"Shocked" is very much the word of the moment. Last week's exposure of US torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has caused shock all around the world that such treatment should be meted out by the Americans. Bush is shocked, Blair is shocked, the US army is shocked, the Arab world is shocked.
Well, they shouldn't be.
There are many emotions which one could reasonably feel when viewing the pictures of US soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners. Disgust would be one. Anger would be another. But shock? Why be shocked? What is so surprising about these pictures? What is so unexpected about the "revelation" that during war, humans do terrible things to other humans? After all, we've had a couple of millenia of experience with war to work this out.
War cuases some to lose sight of their morality. I'm not saying that every soldier loses their sense of right and wrong at the fist whiff of cordite, but some do. I have no way of knowing how widespread this kind of torture is in Iraqi prisons. I don't believe that every Iraqi taken into custody is tortured as a matter of course. But neither do I believe that the US soldiers in these pictures are the only ones to have committed torture since the occupation began. Sorry, I've heard that "few bad apples" line once too often.
I can only assume that some American soldiers abide by the rules of war an some don't. I can't come up with a proportion either way. But still, it is far from "shocking" that some, however many, US soldiers should react to war by unleashing the darkest aspects of their characters. This is what happens when you dehumanise people, and war is all about dehumanisation.
Tink about it. When a war starts, the first thing which soldiers do is to come up with some nickname for their adversaries. In Vietnam, American troops fought "the Gooks". British soldiers in France in 1914 confronted "the Hun". I don't know what US troops call the Iraqis, probably "ragheads", but I'm sure that they have some nickname for their enemy. Finding a demeaning name for your adversary is the first step on the road to dehumanisation. War requires soldiers to do horrible things and it's easier to do these things if these soldiers can find away of stripping their opponents of their humanity. It must be easier to bayonet a "Hun" than to bayonet a German.
Given this, why should anyone be shocked that some soldiers take dehumanistaion to another level? Why be surprised that some over-step the mark laid down by international law? All these people are doing, after all, is moving from "acceptable violence" to "unacceptable violence".
I would suggest that in any conflict in which a large number of people are taken prisoner, torture of some of these priosners is inevitable. That's not to say it's OK. It's not OK. But it is something which happens. A lot of things happen in this world and many of these things are wrong. But they still happen.
So those of you who support this war really have to acknowledge that torture is a part of the war. That doesn't mean I'm saying you're to blame for the actions of the however many US soldiers who act in a brutal manner. You're not. But still, you have to acknowledge that once a war starts, people will behave in horrible ways.
And that's one of the reasons I'm against this war. War is not clean and humane. It dehumanises, it ruins lives. Not only does it take lives and limbs, it scars those who participate in it pyschologically. It is such a terrible thing that it should be used only as a last resort. It should not be something for which political leaders push relentlessly.