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| LOOK WHO’S CRYING ’ABUSE’ |
| 2004-05-12 |
| THE events in Abu Ghraib prison shamed America and our military. The mistreatment of prisoners is utterly unacceptable. And we haven’t accepted it. As a nation, we’ve taken responsibility for the tragic actions of a few. Our military has been investigating the misdeeds for months. The initial report was brutally frank. There’s no hint of a whitewash. The guilty parties will be called to justice. Even given the strategic damage done by those horrid photos, the fact is that we Americans can be proud our system does not tolerate such behavior. It’s an exception, far from the rule. We’re genuinely shocked that even a few of our soldiers could behave so grotesquely. Now consider our loudest critics, those governments expressing outrage over the crimes we’ve been investigating of our own volition. Start with the Arab world. There is no Arab country - none - in which prisoners aren’t treated immeasurably worse than the victims of the sadists in uniform at Abu Ghraib. The torments inflicted on our prisoners came as a shock to us. In the Middle East, torture and even murder remain business as usual behind prison walls. Can anyone imagine Egypt, or Syria, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia or even Turkey holding public, televised hearings to grill senior government officials about conditions in their prisons? And prisoners of their militaries are unmentionable. Can any reader name one Middle Eastern state, other than Israel, in which prisoners have any real hope of redress? Would any of the world’s enthusiastic critics of America like to spend time behind bars in any state between Morocco and Pakistan? Without excusing the behavior of those renegade military police in Iraq, isn’t there some slight difference between humiliating enemy prisoners and torturing one’s fellow citizens to death? And let’s not leave our sanctimonious European friends off the hook. When French intelligence agents blew up a Greenpeace vessel not so long ago, it was treated as little more than a case of littering in the Bois de Boulogne. And when, almost 50 years after the events, a retired French general published a book admitting the extent of French torture and extra-judicial murders in Algeria, the French government’s first impulse was to prosecute him for telling the truth. Asia? How many public investigations have there been into the Indian military’s extra-judicial killings in Kashmir? What of those Indonesian generals who barely got a tap on the wrist for the atrocities of East Timor? Of course, the Chinese People’s Army is a model observer of human rights . . . As an American, I want my country to be held to higher standards - we can live up to them. Proudly. But we don’t need any more hypocritical charges from states with no standards at all. The international media have been no better. It’s certainly fair to criticize America. Our system’s robust enough to stand up to even the most bigoted scrutiny. But when stations from al-Jazeera to CNN International cover the misbehavior of a few U.S. prison guards with more fervor and airtime than they did Saddam’s mass murders (or the ongoing crimes in virtually every other state in the Middle East), then, as an American, all I can do is to tune them out. All those who opposed the removal of Saddam, from the BBC to Egyptian state television to The New York Times, act as though the events in Abu Ghraib prove that they were right all along. No. They weren’t right. And no amount of disingenuous "reporting" or feigned shock on the part of newsreaders can change the fact that America behaved nobly and bravely in Iraq - or that we continue to struggle to do the right thing, if sometimes ineptly. We’ve made mistakes. We’ll make more. We’re human. But it’s never a mistake to fight for freedom. If the Iraqis make a mess of their one great chance, it won’t be our fault. But it will be the fault of those regional governments and the global media who encourage anti-American hatred at every opportunity, pretending that terrorists are freedom fighters. While those photos from Abu Ghraib are disgusting, it’s far more appalling that so much of the world doesn’t want a free Iraq to succeed, that jealousy of the United States is so great that TV commentators, heads of state and many a common citizen would gladly write off the 25 million people of Iraq just to give America a black eye. But black eyes heal. Much more quickly than the scars left by institutionalized torture and murder, state oppression, decades of censorship, imprisonment without hope of trial, religious bigotry and ethnic cleansing. That, too, is a lesson of Iraq. Even human-rights advocates seem vastly more concerned with sticking it to America than with the suffering of millions of prisoners in countries that wouldn’t let foreign activists near their prisons. Attacking America makes headlines. Taking on the government of Egypt gets you nowhere. In the quest for renown, justice falls by the wayside. Human-rights critics were in Iraq because we let them in. Perhaps they should try Saudi Arabia next. The headlines now wounding us will not soon go away. The media, foreign and domestic, will twist every drop of blood from this story of an American misstep. But no matter how much more there is to come, we Americans will admit our errors and fix them. Then we’ll move forward, no less determined to do the right thing. How many other nations in the world could claim as much? Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad." |
| Posted by:tipper |