May 05, 2004

What Happened at Abu Ghraib

I haven’t said a whole lot about this Iraq prisoner scandal, probably because there’s not a whole lot I can add. It’s terrible, it’s inhumane, and it’s un-American, and I hope to see every single soldier involved in this rotting in military prison for a long, long time.

My biggest question with this, as it often is with exposures of massive wrongdoing, is: what the hell were these people thinking? Not only are they committing a war crime, but they’re taking pictures of it! Haven’t they ever heard of al-Jazeera? Don’t they know that their actions may well have done irreparable damage to the cause of what we’re trying to do in Iraq?

I remain unwavering in my support of the decision to remove Saddam Hussein and attempt to create a stable democracy in Iraq. But it’s now time to admit that yes, quite a few mistakes have been made- from the decision to invade with too few troops to the disbanding of the Army to this latest tragedy. This fall’s election may not turn out to be a referendum on whether we should be in Iraq; it will rather be a referendum on how best to handle the situation as it stands in November. If John Kerry can demonstrate that he is more capable of steering the Iraq ship, he will be our next president.

A couple more thoughts:

Does “the left,” as John Podhoretz argues, feel a “thrill,” and a “sense of moral superiority” from the prison-camp torture atrocity? I don’t doubt that some of them do- but that’s not the point. Let’s not pretend that that’s the story here, because attempts to argue such are nothing but a changing of the subject. The fact that Seymour Hirsch was opposed to the war doesn’t make him any less correct in his reporting that these atrocities actually happened.

And something from Virginia Postrel:

Andrew Sullivan has a long quote from one of al Sadr supporters who reports abuse at the hands of American troops. It concludes: "They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman." Being a Muslim woman is like being tortured and humiliated all the time? And this guy thinks there's nothing wrong with that?

And finally, considering that we’ve got an international atrocity that involved torture, shouldn’t ESPN.com maybe come up with a new name for its tortured sports cities” series?

Posted by Stephen Silver at May 5, 2004 09:55 PM
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