Abu Ghraib

Sober reflection:
I don’t think it matters a damn to compare the way things used to be at Abu Ghraib under Saddam with the way things were there up to January with our troops in charge. I see a lot of people trying to make moral equivalencies and saying, well, you know, our treatment wasn’t anywhere near as bad as prisoners got under Saddam. Even I did that the other day when I said something to the effect that at least we weren’t dumping people feet first into plastic shredders. That much is true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
The fact of the matter is that the treatment prisoners got at Abu Ghraib should have been exemplary. It should have been humane. It should have been respectful. And it should have been all these things even though the human scum that were in the prison were there because they had done Bad Things™.
The fact is that the left is partly right on this debacle, but for the wrong reasons, and they get the solution completely wrong (because they have a political solution — “anyone but Bush”, and “Rummy resign now”). Situations like this DO make us look bad, and they DO reflect on our entire society when viewed by people whose only perception of the United States is in black and white (read, anyone from anywhere but the United States). Intelligent people who know this country and know what it’s all about — AND KNOW WHAT’S AT STAKE — accept the fact that there are shades of grey. And right now there isn’t anyone on the left, or at least on the “Anyone but Bush” left, who has two brain cells left to bang together on this.
People are comparing this to My Lai, for God’s sake. I remember My Lai. But My Lai was a) a massacre, b) handled very poorly by everyone involved all the way up to the President, and c) a serious and very signficant exception to the rule of how our troops behaved in Vietnam.
I think if I read the Abu Ghraib reports correctly, one prisoner died because someone sat on him and suffocated him.
This goes right along with the Angry Left trying to claim we’re stuck in a quagmire like Vietnam. First of all, folks, we kicked Saddam out, and we’ve got his ass locked up. Second of all, call me when we get to 50,000 combat deaths in Iraq. Third, last I looked, Vietnam was still communist; Iraq might have a chance to be democratic if we stay in for the long haul. So much for your quagmire theories.
The Angry Left also base their demands for Rumsfeld to resign and Bush to pull the troops out over this on the presumption that guilt travels upward through the ranks to the very top, and that the people at the very top need to commit the equivalent of political seppuku over this. I call bullshit. There’s no way in hell that the CinC or the SecDef can take a bullet for every jackass misfit who manages to get into the service and has a chance to do something as unutterably dumb and stupid as what these few soldiers did. Even if the entire brigade was guilty, or even if an entire Army Corps was guilty, it’s the commanders on the ground whose heads should be delivered up on a platter. The fact is that every troop who was involved in this should be court-martialed and do hard time breaking rocks at Leavenworth, or worse. And every officer who was involved should be broken, and probably also ought to do time — all the way up to the brigade commander, if found culpable.
And this has been happening since December, when DoD found out about it. Too many people don’t realize the timeline and are simply not aware that DoD was investigating long before CBS broke the story. There’s a big difference between conducting an investigation on your own and being forced to conduct an investigation because someone aired a report on TV about it. I have to give kudos to DoD for not sitting on this and hoping nobody ever found out. And a raspberry to CBS for almost completely confusing the issue in the name of “Anyone but Bush”.
All this in and of itself doesn’t solve the problem — unless it does. I mentioned shades of grey above. The problem is that even though we see in shades of grey, the world sees us in black and white, and we have to change that. We have to explain to the world that we aren’t perfect (as if any society is). But at the same time, we have to prove to them that we’re willing to make sure that the guilty suffer mightily, even if the guilty are our own people. We’re not perfect, but we’re not evil, either. The excuse that it was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as they had it under Saddam, isn’t good enough. To say that we have a few bad apples and that we are willing to punish them when caught doing stupid things isn’t good enough either — but it’s a start.
And it’s a fantastic lesson for the rest of the world to receive.