Tuesday, May 04, 2004
I take a very grim view of these torture allegations in Iraq. They do appear to be ghastly and true. And of course in utter contravention of what we're there for. And we clearly need to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law and give these people the maximum penalties if the evidence holds up (which it will do no doubt).
But this sort of thing is bound to happen. Any army - even an army from a democratic state such as ours - is going to have vicious or depraved people in it. Ours is probably the best and most professional fighting army in the world, but this sort of thing is bound to happen. That it's happened at the worst possible time in the worst possible place is just shitty luck.
And the damage - well it was easy to predict. It could have been one soldier one time, it could have been six or seven, it could have been seven hundred. The spinning of this was utterly predictable. The same people who predicted that we'd never take Baghdad, who defended Saddam as a leader of his people, who actively hope for the failure of US efforts to reconstruct the country are taking this and running for the end zone. Some of these people now deploring the torture (in the Al Jazeera TV market) probably reacted to the mutilations in Fallujah with unfettered glee. The sorry fact is that we're under a microscope in Iraq. We're going to be damned for the bad things we do and a lot of the bad things we didn't do. And I can't see a way to avoid that. Grim but true.
But this sort of thing is bound to happen. Any army - even an army from a democratic state such as ours - is going to have vicious or depraved people in it. Ours is probably the best and most professional fighting army in the world, but this sort of thing is bound to happen. That it's happened at the worst possible time in the worst possible place is just shitty luck.
And the damage - well it was easy to predict. It could have been one soldier one time, it could have been six or seven, it could have been seven hundred. The spinning of this was utterly predictable. The same people who predicted that we'd never take Baghdad, who defended Saddam as a leader of his people, who actively hope for the failure of US efforts to reconstruct the country are taking this and running for the end zone. Some of these people now deploring the torture (in the Al Jazeera TV market) probably reacted to the mutilations in Fallujah with unfettered glee. The sorry fact is that we're under a microscope in Iraq. We're going to be damned for the bad things we do and a lot of the bad things we didn't do. And I can't see a way to avoid that. Grim but true.
