Posted on 05/09/2004 3:54:45 PM PDT by yonif
The revelations about US soldiers' sadistic behavior toward Iraqi prisoners cannot be taken lightly. No upstanding democracy can tolerate such behavior, and we are confident that America won't. Still, such abuses should, if anything, remind us what has been achieved in Iraq and how important it is that that success be consolidated rather than discarded for lack of patience or perspective.
The prisoner-abuse photos have rightly stimulated nothing but disgust throughout American officialdom, yet they have generated waves of claims of moral equivalence and loss of the high moral ground. Anthony Lewis, for example, writing in the International Herald Tribune under a cartoon depicting American soldiers leering at Saddam Hussein's old torture manual with an Iraqi general, states: "Instead of a country committed to law, the US is now seen as a country that proclaims high ideals and then says that they should apply to all others but not to itself."
We have been the first to criticize Western countries, sometimes even the US, for applying a double standard in its criticisms of Israel. Yet we wish that no other free nation, certainly not the US, be subjected to the same treatment.
It should first be noted that, long before the sickening pictures were broadcast around the world, the abuses themselves were under full investigation and corrective actions were being taken. On March 20, US Brig.-Gen. Mark Kimmitt announced in Baghdad that criminal charges had been filed against six soldiers and that 17 had already been "suspended from their duties until the outcome of the investigations." Kimmitt also described the collapse of good discipline in the unit as a "kind of cancer that you've got to cut out quickly."
Democracies like Israel and the US are hardly immune from the scourge of abuses when under attack or at war. In the 1984 Bus No. 300 scandal, for example, Shin Bet agents first killed hijackers at the scene of their crime rather than bring them to justice, and then framed innocent people in an attempt to cover up their crime.
To take out of context such a case, or the American abuse scandal, and conclude that the democracy behind it has lost all moral standing is absurd. For democracies, such abuses are neither ordered nor tolerated; for dictatorships, they are a matter of policy.
Now the abuses in one prison are already morphing into a claim that the US is maintaining its own "gulag," as alleged by a New York Times editorial headlined "The military archipelago."
The attempt to compare prisons filled with alleged terrorists and other jihadis with gulags past and present is obscene and an insult to the victims of terrorists and dictators.
How can enlightened people, who claim to care about human rights, compare the real gulags that now exist in places like Iran and North Korea, in which thousands of innocent people are being killed and tortured far from the public eye, to the American incarceration of terrorist suspects?
Regardless of where one stands on the debate over how to fight terrorism, it is incumbent on all those who care about human rights not to debase this fundamental concept by conflating its exceptional violation by countries who believe deeply in it with its rampant trampling by those who do not. Nor should we in the West, because of lamentable but exceptional incidents, condemn ourselves and the world to much greater injustices by simply throwing in the towel in this war to defend our freedom and beliefs.
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's henchmen would feed prisoners into shredders and shoot them for sport.
The attempt to identify the thousands found in mass graves has barely begun, as has the process of bringing the regime's leaders to trial. Since its liberation, Iraq has made tremendous progress: Electricity is now flowing at above prewar levels, health care spending is 30 times what it was under Saddam, and dozens of newspapers have emerged in the new Iraq.
The name of the game is not to throw away all this, and the potential of an Iraq that is successful and free, just because some in the West have lost confidence in the West's own cause.
For this to happen, the people of Iraq must be allowed to establish their own elected government as quickly as possible, perhaps even ahead of the 2005 deadline for elections currently in place. A fully legitimate Iraqi government – not UN-appointed technocrats from the old regime – is the best guarantor of freedom and stability in Iraq and beyond.
MAYBE, just maybe, because we've been told it's only FREE SPEECH to pile naked bodies up together and take pictures of them doing whatever they want, or are demanded by the porno/homo/aclu/libertarian lobby? AND, because, no one DIED doing it? Just a thought.
that's funny who ever wrote this sounds remarkably like the Palys Muslim press writer when discussing Israel's moves on the poor innocent HAMAScide bombers and their handlers
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