Wouldn’t it be ironic if the current imperial venture – I’m not so naive as to suppose our neocon buddies don’t have more ventures in mind for your children and mine, and note that even as Iraq blows up the United States is stirring the pot in Cuba, planning to send military planes over the island to broadcast salsa music and pop-culture invocations of freedom to a place that will really be a mess when the current dictator leaves power if the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Falcoff is to be believed – ran aground not on the inherent absurdity of the mission but because a few National Guard worthies couldn’t resist indulging in what they probably thought was a little harmless sadism?
One can understand how the stories and pictures of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners resonates. For starters, there’s the eternal question from the remotely rational: If you’re going to do something reprehensible, why would you take pictures that seem to show you reveling in it? What kind of perversity wants to document something that even those who haven’t read the fine print in the Geneva Convention had to suspect would eventually get them into trouble? There’s the uncomfortable question few want to ask out loud but wrestle with internally. These seem like ordinary Americans, not irredeemably evil monsters. Would I be capable of that? We all figure we wouldn’t, but then we might remember that Stanford psychology experiment in the 1970s – the one where some ordinary students were designated guards and some prisoners, and after six days the sadism of those designated as guards was getting so far out of hand that the experiment was aborted.
The outrages capture attention mostly because they don’t comport with the image most Americans like to have of themselves and their country. Maintaining that image requires ignoring a great deal that Americans and the American government do here at home – you wouldn’t want to look too closely at the U.S. prison system to maintain a pollyannaish attitude, for example. But most Americans, being involved in little more than getting, spending and surviving, are reasonably decent in most aspects of their everyday lives and manage to believe most other Americans are too. So evidence of sadism and essentially capricious brutality on the part of people most Americans want to view as “our brave men and women defending freedom in a difficult environment” hits most Americans right in the gut.
Only a few conservatives and war-whoopers have tried to minimize or pooh-pooh the actions, although there have been a few. While there might have been some better-show-shock-before-the-liberals-bash calculation involved in some cases, my impression is that many conservatives were genuinely outraged, if only because they wanted to believe more than most that the military is noble and pure.
CHANGING ATTITUDES
If conservatives and those who had been enthusiastic about this war are a bit disillusioned, how much more disillusioned must be those millions who have been essentially drawn into the spirit of patriotic loyalty that becomes so predominant when there’s an overseas battle and hated Saddam Hussein, but don’t particularly share the imperial ambitions or concern about suppressing challengers to American power? First came the evidence that few Iraqis would be greeting Americans with flowers and jubilant dancing, then came continued resistance, building to something of a peak with Fallujah, that seemed to be growing rather than diminishing. Various polls have shown enthusiasm for continued Iraqi occupation waning.
It could be that for many Americans the embarrassment and shame over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners will be the final straw. That would be understandable, given that most people, who don’t follow political events all that closely for the perfectly rational reason that they can do little to influence them anyway, make decisions more on the basis of emotion than as a result of cold-blooded analysis. If the prison scandal turns out to be the event that hastens American disengagement from Iraq, I won’t shed tears. Idealists have to operate in the real world, and whatever gets a worthy policy objective accomplished shouldn’t be look at too closely in the mouth, perhaps. But in a way it would be a shame if the prison crisis were the precipitating event.
THE REAL ABSURDITIES
Perhaps something like the prison outrages was inevitable, and the general coarsening of the participants (not to mention the coarsening of discussion of issues of war and peace, as anyone who has taken a pro-peace position over the last year or more must surely know) is one of the often uncounted but inevitable costs of war. But this war was a bad idea for much more substantive reasons than that it provided opportunities for a few Americans to behave badly. One would hope that those lessons would be learned as well.
US policy in Iraq is now in shambles because the policy was misconceived from the beginning. Saddam was not an active threat, let alone an imminent threat, to the United States or his neighbors, though he was undoubtedly more vile than average as a ruler. Although more concrete evidence of programs may yet be found, he didn’t have stockpiles of especially destructive weapons of a kind that could be swiftly or even effectively mobilized to do damage to the United States. Thus there was no justification for war either to punish or deter aggression. The initiation of the war by the United States was the aggressive action in the equation. The war was in no sense defensive or even preemptive. Most of the purported dangers and threats the regime posed were vaporous stuff or pure fantasy — remember those unmanned aerial vehicles that were supposed to be able to deliver chemical weapons inside the United States?
The war was then a war of choice, not necessity – or to put it more bluntly, an act of aggression by the United States. A country that values freedom, especially its own, should not be engaged in acts of aggression. And trying to spread democracy and freedom with bombs, missiles and “boots on the ground” is an absurdity. A people grows into democracy and freedom, in ways that fits its history and culture. Imposing them from the top – especially by force – is about as close to a pure contradiction in terms as it gets.
You don’t force people to be free. You don’t get gratitude by occupying and brutalizing a country. You don’t increase your own security by exaggerating threats from pipsqueak dictators. It’s foolish to search the world for justifications for taking military actions and rescuing a too-affluent country from complacency and devotion to what our betters in elite circles believe are trivial concerns.
If the prison scandal is what it takes to hasten an American departure from Iraq, I’ll take it, with gratitude. But there are bigger lessons the American people should take from the fiasco in Iraq.
