Abstract

Show & Tell in Abu Ghraib

The author comments on the implications of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. The fact is, whatever the reason or excuse, however unrepresentative those photos are ever shown to be--and whatever punishment is eventually meted out to the perpetrators--the United States has just lost its last remaining rationale for the misbegotten invasion of Iraq. The WMDs are missing, the nuclear weapons never existed (even the "nuclear weapons program" has been dead since 1991); you don't hear much anymore about Saddam having been behind 9/11, although thanks to the media's slavish channeling of White House propaganda, 70 percent of Americans will probably go their graves believing him Osama's best friend. Now the rescue of the Iraqi people from tyranny and brutality is turning out to be another fantasy. The humanitarian argument persuaded a lot of people--good people--to give this war the benefit of the doubt. Does anyone still think Iraqis are about to shower their invaders with roses and sweetmeats? The Administration will do everything it can to portray Abu Ghraib as, in Rumsfeld's words, "an exceptional, isolated" case. That seems unlikely: Human rights groups report many more instances of unlawful detention, torture and abuse, and there are at least ten pending investigations of prisoner deaths that we know of. Abroad, if not here at home, they underscore how stupid and wrong the invasion of Iraq was in the first place, how predictably the "war of choice" that was going to be a cakewalk has become a brutal and corrupt occupation, justified by a doctrine of American exceptionalism that nobody but Americans believes.