Pyrrhic Victory

Peter Lee

May 17, 2004

They got pictures of us making their guys look silly. We’ve got video of them cutting a guy’s head off! We win! We win! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

That’s pretty much the attitude of the apologists of Abu Ghraib after the release of the Nick Berg video.

By contrast, the Muslim response, as reported by Juan Cole has been remarkably restrained and reflective. Maybe, with the end of our rule in Iraq in sight, people in the region are alive to the opportunities — and responsibilities — that the Muslim world should be getting ready to shoulder in an unhappy land that might suddenly find itself free both of a homegrown dictator and foreign domination.

Even Hizbollah condemned Berg’s murder. Maybe Muslims really would prefer to live in a world where nobody gets a flashlight stuck up the ass or has his head cut off. Wow!

The U.S., on the other hand, is still mired in a struggle of perception whose theme is no longer a clash of civilizations; instead it’s a battle of barbarisms.

But there are plenty of people who hope that the Berg murder will help the administration put Abu Ghraib behind it.

Starting with our C-in-C, George W. Bush.

Bush led with the Berg murder in his weekly radio address:

This week, our nation was sickened by the murder of an American civilian, Nicholas Berg. The savage execution of this innocent man reminds us of the true nature of our terrorist enemy, and of the stakes in this struggle. The terrorists rejoice in the killing of the innocent, and have promised similar violence against Americans, against all free peoples, and against any Muslims who reject their ideology of murder. Their barbarism cannot be appeased, and their hatred cannot be satisfied. There's only one way to deal with terror: We must confront the enemy and stay on the offensive until these killers are defeated.

Go Oceania!

Bush completed his dismal trifecta later in the week.

In addition to trying to whip the US into a bloodthirsty frenzy (this is why we fight!) and adding one more pretext for prolonging the war (his killers must be caught!) Bush used Berg’s murder as a retroactive excuse for why we blundered into this misbegotten war in the first place (Zaqwari got medical treatment in Baghdad while Saddam was in power!).

At a fund-raising lunch in Bridgeton, Missouri, Bush said Zarqawi was an example of the threat posed by the ousted Iraqi leader. "We knew he (Saddam) had terrorist ties. The person responsible for the Berg death, Zarqawi, was in and out of Baghdad prior to our arrival, for example," Bush said.

But with the typical bad luck that besets the Bush war effort these days, bloggers are not only wondering what happened to Zaqwari’s prosthetic leg and Jordanian accent — apparently missing from the snuff video — but, if it really was Zaqwari, why was he even alive in the first place?

An embarrassing report on NBC asserts that White House supposedly nixed pre-invasion military plans to take out Zaqwari’s Iraq base in the Kurdish north — three times! - because the efficient removal of Iraq’s only significant terrorist by a surgical, Special Ops-type strike would weaken the case for the Big War against Saddam that Bush was so anxious to launch.

But the Berg matter may be Bush’s undoing for another reason — because the transient tidal wave of indignant freeper and right-wing pundit froth may convince him not to dump Donald Rumsfeld.

Karl Rove and Dick Cheney may be telling our 98 pound weakling George Bush that hanging on to Donald Rumsfeld will make him Big and Strong with the precious Neanderthal voting bloc.

If he clings to Rumsfeld for the sake of acquiring political advantage with his shrinking base of true believers, Bush will forsake it not only abroad and in Iraq, but at home as well.

Retaining Rumsfeld — perhaps even for another few days until the bad news from Abu Ghraib finally overwhelms him — proves that reform is just a sham.

Waving the bloody shirt of the Berg tragedy instead merely reminds voters how low our standards for success and civilized behavior have fallen.

The Good vs. Evil gloss has gone off this war.

More and more, it looks like a struggle between Folly and Cruelty, with Bush stumbling all over the battlefield trying to get on the winning side.

Now, with the latest installment of the Abu Ghraib story from Seymour Hersh - that invaluable stenographer to America’s disgruntled spooks and troops — the story is going to take another twist.

