It’s hard to talk with your jaw dropped, and that is the position I — along, I imagine, with vast numbers of other people around the world — find myself in as the revelations of U.S. mistreatment, humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners continue to emerge.
One aspect of this fiasco that I haven’t seen much noted, though I’m sure it must have been observed by many, is the location. Why on earth did the U.S. ever choose Saddam’s most notorious prison — a scene of so much of the abuse and torture by the old regime that President Bush has taken so much credit for ending — as its own jail? Don’t some places become so tainted by their past that you just don’t recycle them? Would you take a concentration camp and reuse it as an interrogation center? Doesn’t anyone in the Bush administration understands the power of symbolism?
The U.S. employment of Abu Ghraib as a prison was iffy enough before we knew that Iraqis were being tortured within its walls on our watch. It was of a piece with the American occupation’s setting up camp in Saddam’s old palaces. From the beginning we have displayed an unfathomably tone-deaf approach to the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis in the post-Saddam era. With the pictures from Abu Ghraib, it’s hard not to sense that we have now lost the whole psychological war. (From today’s New York Times: “Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, has told one Bush adviser that he believes that it will take a generation for the United States to live this scandal down in the Arab world.”)
Tom Friedman yesterday argued that the only way the Bush administration could begin to change things at this point would be to “finally screw up the courage to admit its failures and dramatically change course.” Good advice that we will never see acted on: it’s simply not in Bush’s nature (just now he’s emphatically saying that Rumsfeld will stay). There is no example in Bush’s life or career of “admitting failures and dramatically changing course.” (Yes, he kicked drinking, but as friends who have experience with alcoholism have pointed out to me, he has never taken the key step of acknowledging and naming his condition.)
That means that the only real way to achieve the goal Friedman identifies would be for Bush himself to resign — like the stand-up, take-responsiblity “CEO president” he’s supposed to be. It’ll never happen — we’re going to have show Bush the door instead. But we can dream.
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