Yawning Over Abu Ghraib

In a world besotted by toxic moral equivalence, it actually makes sense to equate the treatment of Iraqi prisoners with the brutality suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein, or, as some have suggested, the Gestapo torturers of the Third Reich. But aside from its inflammatory properties, such a comparison has little use as a diagnostic tool or a logical yardstick for measuring the degree of the offense, at least anywhere in the real world.

These incidents, we’re led to believe, recall the tyranny of Saddam’s regime, and tarnish the moral credibility of the allied mission in Iraq. As though being the butt of a miscreant’s joke is the same as having your kneecaps ground off.

Trust the Left to make the comparison, regardless of how strained or specious. Can you imagine how trivial these charges are going to seem if the terrorists manage to explode a dirty bomb and 30,000 Americans die puking up their own intestines? That is the caliber of enemy we face. Yet we’re supposed to don sackcloth because a few homunculi got their feelings hurt???

But there is a reason. You’re there because your target and a few thousand of his friends are willing to hijack airplanes and fly them into your buildings. They yearn to set off explosives in your train stations and poison your water. They would cheer if a suitcase nuke went off in the Chicago subway at rush hour and thousands of innocent commuters vaporized in a flash.

To prevent these horrors, you commit smaller horrors. You keep the sights on the target, and you squeeze the trigger slowly, just like your DI showed you in Basic. And the target’s head explodes in a pink shower of blood, brain, and bone. And one less enemy exists to threaten your way of life and the lives of innocent Americans.

But occasionally you don’t have to pull the trigger. Cowards quickly recognize the discretion that constitutes the major part of valor, and will often give up and live to fight another day. Then you - who only moments before were their executioners - become their caretakers.

Their presence puts a strain on your resources; you have to clothe and feed and shelter them, while your comrades are living in holes and eating whatever crumbs they can gather. You’re forced to listen to the insults and the defiance and the hypocrisy of people who have no honor. You suffer the outrage of their demands for decent treatment, as though the charred bodies dangling from a bridge like smoked beef are simply the ephemera of nightmares, not the work of the mewling wretches before you.

So maybe you’re a little brusque when you’re transporting a group of fetid whiners from the holding cells to the showers. Maybe you scoff when these “brave soldiers” cringe like schoolgirls at your guard dogs. Maybe you react to a rebellious loudmouth with a nightstick instead of Rogerian therapy. You let them stand naked a tad longer than they would have to, and you’re a trifle slow to respond to their demands for an extra blanket or a mint on their pillow. You’re a soldier not a stewardess, and these are murdering thugs, not guests at the Four Seasons.

Geneva Convention be damned. Under that same protocol, we would be well within our rights to summarily execute un-uniformed “militia.” We are certainly under no obligation to provide them with extraordinary service or carry out our duties with courtesy. We are not required to empathize.

What protection has the Geneva Convention accorded OUR fighting men and women? In Viet Nam, captured Americans were brutalized in unspeakable ways; the captors always found some justification for ignoring decency. Likewise in Gulf War I. Our prisoners were beaten, raped, in some cases murdered. And these were soldiers, not civvy-clad “noncombatants.” In another world, in cleaner times, such sideline shooters were known as “spies,” and were shot on the spot.

It is absurd to be hamstrung by polite conventions when prosecuting a war against savages. No, we don’t need to take our cues from Saddam. But I hardly think that poking fun at naked prisoners is the same as boiling a soccer team alive in battery acid. The world that has expressed such outrage at America’s indiscretions was oddly silent while Saddam was pulling his citizens’ eyes out with gimlets and Muqtada al-Sadr’s goons were dragging dismembered corpses through the streets. When that world begins to express the same level of discomfort with those atrocities as it does at the photos of naked Iraqis, it will earn some degree of credibility. When the imams and clerics of radical Islam begin demanding investigations into the wholesale slaughter of western contractors, they will show the same degree of integrity America has shown all along. And they will demonstrate their willingness to wage war according to rules of civilized behavior. That in turn will give them sounder ground from which to demand merciful treatment. But until that day, any treatment we give Iraqis beyond a bullet in the head comes from our grace alone. That we don’t line them all up and machine gun them is a tribute to our forbearance. The last thing these animals deserve is an apology.

I’ve seen umpires at Little League games abused worse than these prisoners. And all they did was make a bad call at second base. They didn’t behead anybody or make soup tureens of human skulls. How much sympathy am I supposed to have for a group of people who indulge the most savage and cowardly of human vices, then collapse at the first sign of resistance? How much high ground can a group claim when they readily slaughter innocents in ways that make Torquemada hurl? We’re supposed to believe that these barbarians are offended by their cavalier treatment, and that forcing them to march to the shower naked somehow bruises their fragile self-esteem?

In a more honest day and age, they would have needed fear no rough treatment; they would have been cut down where they cowered on the battlefield. The ultimate way to solve the mishandling of prisoners is to take no prisoners. Instead, these poltroons throw up their hands and demand protection under a protocol they steadfastly refuse to honor themselves.

“We should treat them well not for their sake but for our own,” it is argued. There seems to be a large group of folks more concerned about the PR implications of this molehill than about its moral (and legal) legitimacy. Am I to understand that our MPs are now to worry about whether these vermin have fuzzy bath slippers and a low-carb alternative at their dinner meal? Our soldiers are to devote tremendous energy and resources to ensuring the comfort of an ilk sworn to their eradication? What possible ethic binds us to such absurdity? What do we owe these detainees except a hot and a cot? Respect? For what!!??? Their grim determination as fighters? Their sense of honor and military integrity? The ultimate nobility of their cause?