The rituals of pain, humiliation, and degradation practiced at Abu Ghraib were not isolated abuses. They represented the calculated application of interrogation techniques that America had already used on al Qaeda detainees in secret prisons around the world and at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo to the volatile political and security crisis in Iraq.

And we are told they yielded results at Abu Ghraib.

After Rumsfeld lieutenant, Deputy Secretary in Charge of the Lower Rings of Hell, Stephen Cambone “turned the electricity on” (a metaphorical turn of phrase only, I’m sure) and applied them to suppression of the insurgency

We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white (i.e., non-covert) world. We’re getting good stuff. Hersh, ibid.

So look for the new spin. Yes, it was a system, it was nasty, but it worked! And only a few “recycled hillbillies” working as MPs at Abu Ghraib screwed up this marvelous piece of 21st century interrogation technology.

Credulous Kevin Drum detects a paradox:

This is the circle that seems impossible to square in Iraq: the only way to keep control is to use a level of brutality that (a) Americans are unwilling to tolerate and (b) merely fuels further resentment from Iraqis when they learn about it, which they inevitably will since, after all, it's being used against Iraqis.

Kevin, let me help.

This is not an interrogation/intel issue. If Iraqis truly believed that our torturers in Abu Ghraib were helping build a better world for all Iraqis, they wouldn’t care all that much.

This is about the brutalization of Iraqi society.

First torture works for you, then it works on you.

In Iraq, we’re not bending a few rules of police interrogation in a desperate race to save the world in 24 hours from subhuman fanatics a la Kiefer Sutherland.

We’re in the bloody, routine business of counterinsurgency — a piece of expensive, messy, long-term social engineering.

Our facility at Abu Ghraib not only had the job of collecting tactical information needed to counter armed attacks. It also worked as a strategic weapon to subvert and corrupt the society that supports the insurgency.

This means that Iraqi men are not necessarily being punished for their crimes or tortured for their information.

Some are being degraded and blackmailed according to their vulnerability and potential utility when they return to Iraqi society.

That’s why there are all those pictures of humiliated Iraqi men. The photos and videos are not just trophies — they are tools.

It’s so the guys in the pictures could be blackmailed into informing on their associates, friends, and neighbors.

When you’re a hated occupier in an alien land and you don’t have intelligence assets, create them.

Counterinsurgency 101.

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything — including spying on their associates — to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow. Hersh, op. cit.

So think about it.

It wasn’t only who you were or what you knew that got you into trouble at Abu Ghraib. It might have been who you knew, where you lived or worked, or how vulnerable you appeared. Or maybe you didn’t possess any obviously useful attributes, but Military Intelligence was feeling lucky. Or it might simply have been that the MPs had nobody else to pick on that day, and fresh grist was needed for the mill.

Even the CIA, happily fighting the good war with torture against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, opted out:

“They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan — pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets — and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’” - the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. Hersh, ibid.

The system is self-perpetuating. In the never-ending, futile search for “full spectrum dominance”, total information supremacy, and complete security, the target of the interrogation program slipped from al Qaeda professionals to Iraqi insurgents to Baghdad taxi drivers.

And where would it finally stop, if unchecked?

Anybody who thinks it “can’t happen here” has no idea of how the “war on terror” works, with its infinite threats and endless opportunities for intervention.

In total war, you’re either a bad guy, a good guy, or a potential asset. Sitting on the sidelines is no longer an option.

If Rumsfeld dodges the bullet thanks to Nick Berg, and Bush manages to stagger to election as the tough guy who broke a few eggs at Abu Ghraib for a good cause, then it’s only a matter of time before another attack inside America and the logic of the total war demands that we pay the price for administration’s inevitable failures, omissions, and amoral, lazy ruthlessness.

If Bush wins, and we face the prospect of four years of our runaway security apparatus metastasizing into the homeland under the supervision of our Lavrenta Beria in waiting, Stephen Cambone, then we will say, as Pyrrhus did:

Another such victory and we are done for.

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