Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page C01
Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory
-- the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation
of the oppressed -- belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure
-- the accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities
-- is always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble
people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of
individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national
conscience.
This kind of thinking was widely in evidence among military and
political leaders after the emergence of pictures documenting American
abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. These photographs do not
capture the soul of America, they argued. They are aberrant.
This belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their
authenticity, is indistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants censor;
democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct propaganda in ministries of
information; democracies produce it through habits of thought so
ingrained that a basic lie of war -- only the good is our doing --
becomes self-propagating.
But now we have photos that have gone to the ends of the Earth, and
painted brilliantly and indelibly, an image of America that could remain
with us for years, perhaps decades. An Army investigative report reveals
that we have stripped young men (whom we purported to liberate) of their
clothing and their dignity; we have forced them to make pyramids of
flesh, as if they were children; we have made them masturbate in front
of their captors and cameras; forced them to simulate sexual acts;
threatened prisoners with rape and sodomized at least one; beaten them;
and turned dogs upon them.
There are now images of men in the Muslim world looking at these images.
On the streets of Cairo, men pore over a newspaper. An icon appears on
the front page: a hooded man, in a rug-like poncho, standing with his
arms out like Christ, wires attached to the hands. He is faceless. This
is now the image of the war. In this country, perhaps it will have some
competition from the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled. Everywhere
else, everywhere America is hated (and that's a very large part of this
globe), the hooded, wired, faceless man of Abu Ghraib is this war's new
mascot.
The American leaders' response is a mixture of public disgust, and a
good deal of resentment that they have, through these images, lost
control of the ultimate image of the war. All the right people have
pronounced themselves, sickened, outraged, speechless. But listen more
closely. "And it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch maybe
the reputations of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors,
airmen and Marines. . . . " said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday.
Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the
abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and,
of course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation.
Our soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we
insist, are not us ...
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