I was going to post this as a reply to “Liberty Dad” in the comments section of the Guantanamo thread, but I realized it was almost entirely about Abu Ghraib, which is a different matter (though with some overlap), so I thought it might as well become its own post, for people who want to discuss that issue.

Liberty Dad made an excellent point:

I’ll also claim it’s likely that a prison or two in YOUR OWN state has more prison rapes and AIDS infections, for instance, than Gitmo. Why isn’t that a bigger issue?

Back at the beginning of the Abu Ghraib scandal I was telling people this wasn’t a military problem at the core, but a prison system problem. The abusers were prison guards in their regular jobs.

A few bad-to-the-bone types on the pro-war side reacted to Abu Ghraib with a “so what?” Most of the pro-liberation people I read were devastated and disappointed, but grimly determined to carry on in spite of the setback, and eager to see the guilty punished swiftly and openly, to prove our system works. At the same time, they wished to keep the abuses in perspective, especially by comparing them to what Saddam did. [Read the Amnesty reports.]

As Andrew Sullivan wrote at the time, though, Abu Ghraib was a crippling blow, because, “how we conduct this war is as important as winning it. We cannot lose our soul in the process.” But he, like many others, tried to trace the problem down from the top, seeing it in terms of ripples from Rumsfeld-Bush decisions to aggressively pursue counter-terror intelligence.

How did those new relaxed rules get moved from Guanatanamo against high-profile Qaeda terrorists to people dragged in off the street in Baghdad? We don’t yet know. But we do know that the administration debated various methods of torture – because Rumsfeld signed off on some and then had a change of heart and restricted some of the more horrifying methods.

There certainly are two strains to what went wrong in Abu Ghraib. The one, which Sullivan articulated well, was the top-down question of what was sanctioned.

But also bear in mind that there is likely a strong strain of sadism in the U.S. prison system. I say “likely” only because my evidence is anecdotal. I don’t have statistics, but, I have had some experience in the BDSM community (it’s a long story), and I can tell you I probably encountered more self-identified prison guards there than any single other occupation.

I also know that, as a newspaper editor, after the Abu Ghraib photos were printed, I took several phone calls from people who had been in the local county prison who told me you could see the same things happening there in any given week: snarling dogs and naked men cowering. Court and police beat reporters I work with, as well as public defenders, had no trouble believing this.

Yet for some reason my fellow editors, all in a lather over Abu Ghraib, don’t seem to think this close-to-home problem is worth investigating. We don’t report this with scandalous page one coverage and scathing editorials.

Just so you know it’s not just me, I plucked a few observations from the Calpundit blog discussion forum on the wrangling earlier in 2004 between Gov. Schwarzenegger and the California prison guards’ union:

“A significant part of my professional life is defending prison guards (in a relatively civilized prison system) from lawsuits by inmates. It is certainly true that most claims are bogus. Nevertheless, I can tell you of my own knowledge (the attorney-client privilege prevents my giving specifics) that abuse, often quite astounding abuse, is far too common.”

Or this one.

“The abuse of prisoners by guards is something that happens. Such violence surely has its origin in the need to assert control over a population of prisoners — which is a very sticky proposition if you have to look over violent, half-crazy offenders. It is no joke that many criminals are mentally ill or close to it — and violent chaos can and will erupt despite the best layed plans. I have some sympathy for the difficulty of the job.

“That said, it is clear to anyone who wants to examine the facts that a culture of sadism has developed in some of our prisons, and in the spirits of some, perhaps many, guards. Gladiator matches and organized rape-sodomy are documented realities. To say nothing of the general dehumanization of prisoners — 90% of whom will be released eventually and live among us with their scarred psyches. Only fools argue against aggressive rehabilitation programs: education and mental health treatment.”

Combine that aspect of many — certainly not all — prison guards, with the fluid, violent, and unrestrained atmosphere of Abu Ghraib in late 2003, and you don’t necessarily need a Rumsfeld dictum or a Bush legal team memo to arrive at the scenes we’ve seen.

Certainly something as idiotic as taking video footage and photographs of your escapades is far more consistent with a sexual fetish than it is with a government trying to cheat on international laws.

Yet the extensive Human Rights Watch report on Abu Ghraib makes no mention whatsoever of U.S. prison culture. Instead, its damning report allows only Bush Administration officials any direct responsibility. You’d think a worldwide human rights group would be as concerned with U.S. prisoners as with Iraqi prisoners. But apparently not so, at least when there’s partisan hay to be made.

The top-down problem collided head-on with the bottom-up (pardon that) problem at the level of the prison supervisors, who were — I suspect — feeling heat from higher up to get better information and at the same time neglecting to supervise their people on the floor.

* * *

All that got overlooked in the rush to beat up on America. In Germany, when the U.S. revealed released the first wave of damning Abu Ghraib pictures, the conservative, mainstream “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” wrote about “a pile of naked men that reminds us of pictures from the concentration camps.”

