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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA 'OWN GOALS' IN THE GWOT
Hearts and Minds by David Remnick 
COMMENT HEARTS AND MINDS by David Remnick Issue of 2004-05-17 Posted 2004-05-10 In the days of Saddam Hussein, hangings at Abu Ghraib prison took place on Wednesdays and Sundays--up to fifty or sixty a day, year after year, decade after decade. Prisoners were often shuttled to Abu Ghraib - a vast complex twenty miles west of Baghdad, with three miles of cinder-block walls and twenty-four watchtowers - in an ice-cream truck. Tens of thousands never came out. In the nineteen-eighties, according to a Washington Post report by Peter Finn, the executioner was a tall, burly man known as the Sword. He wore a pistol with Saddam's name inscribed on the handle, and his breath reeked of whiskey. The Sword's successor used to embrace the condemned prisoner from behind on the scaffold, so that when the trapdoor opened the two dropped together and the prisoner's neck snapped more efficiently. Torture was routine in Abu Ghraib: isolation, beatings, rapes, attack dogs, electric shocks, starvation. In the death house, the walls were covered with graffiti. Most marked the days left to the prisoners. "God save me," one man wrote, "and I will pray seventy thousand times." A report published in 1993 by Human Rights Watch quoted a former inmate as saying, "No one, not Pushkin, not Mahfouz, can describe what happened to us." From the beginning of the war in Iraq, the Administration's rhetoric placed moral progress at the heart of its mission. "I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture," President Bush said last June, emphasizing the ethical underpinnings of Operation Iraqi Freedom. "We are leading this fight by example." The sentiment was laudable--and it is precisely what has made the revelations of American misconduct in Abu Ghraib so profoundly disheartening. There are order-of-magnitude distinctions to be made. Major General Antonio M. Taguba's confidential report on the brutality, humiliation, and sadism at Abu Ghraib can hardly compare to descriptions of the horrors there under Saddam. What happened is not on the same scale as the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, or, indeed, the routine torture of prisoners that continues to be countenanced around the world. It is nonetheless shocking, and indefensible, and has made a mockery of this Administration's pretenses to moral leadership in the Middle East. Iraq is not like the Second World War, in which victory consisted of the triumph of one conventional army over another. F.D.R. and Churchill did not spend much time worrying about winning the hearts and minds of the Germans or the Japanese. (If they had, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo would likely not have been considered.) Victory in Iraq depends not only on the successful overthrow of Saddam but also on the maintenance of security there and on the attainment of some measure of legitimacy, in order to make good on the idealistic project of building a stable, secular democracy. From the start, moral and political acumen was just as essential as military efficiency. This preëmptive invasion, in all its complexity, was carried out in a particular kind of information universe. In Iraq, as elsewhere in the Arab world, people have an understanding of the United States that is shaped (and skewed) by a combination of real information and history, on the one hand, and by resentments and conspiracy theories, on the other. The region's newspapers and satellite television stations will never see the world as the Times or CNN does. In Baghdad, the Coalition collects all the paranoid or malevolent rumors in circulation in order to rebut them. But Abu Ghraib was no rumor; it was an incident--indeed, part of a pattern of incidents - of indiscipline, cruelty, and moral failure. The photographs and reports have deepened every resentment, every sense of grievance and subjection. Our moral standing in the region was low enough before Abu Ghraib. The notion of Iraqis - to say nothing of the rest of the Arab world - accepting the United States as a moral exemplar is now surely out of reach. Nor has the Administration shown much moral leadership in Washington. After months of secrecy, Pentagon officials have admitted that they have been conducting thirty criminal investigations into abuses in jails in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that acknowledgment was not forthright; it came only after CBS's "60 Minutes II" broadcast photographs of what occurred at Abu Ghraib, and this magazine's Seymour Hersh published excerpts of the Taguba report. Initially, the Pentagon acted as if the report were insufficiently important to require its attention. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went on the Sunday political talk shows to say that he hadn't yet read it. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld allowed that the photographs and the acts they depicted were indeed horrifying, but he seemed more interested in parsing definitions of "violence." "My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture," Rumsfeld said at a press conference that might have been scripted by Lewis Carroll. "I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word." Thus does the Secretary torture words. Or maybe he's abusing them. Anyway, whether unleashing guard dogs on naked prisoners, for example, is torture or abuse is not the main question. The main question is how such things came to be done under American auspices. As citizens of the world expressed their outrage, domestic soldiers of the right wing quickly sought to minimize, even trivialize, the affair. Rush Limbaugh, who broadcasts to twenty million radio listeners a week, outdid himself as he launched what might be described as "the Animal House defense." "This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation," he intoned. "And we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time. These people, you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of the need to blow some steam off?" And where is the President in all this? His first instinct, like Rumsfeld's, was to grasp at fine distinctions. The affair was "abhorrent," he told two Arab television stations, but he would not apologize, not plainly and directly. And, in what seemed a transparent attempt to get tough without consequences, Bush arranged for the whole world to be told via press leaks that he had called Rumsfeld to the Oval Office and "chided" him. The Secretary's resignation has been sensibly demanded by the Times and The Economist, but not by the Commander-in-Chief. "We are leading this fight by example," Bush had said in June. His White House might regain some measure of credibility if he actually did choose to make an example of someone. But that is not his way. As the President made clear at his most recent press conference, he does not make mistakes - none that he can recall. His chief lieutenants are similarly flawless, except for the likes of Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, whose common flaw was to see the Administration as less than perfect, and to say so out loud. Finally, at the end of the week, came Bush's sullen apology in the presence of the King of Jordan, and Rumsfeld's steely contrition for this "catastrophe." The President and the Secretary of Defense knew about Abu Ghraib for months. Their failure to come forward was also not a mistake. Mistakes, as ever, are the province of others. |