Commentary

The Price of Non-Freedom

“Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country.” -George W. Bush, Interview with Al Arabiya Network, 5/6/04 A year and two months after ousting one of the world’s most hated tyrants, the Arab Street feels that the United States merely replaced him. The world has endured images and videos from Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi detention centers. Some are shocking, some sadistic, some purely heinous, but all are horrifying. We then saw George Bush ’64 defend his Secretary of Defense’s sterling performance, and watched Paul Bremer ’59 hop from one disaster to the next. The White House and Pentagon are fundamentally wrong in their cries that recently-revealed American torture is the fault of “a few bad apples.” The “bad apple” upsetting our occupation of Iraq is the White House itself. Responsibility, if not for abuse itself, then for the culture that created it, lies squarely with our Commander-in-Chief and other architects of America’s soulless “War on Terror.” Given, our soldiers, not Bush or Rumsfeld, are responsible for each individual act of torture, assault, rape, and other crimes against humanity. But, the idea that hundreds of isolated soldiers across a vast country would hatch similar plans to degrade, denigrate, and ultimately dehumanize their Iraqi prisoners of war is lunacy. If not directly ordered—an increasingly unlikely scenario—such acts were certainly met with tacit approval from above. The reason is clear. The effect of post-9/11 terror policy has been to tidily militarize what should be a legal and diplomatic effort, turning America into a “home front” and marking all Muslims as suspects. It should surprise no one that once our troops—often poorly educated and ignorant of Islam and its tenets—were fed the administration’s false claims of Iraq’s links with global terror, they sought passionate vengeance on the Iraqis they guard, the “terrorists” they are. In witnessing their heroic wartime President scrap 50 years of human rights progress and veil his administration in secrecy, in being told that this is “patriotic” and dissent “unpatriotic,” our soldiers are intellectually bullied to conclude that the old American conventions of right and wrong they grew up with no longer apply. That the U.S. military was quick to utilize, rather than demolish, Saddam Hussein’s most notorious torture palace only strengthens this notion. The real shock in this mess came in Secretary of Defense Donald “I Don’t Do Quagmires” Rumsfeld’s response to the problem. He was quick to complain,