Shocking and awful
A series of horrific images and a big American black eye
Eight decades ago, British commanders called in punishing airstrikes to put down a fierce insurrection in one of its most unruly colonies. After pumping money into Iraq to support a deeply unpopular occupation, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill was fed up. "We are paying 8 millions a year," he fumed, "for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano, out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having."
America now finds itself struggling to control the same volcano, a nation of 25 million still deeply ambivalent about the U.S. role in its "liberation." Coming off the deadliest month yet for U.S. soldiers, the Bush administration is combating two smoldering insurgencies with the same tactics--a combination of overwhelming force and millions of dollars--yet Iraqis seem only to grow more angry at the occupation with each passing week. America, it turns out, is not very good at occupation. This one has been troubled from the start, when the administration followed up its "shock and awe" military strategy by failing to deploy enough troops to control Iraq in the aftermath and without much of a plan to plant the seeds of democracy in such infertile soil.
Last week, once again, America's troubles were of its own making. This time, it was a barrage of filthy pictures, depicting a group of U.S. soldiers inflicting on Iraqi prisoners a range of humiliations worthy of a two-bit porn purveyor. In one photo that Arabs found particularly humiliating, Pfc. Lynndie England, a baby-faced Army reservist, holds a leash attached to a naked Iraqi man lying on the floor of Abu Ghraib, the same prison Saddam Hussein used to torture and murder enemies real and perceived. The episode--apparently the product of inadequate training and oversight and a fundamental breakdown of leadership--highlighted yet again the haphazard planning and paucity of manpower that have hampered the entire occupation (story, Page 33).
As the images blanketed American and Arab media, the Bush administration faced a dual crisis. In Baghdad, the promises of the American-led occupiers to bring democracy to Iraq sounded more hollow than ever to increasingly cynical Iraqis. "It goes beyond convincing those against us that we are everything they feared towards dashing the hopes of people who looked up to us," says a senior State Department official. In Washington, President Bush made a rare apology amid calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, even as the White House was forced to admit that the occupation would require more troops than planned and at least an additional $25 billion heading into next year.
"Sick to our stomachs." The administration was slow to grasp the full extent of the damage from the widening scandal. Days after the first photos surfaced, Bush was still boasting in campaign speeches that the "torture chambers in Iraq are closed," a claim belied by the image of hooded men forced to simulate oral sex on each other. After a public rebuke from Bush, Rumsfeld was forced to apologize in two highly charged congressional hearings at week's end as he defended the Pentagon's handling of the mess. Bush's own apology was strongly worded, but it came a day after he missed a chance to express contrition during interviews on two Arab news channels. "Americans like me didn't appreciate what we saw, and it made us sick to our stomachs," he said, even as he continued to stand by Rumsfeld.
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