I don’t mean to bang on about the same subject all the time here, but the horrific pictures of US soldiers torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners make it impossible to leave the subject of Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq. In many ways, this is the story of the war so far, because it underlines the self-serving hypocrisy of the US war effort with a clarity that is truly stunning.
Much has said and been written by propagandists of the right in relation to the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime, as an excuse for the colonisation of Iraq by the US, which is now in progress. Brutality, there most certainly was under Saddam. But the notion that the US soldiers are freedom fighters, angels of mercy bringing an end to a despotic regime, is nothing less than a Big Lie. It is profoundly disturbing, the extent to which apparently intelligent people can argue that this is indeed the case, despite the fact that, since the US and the British attacked, the US command in Iraq has been responsible for bombing civilian targets, laying waste to homes and killing thousands of innocent children, as well as adults.
Well, the pretence has crumbled to dust now. The vile pictures of US soldiers grinning shamelessly as they preside over the physical and sexual degradation of their Iraqi prisoners captures the sickness that is at the heart of the invasion better than words ever could. Smile for the camera – click! The hooded and naked Iraqis, their bollocks to the photographer, are forced to make like they are taking it up the arse from their fellow prisoners. Click. Their bodies are heaped like slaughtered animals, one on top of the other. Click. Smile for the camera. Click.
They’ll have a good laugh at these at home, yes they will. Click! A woman GI does a victory dance: look at his cock – nice, huh? They’ll have a good laugh. Yes they will, laugh, click. Laugh, click. Laugh.
The pictures were taken in Abu Ghraib prison, just outside Baghdad. But one of the soldiers who worked at the prison was so appalled at what happened that he reported it and handed over the evidence. However, nothing seems to have been done about the abuse until the soldier gave the explosive pictures to CBS News.
The response from US army officials was predictable. The American people were asked not to believe that these soldiers were representative of the US Army in general. In a sense this is true – it is doubtful that many troops are stupid enough to gather pictorial evidence of their own crimes. But, looked at another way, they are in fact representative of everything that the US soldiers are taught to believe about the people they are fighting, killing and capturing.
It is a necessary condition of going to war that soldiers must be prepared to do the unthinkable. They must be prepared to kill, and to kill at close range. And in the way this particular war has been fought by the US, their soldiers must be prepared to watch innocent people die at their hands, and at the hands of their comrades, without feeling moral qualms of any kind.
It is only possible to do this, and especially to do this as an aggressor, in someone else’s homeland, if some place inside you have developed the belief that those you are fighting are evil, wrong, bad, inferior, dangerous, expendable. It is only possible to treat people as being sub-human, if in some place in your heart you already believe them to be sub-human.
It is why American soldiers cut the ears off the Viet Cong they had killed, and carried them around as trophies. It is why the British Parachute Regiment have been responsible for what any sensible person would define as atrocities – whether in Northern Ireland or the Falklands. It is why the Israeli army can indiscriminately bomb Palestinian towns, crushing people like worms. It is why the US feels that it has the right to treat the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay like vermin.
In terms of psychology, the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with all of this. And no one in the US command, I believe, would care one iota about what happened, if it had not been made public. But it has been, and the civilised world owes a debt of gratitude to the individual who decided that, in conscience, he (or she) would have to speak out.
With the revelation, the barbarism of the invasion has been brought home to American citizens in a way that is almost impossible to deny. These pictures do not lie.