On furthering basic human dignity abroad

Shocking excerpts from a report on the abuse completed on March 3 by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba and acquired by Reuters on Tuesday: “Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees…. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison (BCCF).”

+ Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees

+ Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair

+ Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick

+ Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them

+ Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time

+ Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped

So, the semiotic aspect of the war is over. Now, this sort of abuse doesn’t particularly upset me – it’s not like they’re being thrown into plastic shredders, after all – but it certainly explodes the notion that we’re over there for the sake of the dear Iraqi people out of the goodness of our hearts. War is about power, it always is. Lowlives always inhabit the rear echelons of every army. The problem that Americans face is that we think that we are so inherently pure by virtue of our system of government that we can go ahead and do exactly the same thing that every military power in human history has done, but that it will be accepted because we are different. Once, we arguably were. But America is not what it once was.

I’m not at all concerned about the “Arab anger” over which the press periodically hyperventilates. They already hate us, BFD. But the increasingly dubious American public is not going to buy the hearts-and-minds argument much longer, not as this report spreads around the world. It’s just as well. The Hussein regime is dead. Our soldiers did their job. Bring them home and let the rats devour each other. Obviously, it will cost far fewer lives to go back and do it again than to leave our troops there as sitting ducks.

When you lose more troops in the occupation than in the conquest, the solution is obvious. 3D war is like shampoo. Drop in, destroy, depart. Repeat as needed.

The part that makes me laugh is when the rationalizers say that just a few bad apples were involved. Reeeeally… and here I thought that it was just a few bad apples on the other side that were causing all the trouble in the first place.