[A-List] Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

So, Who's to Blame?

by Virginia Tilley, Counterpunch (May 12 2004)

Secretary Rumsfeld has apologized.  Or rather, he read a statement full
of apology, now dutifully quoted in the media.  Nothing in the rest of
his testimony or his bearing, however, indicated the slightest remorse. 
Instead, with his usual nasal petulance, he lashed out against any
suggestion that he had neglected to take proper action, waving
impatiently at the time-line of military investigations.  He snapped
insultingly that a three-line press release in January had "informed the
whole world", so what more do you want?  (His face went blank when one
Senator returned quietly, "You didn't inform us".)

He protested his incapacity to follow every little crisis, waving papers
about "eight-thousand court-martials" - the only reliable statistic he
bothered to bring.  When did he inform the president?  Well, come on. 
He had so many important things to discuss in those talks with the
president, he could hardly be expected to remember when he had discussed
the little matter of rampant torture in the US occupation's main prison. 
The real culprit, then, in his view?  Digital cameras.  For without them,
the process would have ground on normally, through the months, and
resolved itself somehow, while Iraqis lay naked and ridiculed on
concrete floors.

So who's to blame?  The generals at his side were clearly implicated,
but they did what guidelines told them to do.  Rumsfeld might have been
partly right about that; as the old saying goes, military justice is to
justice what military music is to music.  It was Rumsfeld himself who
clearly failed to do his job: here, to watch over the politics of
detention policy - one of the most crucial and sensitive dimensions of
any occupation - by jumpstarting investigations when the first ICRC
reports came in, or at least warning the president and the Congress
about the pending scandal.  He knew about it, but paid no attention.  It
was not important to him.  He didn't read the Taguba report.  He didn't
ask about the photos.

And it is precisely that casual neglect of suffering Iraqi citizens,
through months of their systematic torture and detention without trial
in US occupation prisons, which truly drives this crisis.  Because it
reflects something which has come to the fore more forcefully in Europe
and the Middle East than it has here, and is the real burden the US must
now overcome.

The larger politics infusing the prison scandal can perhaps be glimpsed
by considering a very different event, an extraordinary exhibit now
touring the US: photographs of lynchings, mostly of black people in the
early-twentieth century.  The collection is soul-wracking in two ways. 
Dangling black bodies, battered and bleeding, terribly evoke past hours
of terror and torture.  But it is the white people standing around the
tree, smiling into the camera - sometimes including women with parasols
and fine frocks - who fascinate observers.  For as curator said, it is
"the comfort, the ease of the crowd" which conveys the dire context:
that a whole white society shared a mindset in which this cluster of
fine citizens could pose openly beside their murdered trophy and smile
for a photograph.

As the visitor peers into these tiny documents of racial terror, that
very act of looking brings a final, gut-wrenching realization: for these
photos were converted into postcards, mailed as mementos to family or
friends.  Such was the heart-stopping dehumanization of black people in
the era.

Those postcards should better illuminate our understanding of the
politics now surrounding these photos from the Iraqi jails.  It is not
simply that people were stripped, or piled naked into a pyramid, or left
shackled together on the corridor floor.  The real shock has always been
the guards grinning and clowning for the cameras - or even the casual
guards just standing about, discussing other things, while prisoners lay
naked in their midst - because it signaled that the prisoners' torment
was entertaining, or otherwise of no moral consequence, because they
were vaguely dehumanized.

And unfortunately for US foreign policy, the crucial condition framing
this debasement is that those prisoners were Iraqis - Arabs - being
tormented by white Americans or Europeans.  Appalled US critics speak of
"sadistic abuse" and "brutality" and "humiliation", and these terms are
correct. But even footage of Saddam's torturers beating Iraqi citizens
does not convey the impression of essential degradation conveyed here,
especially by Lynndie England's infamous leash.  Yes, many Arab
governments routinely torture, and get away with it.  But they do not
routinely reconceive their own people as subhuman, and something
particularly awful surrounds that.  Europeans recall "master race"
doctrines; Arab societies recall colonial racial debasements.  Either
way, Americans are now anathema.