Have you seen the Berg video? The charred meat, that used to be a person, swinging from a bridge in Fallujah? The shots of the Trade Center the morning of 9/11/2001? These are not images inclined to elicit respect from anyone except underclassmen at the De Sade School of Diplomacy. And unlike the photos from Abu Ghraib, these are not isolated, posed tableaus but slices of an all-too-commonplace reality frozen forever in a resin of horror. Yet we’re supposed to witness such depravity in silence, lest we inflame a pathological hatred against Arabs and Muslims. Worse yet, we’re supposed to suffer pangs of conscience when we see an Iraqi detainee cringing before an attack dog.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but I have to tell you, I DON’T CARE. I don’t care if Abdul is so scared he’s crapping his loincloth. I don’t care if Achmed sobs himself to sleep on the cold, dank floor of a fetid cell. I don’t care if he wakes every midnight from haunted dreams of a red-white-and-blue specter. I believe that these creatures should be accorded the bare minimum they need to survive: a relatively weather-proof roof over their heads, a bland, nutritious gruel thrice daily, and rags sufficient to keep our guards from having to stare at hairy naked bodies all day.

I don’t believe our jailers should be engaging in freelance electroshock or hobby proctology; such acts are beneath us. But we should not be prevented from such violence by any respect for our charges; they don’t deserve it. We should tolerate their pathetic existence only because wholesale murder and the torture of weaklings diminishes us as a people, kind of like throwing rocks at a limping mutt owes more to sadism than to power.

As to the PR impact of our “brutality,” I’m not particularly worried that the Abu Ghraib scrapbook may cost America its Miss Congeniality title. There isn’t a nation on earth - our Western allies included - that can dodge charges of wartime atrocities. The Brits had their Boers. The French had the Hugenots. The Spanish had the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayans. The Germans … well …

These “atrocities” weren’t limited to poking fun at some Catholic’s privates or tying some Jewish shopkeeper to a wall. Their offenses, where they didn’t leave piles of corpses, left broken bones, scarred faces, and missing limbs. They were truly tortures, not mere inconveniences magnified to scandal through the distorting lens of hypercritical media.

Propaganda is a powerful weapon during a time of war -- one might even say a weapon of mass destruction. It should be clear by now who is wielding that weapon and to what end.

Can you imagine how trivial these [Abu Ghraib moral equivalence] charges are going to seem if the terrorists manage to explode a dirty bomb and 30,000 Americans die puking up their own intestines?

Indeed. (Quite frankly, I see them as trivial right now). But don't be surprised if many leftists claim that we were the victim of such an attack because of the Abu Ghraib shenanigans.

Has it not occurred to anyone that the images of a man with underwear over his head prove the precise opposite of abuse; he has pants on his head because his interrogators are not allowed to hit him. If his interrogators were brutes there are many more direct methods of getting him to talk, a leap from a helicopter, a gun to the head of his cellmate... It is precisely because such things are forbidden that the interrogators must invent other, sillier kinds of pressure.

Pants on the head, prisoners dancing naked, prisoners forced to watch Gilligan re-runs is not proof of abuse, it is proof that the Americans are not harming them and are not going to. So they must annoy them instead. Tell us what you know and you can put your pants back on.

How do you fight a war by empathizing with your enemy? How do you center his skull in your sights and blow his brains out when you feel his hopes and dreams and know he carries a picture of his sweetheart in his back pocket? It would be a wonderful world if he felt the same way about you, if he got you in his sights and lowered his weapon in appreciation of the horror he was about to commit. If that were to happen, there would be little reason for either of you to be there in the first place.

But there is a reason. You’re there because your target and a few thousand of his friends are willing to hijack airplanes and fly them into your buildings. They yearn to set off explosives in your train stations and poison your water. They would cheer if a suitcase nuke went off in the Chicago subway at rush hour and thousands of innocent commuters vaporized in a flash.

its a bit hard to assume that your average iraqi conscript who died had much connection to terrorism. even if you beleive saddam and osama were best buds (i dont) its hard to make that connection.

Abu Ghraib may have a lasting influence. Women, not men, get a kick out of the dog-leash gal and panty-headed men. I just laugh, but they seem to have ideas:) You can tell that look!

Good old regular sex may mean something else, thanks to those "outraged" RATs who forgot Clinton had oral-anal sex with Monica, in the Oval Office.

I just caught the last past of Oreily's talking points, and if I heard it right, the NY Times has made Abu Ghraib a part of its front page stories for the last 28 days. What's worse, is that he mentioned that the the latest terrorist warnings...complete with the 7 photos of the terrorists, was buried deep within the newspaper. Talk about a complete lack of perspective.

Excellent rant, Jack, and IMO right on the money!

"The Era of Osama lasted about an hour, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty."
Toward FREEDOM

don't be surprised if many leftists claim that we were the victim of such an attack because of the Abu Ghraib shenanigans.

Then what is their rationalization for 9/11?

If "the average Iraqi" was fighting American troops in defense of the Saddam regime, then he was either a fool, a coward, or a butcher. Whatever his reason, he was The Enemy, and we owe him nothing except some modicum of humanity.

Then what is their rationalization for 9/11?

Leaving out the conspiratorial ones......let's see....."the administration ignored the intel warnings" probably tops their list. But nowadays the leftists have fresh meat if another major attack on our soil should happen -- "We've created millions of more bin Ladens through our 'arrogance' and 'hypocrisy'. They'll also mostly like throw out words and phrases like "imperialism" and "going it alone." Whatever, the rationalizations would be there, and they'll all be aimed at the administration's supposed incompetence.

Enough already of Abu Ghraib. The Democrats have milked that cow dry.

Not only the Dems but their cohorts in the liberal media and even Republicans like Linsey Graham who joined their hyperventilating by prematurely predicting this would go WAY UP the chain of command and become a genuinely HUGE scandal smearing the entire military and the administration.

I'm sick of all of them.

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