in them, and the rest were already cynical. Me, I’m one of the latter; as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I only believe in that sort of thing as instrumentally good.
There’s a parallel to the US idea of giving Iraq “sovereignty” with the quid pro quo that it should be used to invite a US presence. If civilisation and democracy are to deny Islam as being inconsistent with themselves, they lose any instrumental good for people who put a priority on Islam – even when those same people see the value of civilisation and democracy, considered instrumentally. Neither they nor I value civilisation and democracy in themselves, the only difference being that civilisation and democracy don’t hurt me – and won’t until I get in the USA’s way.
It is a bit over the top to talk as if there is moral equivalence between the Coalition and the Baathists. The very fact that these photos have been given wide currency indicates that Iraq is more of an Open Society now than it was under Hussein. Still, any unlawful forms of interrogation or homicide, should be punished by military law as failures of discipline and contrary to Coalition political purposes.
Yobbo, you’re surely not suggesting that Saddam left Iraq underprovided with prisons?
Jack, I explicitly said there was not moral equivalence here, but that the events would be widely viewed as demonstrating it. Hence, more than punishment of individuals (who are already presenting themselves is scapegoats) is needed as a response.
PML, things were bad already, but not so bad they can’t be made worse by something like this.
JQ, just to show that I am right (aren’t I always?), read up Paul Robinson’s article in the Spectator of 24.4.04 – before all this broke. This shows clearly that the situation had been like that for a fair while, and that the information was out there. So, all the recent incidents have done is publicise the reality.
That means that deterioration can only come from people acting differently in the light of new information. But as they are already polarised, that won’t happen to any material extent. There are only the “I told you so”s, the “this is an isolated incident”s, and the marginalised who don’t have any effective voice. That is, they (we) have a voice along the lines of Frederick the Great’s saying “My people and I have an agreement; they can say what they like and I can do what I like.”
Thank you — sometimes I feel like I’m shouting down a rain barrel.
Blogging is a lot better than hollering back at the television.
Scorpio
What amazes me is that there are some people out there who are actually surprised that this sort of stuff goes on. They have only ever watched the movies where the goodies spare the baddies. Imagine what is going on that isn’t being recorded? Maybe it’s easier for pro-war people to believe that coalition soilders aren’t gang-raping Iraqi women… but, unfortunatetly, sometimes war’s a bitch.
But that’s not enough to sway the convservatives from their new mantra: “when it comes to foreign aid, no price is too high”.
Professor Richard Falk at Princeton commented a few years ago, that, in the west, “We are conditioned to see the world through a one-way moral/legal screen, with western values portrayed as threatened and innocent justifying a campaign of unrestricted violence”. In other words, contrary to what Jack says above, and quoting John Pilger, terrorism, barabarism and violence are standard practices on our side, only the technology is different. I am frankly amused that many in the west find the images of Iraqi prisoners so “shocking” when this has been standard practice of the US (and British, and elsewhere in the ‘civilized’ world) almost since the inception of our societies.
Take the United States, which has waged terrorist wars against Korea (1870-1871), The Phillipines (1901-02), Korea again (1950-53), Vietnam (1963-75), Nicaragua (1984-89) and now Iraq (while ignoring the 40 or so Indian wars at home in which the slaughter is also well documented). This also does not include the 40 or so democratic movements it has helped to crush, or the 45 or so governments it supports e.g. Uzbekistan, Colombia, Algeria, Guatemala, Indonesia (under Suharto) and many others with appalling human rights records. Its absurd to suggest that “we” are better than “them” all of the time without a relevant udnerstanding or knowledge of the huge number of atrocities perpetrated by “our” side in support of plutocacries and polyarchies. The two largest outlaw states in the world – the US and UK – with Australia right up there – could not give a damn about ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’, but instead support any regimes, no matter how vile, that ostensibly support their economic and military objectives. Saddam was useful until he made his fatal mistake – invade Kuwait – and it seems conveniently ignored that many of the same recycled neo-cons in Washington (what Gore Vidal colloquially refers to as the “Bush-Cheney junta”, or the “D.C. axis of evil”), fully supported Saddam when he committed his worst atrocities.
For relevant background, I’d suggest reading William Blum’s “Rogue State”, Mark Curtis’s “Web of Deceit”, Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival” and/or Ward Churchill’s “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens”, all of which elucidiate the long litany of atrocities and carnage committed by the US and UK governments over the past 200+ years. It lays bare the myth that we uphold democratic values and human rights, but reveals that our governments have and still support policies, no matter how barbaric, that support that aims of elite interests.
what staggers me is that US intelligience is doing this to people who really can’t assist them in any great way.
In Cuba you would think they would be going in harder than this becasue of the AQ threat.
Just received on the wires:
Bush seeks $25bn more for Iraq, Afghanistan
Thursday, 06 May , 2004, 03:03
Washington: US President George W. Bush said that he was seeking 25 billion dollars more to defray military costs in Iraq and Afghanistan starting October 1 and left the door open to asking for more.
“While we do not know the precise costs for operations next year, recent developments on the ground and increased demands on our troops indicate the need to plan for contingencies,” he said in a statement. “I am requesting that Congress establish a 25 billion dollar contingency reserve fund for the coming fiscal year to meet all commitments to our troops and to make sure we succeed in these critical fronts in the war on terror,” he said. Bush, who had vowed not to seek more money for Iraq before the November 2 presidential elections, said he would submit a more precise spending request, known as a supplemental, for the full year once needs are better known. The president said the new money was needed for the 2005 fiscal year, which begins October 1.
In February, the White House had sent the US Congress an overall budget request of 2.4 trillion dollars, while insisting that the 87 billion dollars already approved would be enough to cover the war in the current fiscal year.
I am no economist. But is this money being poured into Iraq likely to adversely impact on the world economy? I remember reading that the expenditure on the Vietnam war was a trigger for the stagflation of the 1970’s.
In respnse to Homer’s assertion (above), please let me know of any link between AQ and Cuba (there are none). The US has waged countless terrorist wars on non-aligned Latin American countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil, Cuba) that don’t follow orders from Washington and which instead attempted to use their own resources to benefit their own populations. The US is sending a clear message that the first function of many of the world’s poor countries is to act as ‘service economies’ to US multinational interests. Britain adopts the same stance.
The ‘war on terror’ has replaced the ‘red scare’ as a pretext for military and/or economic interventionist policies. Thus, the US and Britain will continue to support vile regimes that provide a service function to transnational corporations, while stifling real democracy that just might lead to the presence of governments that wish to serve their own populations. Any country that ‘doesn’t follow orders’ is thus deemed to be ‘supporting terrorism’ or nationalist opposition parties that threaten the existing order are also deemed to be ‘terrorists’.
Jon Bolton, one of the neocon ‘chicken hawks’ of the Bush administration, has been harping on about Cuba’s biological weapons programme for two years now, presumably as a means of getting the government to launch a preventive strike against Cuba. But he has (not surprisingly at all) provided not a shred of evidence to support this assertion.
I’d rather see the Whitehouse demolished with the Bush family inside.
the counter Enlightenment
The contradictions abound. And I struggle with them. The image below is of an Iraqi person being tortured by the
http://dox.media2.org/barista/archives/000602.html
International news in the blogosphere this week was dominated by the Abu Ghraib and Queen’s Lancashire Regiment torture stories. Making Light collects the American perspectives and connects it to the siege of Fallujah that was and wasn’t as well, and…
Some good news
Abu Ghraib prison is to be demolished. Obviously, I welcome this news and hope that this symbolic measure will be accompanied by the substantive changes it should represent, including the abandonment of the policy of detention without trial….