Many in the US would hotly deny a pattern of racism against Iraqi Arabs,
and they would be right to an extent.  But racism does not always look
like the same.  Sometimes it comes out as paternalism: like dumping
unmanageable authority for a wrecked country on the shattered Iraqi
people under condescending slogans like "it's time for them to take some
responsibility".

For US policy in Iraq, it first showed as a reckless willingness to
invade and occupy the country on false pretenses, risking an entire
society on a geostrategic myth.  But in the event, it has shown
especially as criminal negligence.  Real respect for Iraqi society would
have required elaborate planning for the occupation, and indeed the US
State Department and its genuine Middle East specialists worked for a
year on such plans.  Rumsfeld and his Pentagon Office of Special Plans
threw out those plans like old trash and instead employed a "minimal
force" doctrine which had no planning at all - and the Iraqi people's
national infrastructure was looted down to the wiring.

Casual disregard further showed in the occupation's neglect of Iraqis'
most urgent basic need, health, by failing to give all priority to fully
restoring Iraq's once-fine and now-wrecked hospitals.  It still shows in
the grossly inadequate troop complement, which has left Iraqi society
struggling with rampant crime and the trauma of multiple insurgencies.

Outright racism has especially reeked from Rumsfeld's disdainful
dismissal of any hint that the US should keep count of Iraqi civilian
casualties, as is required by the Geneva Conventions.  In similar vein,
impatient disdain has infused Rumsfeld's accusation that, because
"insurgents" in Fallujah were "using women and children as shields", US
forces were somehow legitimized in blowing those women and children away
by the hundreds - numbers he and his cronies actually denounced the Arab
media for trying to confirm.

So who's to blame for the prison atrocities?  Little Lynndie England,
clutching her leash?  Sadly, yes.  But who gave her the leash?  And who
told her what to do with it?

Racism is not the whole story, of course.  Many Americans soldiers in
this fatally flawed occupation genuinely see Iraqis as people like
themselves and are trying their best to be helpful. Across the cultural
barrier, human beings recognize each other, and some are losing their
lives doing it.  But not all soldiers can keep their moral compass in
situations like this, as we learned to our lasting national grief in
Vietnam.

It is therefore not just some suspicious civilian contractors who
inserted a grotesque dehumanization into Abu Ghraib - although a likely
influence in that regard is peeking much speculation, for who else in
the region sees Arabs as animals and has all these much-mentioned
translation skills?  But the whole hard-hearted Rumsfeld backdrop of the
occupation is reflected in the casual body language of Abu Ghraib guards,
as they stand chatting or smiling around naked Iraqis lying twisted on
the concrete.  For a message has filtered down from the top, the old
paternalistic colonial message that so easily switches from generosity
to brutal iron-fist repression: Iraqi Arabs aren't quite like us, are
they?  They are just a bit less.  They need to be saved by us.  But if
they act up, bring them down fast.  Because they don't really feel
things the way we do, and it's so easy to humiliate an Arab.

In any case, even if many Americans reject that message with anguish, it
has now been broadcast all over the world in front-page photos from Abu
Ghraib, thanks to Rumsfeld's casual neglect of these prisons and the
welfare of the Iraqi people.  It will require long hard work and a
humility that our government is just discovering - starting with
dismissal of the man ultimately responsible for perpetuating the torture
- for our country to overcome it.

http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley05122004.html

Virginia Tilley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart
and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.


Please also see these essays related to US racism:

"An Illegal and Immoral War, Betrayed by Images that Reveal our Racism"
by Robert Fisk, The Independent (May 07 2004)
http://www.k1m.com/antiwarblog/archives/000105.html

"Who Ordered 'Shock and Awe'?" by William Pfaff, International Herald
Tribune (May 12 2004)
http://www.iht.com/articles/519400.html

"If We See Our Enemies As Inhuman, Then We Ourselves End Up As Savages"
by Robert Fisk, The Independent (May 08 2004)
http://www.k1m.com/antiwarblog/archives/000107.html

"Getting rid of Rumsfeld won't change a thing in Iraq" by Cynthia Tucker,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 10 2004)
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16916

"Waiting for Torture Fatigue" by Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet (May 11 2004)
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18676

Bill Totten,  http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/