THE ever-more sickening stream of photographs of abused Iraqi prisoners is doing incalculable damage to American and British credibility in Iraq, plunging the forces of occupation into a crisis that goes beyond the purely military quagmire they are in.
Let’s face it, that credibility had long worn very thin. The controversy over weapons of mass destruction – the reason given for going to war, ditched in cavalier manner thereafter for the right to overthrow a nasty dictator – had already rocked confidence in the United States. The blatant lack of policy for dealing with the morning after the inevitable military triumph also raised serious questions about the Bush administration’s wisdom in launching its adventure.
Now the shocking abuse of prisoners – in one of Saddam’s most notorious jails, as if the irony was not great enough – comes to deliver the final blow. Are these the liberators? The foot soldiers of democracy and western values for which America supposedly fought this war?
There’s little point George Bush saying this doesn’t represent the real America. Across the Arab world and beyond, this has played right into the hands of al Qaeda and those that portray US policy as little more than a new crusade, a clash of civilisations between Islam and the brutish infidels. It has tainted the very principles the White House so glibly used to justify a war that was little more than an exercise of US muscle.
Of course, it’s easy to blame the soldiers involved, the white trash from middle America who meted out the punishment and degradation that are fast becoming the symbol of America’s occupation of Iraq. Yet such incidents are almost inevitable during a prolonged occupation in hostile territory, where you are loathed by a local population carrying out a vicious guerrilla war, where every civilian is a potential member of the resistance (‘terrorist’ in Bush-speak).
The real culprits are the politicians who blasted into this war with no parallel political strategy for their military campaign, with no planning for what to do with post-war Iraq, no intention of engaging in ‘nation-building’ and no exit strategy for when things went wrong. The scale of their blindness is frightening, the consequences catastrophic.
Somehow, the United States and Britain must now re-engage in the political sphere – probably by bringing in the United Nations because any initiative they might themselves spearhead will be fatally tainted. They must establish a credible Iraqi authority that connects with its people and can garner their respect. The only other alternative is ignominious withdrawal and leaving Iraq to pick up the pieces, setting the scene for the region to degenerate into the kind of anarchy that characterised Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal – an example not to be repeated.
