I’ve been away (speaking engagements in the UK).
My reaction to the prisoner abuse scandal is that while abusing prisoners is, in general (I make exceptions for “ticking time bombs” and other imaginable scenarios where physical coercion could be the lesser of two evils) not excusable, it’s utterly predictable, given human nature and the arbitrary power soldiers are given over their soldiers. A certain percentage of prison guards abuse prisoners, and a certain percentage of military personnel will abuse both prisoners and civilians more generally. The job of the commanding officers is to minimize such abuse through training, exhortations, and whatnot, but this nonsense that “our boys and girls would never do such things” is naive nonsense.
As a relevant aside, my father had a friend who told him that as a soldier in Europe in WWII, his unit had occasion to capture German prisoners. The story is third-hand, so the details are a bit vague to me, but basically the CO told some of the soldiers to take the prisoners to the POW camp, and be back in fifteen minutes. Problem was, the POW camp was a two-hour roundtrip. The soldiers understood that they were under implicit orders to kill the POWs.
War brings out the worst in people, as does power, as Lord Acton informed us with his dictum that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I do get the sense that there has been mismanagement and lack of discipline in American ranks, but I am quite dubious that even a well-trained, well-disciplined, well-managed American army would never abuse its prisoners, though the frequency and severity could be lower.
As another relevant aside, one of the primary arguments the Israeli left made in the 80s, before widespread violence broke out, in favor of ending Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza is the inevitable corruption and abuse that has attended the “occupation,” against official policy and often, indeed, endangering Israel’s security (e.g., soldiers accepting bribes in return for smuggling privileges).
In short, the era of digital cameras has brought out into the open the sorts of abuses that attend wars and occupations, even ones engaged in by the “good guys.” The neoconservative fantasy of pristine American soldiers being welcomed with open arms as they spread democracy and human rights is just that. (I once considered myself a neocon back in the 80s, but at some point I asked myself how a government so incompetent in almost all other endeavors can be trusted with the task of spreading liberal democracy around the world.)
I haven’t blogged much about Iraq, mainly because I’m no expert, but I did support the war, to remove Saddam and provide a lesson to others in the Arab world what becomes of leaders who defy the U.S., try to acquire WMDs, etc. My preference was to extricate the U.S. as much and as quickly as possible once the main goal of toppling Saddam was established. I was hopeful that those who suggested that the U.S. could establish democracy there were correct, but thought it likely wiser to simply divide the country in three, ensuring mainly that (1) the oil revenues were in the hands of a friendly government; and (2) the U.S. had bases from which it could project force if needed to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it’s not too late to establish some more limited, and realistic, goals; or perhaps the democracy-builders will be proven right in the end. I certainly hope so.
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