SACRIFICE COMRADE RUMSFELD AND BLUFF THAT WE'RE LEAVING!
The title is only half-serious...

All right, when I first saw the pictures of prisoner abuse in Iraq, I was in Mozambique (just got back) and I felt ashamed to be an American. My guts turned to jello with this fear, can we control our own soldiers? Is this like in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where the morals and constraints of civilized society fall away, where noble purposes turn into cruelty and corruption, men degenerate almost into beasts? It was disgusting to see that Americans were practicing torture, "teaching the world torture," as The Guardian put it...

Then I started thinking about it. Did those prisoners ever even suffer any pain?! Maybe, but honestly in all the pictures I've seen and stories I've heard, I can't think of any evidence that pain was inflicted on Iraqi prisoners. This is not to say that what was done was acceptable. But when I think of the word "torture," what it denotes for me is the ultimate extreme of physical pain. Of course, I haven't really researched this, maybe it's worse than I thought. But I will draw this line: it's absurd to talk about "torture" when pain wasn't inflicted. In fact, if I imagine myself in the position of those Iraqi prisoners, at least from what I've seen so far, it doesn't even really frighten me much. Sitting naked in a cell for six hours. Cold, humiliating, sure, but hey, whatever, I've experienced worse. I want to emphasize that the abuse may have been worse than what I've picked up so far from the headlines and newscasts; maybe pain was involved. And it's harder to imagine what it would be like to have Marines bluff that dogs will bite you. Of course, it doesn't seem bad to me, because I know that the dog won't actually bite, but what if you really believed it would?...

The late Israeli prime minister Yitzak Rabin is admired by liberals: he came close to ending the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, he began negotiating with Arafat, and he was assassinated by a Jewish extremist in 1995. A tragedy. To negotiate with the Palestinians like that, to consider giving up territory, was something the Israeli leadership had not brought itself to do for a generation. Why was Rabin in a position to do that? He could afford to make concessions because of an earlier show of strength: he had brought an end to the Palestinian intifada, by breaking legs. Instead of killing defiant Palestinian crowds, he instructed Israeli forces to break their legs.

Breaking legs was a humane move (at least, so one argument runs) because it was not killing. It was a substitute for killing, a way to exercise state power (which in the last analysis consists large of force and violence, or the threat thereof) without killing.

As Rabin came up with a substitute for killing, it seems the American forces have come up with a substitute for torture-- namely, fear and humiliation. To avoid killing, the Israelis broke legs; to avoid inflicting pain, we seemed to have decided to make liberal use of nakedness. I wish they hadn't, especially because things like being forced to masturbate (though not painful, but in fact, strictly speaking, the opposite) are just gross and seem to undermine America's dignity. But to howl about the "inhumanity" of it seems to miss the point; instead, it shows what kind of substitutes a state which forbids itself certain extremes of inhumanity (such as torture) come up with. At the risk of being tedious, here's the disclaimer again: if actual torture took place, my reaction is rather different; and I haven't figured out what to think about the bluffing yet.

I'm partly glad to see the media hysteria over the photographs, which is quite ridiculous but in a reassuring way. The old danger is that we'll get addicted to violence, that our standards, our morals, will slip bit by bit, that we'll be desensitized, that it's a "slippery slope," etc. That's happened before: I know about the massacre at Mylai in Vietnam and all that. What the media reaction shows is: this clearly has not happened to us, and the threat of this sort of thing happening again is a huge incentive to everyone concerned to be on their best behavior. I think the warning will be effective.

Despite my not being all that exercised by what I've seen of prisoner abuse (this is dangerous ground, so let me repeat the disclaimer: if genuine torture has actually taken place, my reaction is different) I'd like to see this end Rumsfeld's career. This is an unfair, unscrupulous view on my part. I am mostly pro-Rumsfeld. It seems to me the strategy of fewer troops in Iraq (compared to the larger number that others said would be needed) made sense, if only because, as far as I understand, not that many troops are available. I love his "old Europe" and "new Europe" line too. But he's served well and a reshuffle would be nice. With Rumsfeld gone, Powell would suddenly have a lot more clout; and while I think Powell has been wrong about some things, Powell would be a great face for the administration right now. I also want to see Cheney go. Again, I'm somewhat pro-Cheney, really; I think it was brave of an old Bush I Administration man to change tack and become a radical; and I don't buy the junk about Halliburton corruption blah-blah-blah. But, again, the reshuffle would be refreshing. I say, nominate Bill Owen, the genuinely conservative governor of Colorado, for vice-president. A Bush-Owen ticket might even have a bit of credibility on the deficit; it would shift the focus from foreign affairs a bit.

Moreover, I think the prisoner abuse scandal would be a good occasion to start gesturing towards a withdrawal. Again, I'm not despondent about how things are going in Iraq, I don't think we're doing a terrible job, I don't think the administration made so many mistakes, I think Iraq has a bright future. But I've done a rethink of the rationale for war, leading to a position that's a bit odd, but see how it flies. We had a right to overthrow Saddam, sure, no question, because he was just a murdering thug ruling by terror with no legitimacy whatsoever; we even owed it to them, since we had supported Saddam in enough small ways that we had some responsibility for his being in power. But we didn't exactly have a right to occupy the country and write a constitution for it, like we did in Japan and Germany. In Japan and Germany, we had a right to reconstruct their societies, because those societies had threatened their neighbors and even us, because the Japanese and the Germans were perpetrators, but the Iraqis were victims, they didn't support Saddam, didn't fight for Saddam, so we didn't need (so much) to reconfigure their society for ours or anyone else's safety. We triggered a revolution is what we did, and revolutions are fast-paced and devour their children and they can be ugly but you hope for the best. Naturally we have a tin ear for revolution, and I think we may be getting in the way. Now, the Iraqi silent majority is grateful for the end of Saddam and afraid of civil war, and I don't think they actually want us out, not right away anyway. So I think we should bluff that we'll start pulling out, not because anyone's defeated us (they haven't, that's plain for everyone to see after we smashed the insurgents in Fallujah) but because of "discipline problems in the army." And then we'll let the odd Iraqi politician take responsibility for asking us to stay in this or that locality a bit longer... This will help bring moderate leaders into the spotlight.

Well, all of that sounds a bit hare-brained, maybe. I'm pretty upbeat about the whole thing, though. If you want to see why, read Omar's blog about the booming economy, or The Mesopotamian or even Zeyad, who backhandedly undermines the hysteria about prisoner abuse by describing the plight of Iraqi doctors:

[There has been] an alarming increase in the number of assassinations and abductions of Iraqi intellectuals and top medical professionals recently in Baghdad.

"They scream and whine about abuse of prisoners, most of who are criminals, but I don't recall anyone mentioning what we have gone through let alone condemning it, which was much worse. Now they are openly calling the Americans to release thousands of those criminals from Abu Ghraib.", a relative of ours told us a couple of days ago.

The point here-- that Iraq has much more serious problems than the hazing of some prisoners, and they don't spring from the Americans, but from the "insurgents" and terrorists-- should be so blase and well-understood by now as to bore everybody. Is it?