Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The Growing Scandal

(Reprinted from the issue of May 20, 2004)

As ugly details pour forth about the torture of Iraqi prisoners, even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been as nearly apologetic as he ever gets. In an obvious sense, the scandal serves this arrogant administration right. When you release the demons of war, you can’t disown them. Those demons are your babies.

I don’t in the least want to make excuses for the torturers. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t need any help: He likens the appalling pain and sexual humiliation to “college fraternity pranks,” excusable as an “emotional release” for our brave fighting men and women who are being “shot at every day”; while at the same time insisting that these acts are totally atypical of our heroes and heroines.

Nonsense. First of all, fraternity pranks, however repellent, are excused because they are done to willing participants; and many college students have too much self-respect to submit to them. If they were done to involuntary subjects and continued for months, they would be crimes that would earn their perpetrators years in prison.

Second, these “pranks” go far beyond campus high jinks. Sigma Kappa Tau doesn’t use fierce dogs on new members, keep bags over their heads, and deprive them of sleep, food, and water for long stretches.

Third, the interrogators aren’t battle-stressed soldiers; they are specialists, secluded from the battlefield, who are in little danger. They seem to have been having a good time at their work. Pfc. Lynndie English, photographed holding a naked Arab man on a leash, doesn’t appear to have been in dire need of emotional release. She also turns out to be pregnant by a man she is no longer seeing. All in all, she’s a rather inconvenient exemplar of American heroism.

Finally, and most important, these practices do appear to be widespread. The notion that they are the work of a few “bad apples” forgets what the proverb says a few bad apples do to the whole barrel.

True, such things happen in every war — which is another good argument against war in general. But they also happen whenever some people have too much power over others, and nobody is watching — in domestic prisons, mental hospitals, and other institutions haunted by untold tales. The pressure against reporting abuses by one’s fellow workers can be extremely strong.

My son calls this the Serpico Syndrome, after the New York cop who blew the whistle on police corruption, only to learn just how bad the problem really was. He not only had to quit the force; death threats from New York’s Finest caused him to go into hiding and eventually leave the country. He’d broken the great rule: Never rat on your comrades, even if what they’re doing defeats the whole purpose of the institution.

In Iraq, American interrogators have been defeating the proclaimed purpose of the war itself. The revelations have intensified the apoplectic anti-Americanism of the Arab world, probably ruining any remaining hope of a successful occupation and transition to democracy. President Bush no doubt disapproves of American girls smirking over naked Arab men on general principles, but it’s hard to imagine anything more utterly destructive of his hope of pacifying Iraq than forcing Arab men to pose in passive roles for S&M porn.

The story is so inflammatory, in fact, that only one country on earth can profit by the release of these obscene pictures. And it isn’t the United States.

So the torture scandal isn’t particularly Bush’s or Rumsfeld’s fault, except in the sense that if you wage war, you should realize that you are creating countless situations in which, for example, prisoners are going to be entirely at the mercy of their captors. Of course it’s another matter if, say, Rumsfeld knew what was going on and tried to cover it up, in which case even supporters of the war ought to agree that he should resign. But soldiers who abuse prisoners are only doing what we should expect unless the most careful precautions are taken. And in any war, this is very hard to do.

Does this mean we should accept war itself as an excuse? Some argue that because such things “always happen” in wartime, we shouldn’t be too shocked when they do occur. On the contrary, it means we should include the moral certainty of inevitable and unforeseeable horrors in any calculation of the costs of a proposed war. Again, this is a reason for opposing any war that isn’t strictly justified. The question “Shall we go to war?” is hard to separate from the unasked question, “Shall we commit and ensure terrible crimes against the innocent (though of course we would prefer, if it were possible, only to kill and maim those who mean us harm)?”

Nobody in his right mind can promise a war without atrocities. They do indeed “always happen,” though we generally hear only about those of the enemy; our own government and our own soldiers are unlikely to tell us of those on our side. Journalists may, but they are apt to be censored, or at least accused of lending treasonous “aid and comfort” to the enemy, if they contradict official propaganda. Hence Limbaugh’s fury at the amorphous “media” (as if he himself weren’t the most popular media figure in the country!) for publicizing things he doesn’t want mentioned. Hence, too, Rumsfeld’s anxiety to deflect worse scandal by showing even more horrifying evidence to Congress, while keeping it from the public.

Much more will no doubt come to light about this revolting situation. However much of the blame may be due to Bush’s oversight, nobody can believe he intended it; it has left his hope for progress in the Mideast in rubble and undone everything the war was supposed to achieve. It’s as if someone was trying to sabotage his policy. Who might want to do that? Cui bono?

Only one country is gaining by this scandal, and it certainly isn’t the United States. The tortures — hooding the prisoners, the use of dogs, and sexual defilement, for example — are particularly horrifying to Arabs, and they are methods long used on Palestinian prisoners by Israel’s Shin Bet, whose agents have been coaching the American interrogators during the occupation. Ariel Sharon doesn’t want improved relations between America and the Arabs; he wants polarization, with America and Israel against the Arab nations.

The uproar over the Iraqi prisoners is achieving exactly that result. It is hard even to imagine improved Arab-American relations now. The weeks to come may tell us more about the Israeli role in this story.

Bush, with his dogged slogans of democracy, is loath to admit that American interests, as he conceives them, are radically at odds with Israeli interests as Sharon conceives them. Given domestic political pressures, few American politicians can afford to admit this. But it’s the simple fact.


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Joseph Sobran