Overlook the fact that the concentration camp photos showed piles of dead bodies. Apparently that difference doesn’t register in the German media. Overlook, too, the fact that the German media had zero interest in Abu Ghraib under the previous owners. Pictures exist from that phase in the prison’s history. The only reaction I have to those of them I’ve seen is a line from Günter Grass: “I couldn’t eat enough to puke enough.”

But overlook it, because I will say, in Abu Ghraib, Americans got a glimpse over the precipice that leads to a Death Camp.

I haven’t read many books more cold-blooded than Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men” (1992). He tells of a group of average German civilians who mustered into the military as Reserve Police Battalion 101, shipped off to the Eastern Front, and methodically rode from village to village across the plains of Poland, marching the Jewish men, women and children of each place out to the woods and shooting them individually to death.

This book paints the horror with an everydayness that makes it the more horrible.

On their first assignment to kill Jews, in the Polish village of Josefow, the battalion’s major gave his troops the option of “excusing themselves” from the task. Of the 500 in the unit, only about a dozen did so. They were not punished. The rest slaughtered 1,500 women, children and old people. They became one of Nazi Germany’s most efficient extermination units; by the time Police Battalion 101 disbanded in late 1943 “the ultimate body count was at least 83,000 Jews.”

[If this sounds familiar, but you haven't read Browning, realize that his research was a key source for Daniel Goldhagen's bestseller "Hitler's Willing Executioners."]

Browning’s more recent book, “The Origins of the Final Solution,” explores how the Holocaust came to happen. It was not Hitler’s plan all along; it evolved. The racial policy shifted as the military campaigns in the East rolled up huge successes. There was no direct order from the Führer to exerminate. “But local commanders, whether SS officers or administrators in occupied territory, always sensed that more extreme action on the ground would find approval above them,” a reviewer of the book observes. Hitler is portrayed as a leader who “filled the air with fearsome innuendo, but left it to junior figures to put into practice what they sensed he wanted — and what they wanted too.” In the end, “[t]he Wannsee Conference of January 1942 only made the German bureaucracy complicit in what was already being done.”

Among Browning’s revelations in the new book, one seems to have caught the eye of British reviewers, in publications that take a dim view (at best) of the war to overthrow Saddam. “The decisive impulse (to the Final Solution) was not defeat but the euphoria of victory in Russia, in the summer of 1941,” a reviewer writes. “It was the sense that they were invincible which persuaded the Nazis that the genocide of Soviet Jews, which they were already carrying out, could be extended to the Jews of every nation they controlled.”

Euphoria of rapid victory … war crimes that begin with low-level decisions, implicitly sanctioned from above … something seen at first even by Himmler as “un-German” becoming a fact, then a policy … the mix of semi-professional soldiers with loutish tendencies and leaders willing to turn a blind eye to brutality.

Yes, it’s there. The parallel is there. If you only look at it through a drinking straw.

Now put the straw down and look at the whole scene. What came before? In Germany, whole generations of demonization of Jews — they were vermin, disease, the focus of a century of legal restrictions and social exclusion. This was approved in the churches, in the universities, and in the political parties of all stripes.

In the U.S., we have a welcoming culture that is aware of its own mongrel, immigrant origin. Some cartoonish Arab bad guys in a few Hollywood movies hardly are the equivalent of “Der Stürmer’s” vicious blood-libels. Imams visit the White House. Courts uphold muezzin chants. After 9-11, in town after town, neighbors protected Muslim women who were afraid to walk in the street in their distinctive garb. The list goes on.

What came after? Were the American abusers sent off to the next prison, to continue their work? Were their bosses promoted and their leaders pleased? The criminals have been sacked and await punishments. The whole system has been shaken by the revelation. Civil and military tribunals convened, the chain of command exposed and scrutinized.

The German fighting force of 1940 was the finest professional army in the world. And before it was over, even the proudest outfits had been tainted by war crimes. Americans are not better than Germans. American National Guard prison units from Pennsylvania are not inherently morally superior to German police battalions from Hamburg. What is the difference? Start with transparent institutions, free inquiry, a cultural sense of right and wrong that had not gone completely mad over a demonized enemy, and, yes, a media that is willing to expose crimes.

The German press probably should not push this line too hard. It could lead to some embarrassing comparisons.

* * *

It is possible both to burn with personal shame and rage at the fools Abu Ghraib, who threw away so much for so little, and at the same time to remind other people to keep the reaction to their criminal folly in perspective. The incident itself was one thing; the way it was received around the world is another. If my son burned your house down, I would be furious at him. If you then tried to kill him (and me) because of what he did, I would defend us vigorously. That doesn’t mean I condone his crime, I merely reject your reaction to it.

Here’s a good example of perspective, by a voice from the Middle East that is no American lackey:

Absolutes are appealing, but in imposing them, moralists must consider two points: That only a system which responds to censure through amelioration can eventually set lawful standards of behavior; and that some of Washington’s more zealous Middle Eastern critics often avoided applying a universal ethical yardstick when considering what took place under Saddam — even as the US today accepts their moral privilege to condemn its actions in Abu Ghraib.

