I don't doubt that thirty or more years of the sewage that passes for entertainment has permeated American society and corrupted working class rural whites as much as ghetto blacks and the country club crowd. The female in two of the photos grew up more than two hours from Charleston or Pittsburgh, but she was probably exposed to smut on a routine basis through cable and satellite TV, movies, popular music, and the Internet that would have made a Victorian era pimp or whore blush. The female was also indoctrinated with the dogmas of feminism and male bashing through the same media channels, with further support from the public schools she likely attended.
However, these morally debased working class whites from West Virginia and neighboring states were in this National Guard unit not to play S&M games, but to supplement their income and to express their patriotism. Patriotism, loyalty to a nation as an extension of your family, is a difficult emotion to suppress (though the mass media has been trying!). The ancestors of these "hillbillies" fought to free America from British rule in 1776, to preserve the Union in 1861 (northern West Virginia and the adjacent counties in PA and MD were pro-Union), and to fight in our foreign wars from 1898 to 2004 in numbers exceeding their proportion of the U.S. population.
The blame for the humiliation lies not with the Weekend Warriors, but with their superiors, whose ideas of pacification and "winning hearts and minds" are imbued with the same hubris and lack of common sense that plagued their predecessors in Korea and Vietnam. Rather than use the full weight of American firepower to crush the rebels, these "perfumed princes" and well-paid consultants seek to use what they regard as subtle strategies and psychological manipulation. Thus, they engage in these attempts to humiliate Iraqis who are mostly low ranking soldiers or irregulars in order to do police-type counterinsurgency work. What these self-styled experts forget is that half measures have not worked in the past, and will not work.
The effect of the "subtle strategems" of these so-called sophisticates is that what was won in the battlefield in 2003 is being lost in places like Fallujah in 2004. We need more MacArthurs, LeMays, and Schwartzkopfs, and fewer Achesons, McNamaras, and Powells. Furthermore, whether the revelation of the abuse was planned by enemies of our actions within our ranks (which is likely the case) or not, the net effect is that our "high ground" with regard to the Ba'athists and the Islamic extremists is undermined.
We need to win this war and get out. There is no substitute for victory.
Quite a bit of doubt about that actually.... from the top. And I believe them.