Who Lost Iraq?

Peter Lee

May 3, 2004

Lenin famously described communism as “socialism plus electricity”.

We can only hope that people will describe our stewardship of the Abu Ghraib prison as “Saddam without the amperage”.

After all, maybe we wired up people’s genitals but we didn’t run any current through them.

So we say.

But maybe what we did was bad enough.

From the U.S. Army’s Taguba report on abuses at Abu Ghraib:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee. quoted in Seymour Hersh, Torture at Abu Ghraib, New Yorker, posted online April 30, 2004

And here’s a head’s up for prurient readers: the prisoners were not put in positions “simulating sex” as some newspapers have misleadingly reported.

Not much point in creating degrading homoerotic tableaus for men with bags over their heads who can’t see what they are doing.

Men were being forced to masturbate into the mouths of their fellow prisoners:

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.” Hersh, op.cit.

Yes, “its mouth” is a special touch.

“Pfc England”, by the way, is Lynndie England, the dingbat dominatrix of Abu Ghraib.

For reasons that seem open to question, this young woman was expected to supervise the detention of a group of young, hormonally active, sexually deprived naked men who apparently were to be aroused and humiliated at the behest of Military Intelligence in order to further their psychological collapse and expedite their interrogation.

One of the four Britons detained from Guantanamo and finally released earlier this year had claimed that naked women were paraded in front of detainees down there, a claim which didn’t seem to make much sense (was Castro’s contribution to the War on Terror cut-rate Cuban hookers? Were U.S. taxpayers paying to fly whores in from Miami?).

But Jamal's most shocking disclosure centred on the use of vice girls to torment the most religiously devout detainees.

Prisoners who had never seen an "unveiled" woman before would be forced to watch as the hookers touched their own naked bodies.

The men would return distraught. One said an American girl had smeared menstrual blood across his face in an act of humiliation.

Jamal said: "I knew of this happening about 10 times. It always seemed to be those who were very young or known to be particularly religious who would be taken away”. My Hell in Camp X Ray, Daily Mirror, March 12 2004

But now we have to wonder.

So the fact that the commander of our detention center at Guantanamo Bay took over Karpinski’s job of running detention facilities in Iraq back in April is therefore not a cause for celebration.

Will Gitmo “best practices” as applied to the breaking of Iraqi prisoners involve importing hookers? Or will they rely on young, undertrained Lynddie Englands to lose their moral compass and sense of common decency?

What happened at Abu Ghraib was not “a few bad apples”. It wasn’t a “systemic failure”.

It was the completely logical and preordained outcome of a detention system at the heart of despised, brutal military regime that denies the rights, the aspirations, and the humanity of the people it oppresses and soils everything it touches.

Lynndie England was “a railroad worker's daughter who made honor roll at the high school near here, had enlisted in the 372nd for college money and the chance to widen her small-town horizons”, according to the Baltimore Sun., whose face smiled out from the “Wall of Honor” at the Walmart in her home town in West Virginia.

Think about that when you shop at Walmart.

Think about that when you look in a mirror.

Every American owes it to him or herself to read Seymour Hersh’s article in the New Yorker and view the archive of photos.

It’s bad enough that our detention system, like our occupation itself, is rotten to the core.

It looks like we’ve lost our military mojo as well.

Iraq woke up this weekend with the realization that American power could be defied, resisted, and overcome, at least temporarily, at Fallujah.

Perhaps Colin Powell deserves the credit/blame for trying to add a veneer of great power statesmanship and professionalism to our clown college clusterfuck in Iraq, by pushing the “pause” button on Bush’s childish “vengeance is mine” assault on Fallujah.

But, after the spasm of stupidity that triggered insurrection in Fallujah and by al-Sadr at the cost of 115 American lives, it might have been better for the occupation if we had crushed Fallujah.

We would have ensured that, even if we were hated, we were at least feared.

Now we are just hated, with a double-dose of anger thanks to the Abu Ghraib horrors.

It looks like the US strategy of smoothing the way for the IGC and Chalabi in the post transition era by annihilating al-Sadr and administering condign chastisement to Fallujah is pretty much in ruins.

Just the opposite is true. We’ve administered the kiss of death to our IGC Quislings.

Even before the Abu Ghraib revelations and the Fallujah capitulation, 57% of Iraqis wanted us out of there pronto, according to a USA Today poll. Now our pretenses of moral superiority and military invincibility — and the political succor they were meant to provide to our chosen creatures — have evaporated.

And talk about Willie Horton wedge issues! Every pro-U.S. politician in Iraq gets to have Lynndie England as a running mate. The victory of anti-American forces in any electoral or selection scenario is virtually assured.

Control of Iraq’s political destiny has slipped through our clanking, mailed fist.

Iraq is shot. Hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost or shattered, all down the drain.

No use trying to fix it, UN-ize, or Balkanize it. Just hunker down in our bases until we slink away — hopefully, for George Bush, after the November elections.

I believe that, once America gets past the shame and anger, it will be secretly relieved that the wheels came off Iraq so dramatically and suddenly. A quick, calamitous failure is infinitely preferable to the death by a thousand cuts our occupation would endure over the next five years if it were managed by anyone with a modicum of intelligence, morals, or prudence.

The GOP hopes the American people might be ready to cut genial, dumb George some slack for the once-in-a-century mistake he committed in that distant, brown, and unfriendly land of Iraq.

But the events of the last month have revealed the real George W. Bush.

Not the stern, resolute “war president”, the wannabe father figure to the nation.

But the panicky, immature incompetent who will adopt any position, ignore any consequence as long as he can continue to evade responsibility for failure.

The man who eagerly rushed into war, got into more than he bargained for, and then, when it was time to…

… drop the hammer and wield the US military dominance that is supposed to be our ultimate trump card in world affairs

…exercise the overwhelming power that drives our impatient, confrontational unilateralism and that we rely on to foment, escalate, and snatch advantage from crises throughout the world

…apply the irresistible force whose clear-eyed, relentless, and reliable employment is supposed to provide a new basis for world order and security…

…blinked, and walked away from the confrontation he had encouraged, created, and pursued.