There is no justification (let alone a politically expedient rationale) for a host of recent American undertakings in Iraq – whether the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners or the bombardment of civilians in Falluja. However, there is also no excuse for denying that what we have seen in the past week in the US has been the thrashing about of a democratic system that feels disgraced by the behavior of several of its citizens, and that intends to rectify matters.

The Egyptian playwright Ali Salem told me recently that the true indignity of the Iraq war was that it was not Arabs who had overthrown Saddam Hussein. He was right. As Arabs examine the photographs from Abu Ghraib and read about American misconduct there, they might reflect less on what this says about the US, which usually ponders its worst excesses, than what it says about their own systems, where such images could only have been glimpsed over the carcass of an overthrown regime.

The Abu Ghraib pictures also caused my first public row with my fellow editors. One of them insisted that Abu Ghraib stripped away our “moral basis” for freeing Iraq, and left us “just as bad as Saddam.” But he denied that was “moral equivalency,” and then in the very next breath he said that the war had no legitimacy to begin with, because it was begun under “false pretenses.” It’s a child’s game in reverse; deny the cake and steal it, too.

Once you strip back the irrationality, I think this argument probably came down to the old straw man of “American Exceptionalism.” Any time the U.S. attempts a positive change in the world, those who don’t like it will retort that we just think we’re special, and thus privileged to boss other nations around. They can always go and find that marginal, but (thanks to the Internet) visible, section of the American people that truly believes in its heart of hearts that God Blessed America.

I support the war and the rebuilding of Iraq, and I have no illusions about God or Americans. Whatever “morality” has to do with waging war — any war — is a damned slight matter. The United States didn’t go to war in 2001 because its people are more moral than those across the ocean, or because God is on our side. We went to war because we were brutally mugged by an enemy who killed almost entirely non-combatants, and got more of them than Pearl Harbor, Gettysburg, and the Lusitania sinking combined. As I said before, it’s about 3,000 of our fellow citizens, slaughtered in our cities and fields.

Our side went to war because we were attacked, not by a nation-state, but by a vicious movement that festered in a retarded civilization. Part of the cure for that is to give the people in that civilization some hope and purpose, other than the hope of destroying America and the purpose of sailing airliners into tall buildings. What’s better than those things? How about the hope of actually running your own country, and building your own future.

Democracy, transparent institutions, an answerable judiciary, an uncorrupt police force, the rule of law, free expression, religious liberty — these are not god-given perfections, but centuries of human history have taught us that they’re the best available way to live collectively. They’re not American inventions — not one of them. Americans haven’t been always good at applying them in our big, messy nation.

So what? If only perfect nations could act, none ever would. We won our independence with the help of a French fleet and a Dutch loan. Were the Dutch and the French pure at heart? Did they have a self-interest in seeing Britain lose its colonies? Should the American colonies have accepted British rule rather than using these world powers as a skyhook into freedom?

France, after its Revolution, sowed the seeds of liberty and freedom across Europe — Italy, the Rhineland, Spain, Poland. The French conquered many peoples, and were vastly unpopular after their liberations turned to occupations. They ended up getting chased back to France. But the seeds took root. The ideas, not the armies, were the purpose, and the result.

Are we at least as moral a nation as the France of 1800? Yes, and more. There’s no blood of the Reign of Terror reeking from our hands (though I am sure you won’t have to go far to find some Chomskyite to make an absurd “McCarthy=Robespierre” moral equivalency argument). If enough people in Iraq want their freedom — want it even more than they want to send the Americans home — we can give them the room to take it. We’ll give them the tools, if they have the hearts. That’s why we’re there. Is it in our self-interest to do so? Hell, yes, unless you fancy another 9-11 every year for the next century.

We’re not in Iraq because we’re better than anyone else in the world. (Stronger, yes). We’re there because we’re exactly like everyone else in the world: we want to keep living, with dignity and rights. And if we can help other people get that, and help ourselves at the same time, that’s a pragmatic choice, as well as a noble one.

It’s the anti-Iraq crowd that is obsessed with American exceptionalism. Without realizing it, they’ve turned their straw man into their main argument. “You are forbidden to take action, because you’re not perfect.” And it ends up destroying the rest of the world for the sake of America:

“The war in Iraq is bad because it was unilateral and pre-emptive, and because it was begun under false pretenses. Therefore, if reconstruction of Iraq succeeds, and the country emerges as a stable and flourishing democracy, all those poisons at the root of the war will be justified and encouraged. America will be justified and encouraged. It is more important that the Iraq poject fail — and be seen clearly to fail — because if it does, morality and justice will prevail again, America will be discouraged and shamed, and the world will be restored to its right order.”

All that matters to this hard core in the anti-war movement is teaching America a lesson, influencing the outcome of the next election in the States, and containing the “evil” neocons. Average Iraqis? Not even a blip on the radar screen of that crusade. The future of Europe or Israel or India should America be sent packing by Islamists in the Middle East? Nobody gave that a thought.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 22nd, 2005 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Foreign Policy, History, Media, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.