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I enjoyed considering your points; likely because they are not far from my own. Sorry, though, that you hold those in my profession in “low esteem.” Not all ice cream is vanilla.
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The past week has been full of the images of US (and British) soldiers humiliating their Iraqi prisoners. I was tempted to write a longer post on that, but I figured that doing so would (a) take an enormous amount of time to be somewhat orderly and coherent and (b) remain mostly unoriginal and boring as many points of the debate have been going up and down most media in the past few days. So this will just be a somewhat elliptic collection of what might have been a more coherent story.
This is a strange topic. You see those photos and start wondering what exactly the people who did this ('this' being humiliation, torture, against the Geneva convention or whatever you want it to be) thought while they were doing it. While I hold soldiers in low esteem, I'd still grant them enough intelligence to figure out that these things are wrong just from the sight of them. Even without the humiliation and torture – just the fact that all the prisoners are hooded, and thus don't have faces in the western media seems very odd and wrong.
And then there's the politics. The chimp running the USA seems to actually have apologised by now. While this was of course too little too late (and apparently not convincing either in terms of language and body language), it was the very least he could do. And now the blame shifting fest has begun. Who's fault is it? The fault of everyone involved and everyone above them in the chain of command, I'd say. That's the joy of power: You can command people to do things and it will be your merit what they achieve – but if things go wrong, you authorised them and it will be your fault. Responsibility is part of the game. And if the people you sent to actually do the job were unfit to do it, you obviously made a poor choice and are accountable for that.
Moving the blame to the lower ranks or contractors now is about as credible as are, say, clothing companies who make their contractors sign contracts that they don't use child labour or abuse their workers... while making sure everything's nice 'n cheap. Only the situation is even worse here as those companies are only practicing capitalism, i.e. being jerks, while that war in Iraq is allegedly about promoting democracy and thus should meet much higher standards.
If you enjoyed the images of stacked naked Iraqi prisoners, you may want to go and see Salò or the 120 days of Sodom. On the other hand, I tend to strongly recommend not seeing that film because I found it rather disgusting.
And then there is the question of the media. One bit that I find puzzling is the following: According to the reports I read in the very same media, the acts of humiliation against the prisoners are much worse in the context of a muslim country than they'd be in the 'west'. Yet those media chose to publish images of those humiliations around the globe. They might even be the only images that remain to stand for this war in the distant future. Isn't this a disservice to the people seen in the photos? Or are our modern and enlightened countries, democracies and media really so screwed up that people wouldn't believe reports without photo 'evidence' being shown and the people responsible might be able to spin their way out of the situation? Seems so. Sad.
Finally, let's go on a little hypothetical trail: Luckily Germany isn't involved in this war. And while I've heard people claim that the German army is a particularly 'democratic' one due to all sorts of extra controls that were deemed necessary after a bad experience or two with wars and the army in the past century – let's just assume that it is as smart and as sleazy as any other army. Now assume, Germany were a 'good' country – 'with us' rather than 'against us' – and involved in this war, also holding prisoners. And abusing them. With the abuse coming out. Can't you see the tabloid headlines? Krauts back at what they're best at
&c And then imagine our government declaring those actions as 'un-German' and removing the people who commited them from service. I am sure those same deeds would be judged differently if they were committed by Germans than they are when committed by the US.
More links: More sources, Abu Ghraib, Women involved, Humiliation much worse in Muslim context, Responsibility lies at the top.
I enjoyed considering your points; likely because they are not far from my own. Sorry, though, that you hold those in my profession in “low esteem.” Not all ice cream is vanilla.
