SCOT LEHIGH
How 'un-American' was it?AT THE END of William Golding's novel "Lord of the Flies," a British naval officer stares in bewilderment at the adolescent anarchy he sees before him. "I should have thought that a pack of British boys -- you're all British, aren't you? -- would have been able to put up a better show than that," he says.
With the scandal over treatment of the Iraqi prisoners deepening daily, that same sentiment -- the shock over uncivilized behavior by supposedly civilized people -- is being expressed all over this country. How could US soldiers, steeped in American values, have taken part in the humiliation and sadistic treatment of Iraqi prisoners? The questions being asked are some of the same that Golding contemplated in his novel about British schoolboys stranded on an unpeopled island and the way many of them devolve into atavistic brutality. Left unchecked by accepted rules of behavior, does an instinct to abuse and sadism regularly manifest itself? Already we've seen several theories about that very subject. Everyone knows that war is brutalizing and that atrocities sometimes occur when soldiers are left in an environment where rules are theoretical, firepower is reality, and the risk of death is alway present. But this, after all, wasn't the battlefield but the relative safety of the US-controlled Abu Ghraib prison. Is the sort of supervisory power that US soldiers exercised there inherently corrupting? Does the very act of controlling prisoners turn those in control into bullies and sadists, as some social scientists have suggested? If so, then the tragic error here is in the Pentagon's apparent assumption of American exceptionalism, the notion that even outside the United States, the basic decency of our society will still obtain even without strict rules and requirements. Certainly the country would like to believe that the mistreatment in the photos we've all seen -- and the reportedly more brutal abuse in pictures and videotapes we have not -- is the work of a small group of bad actors. But what if, as others have suggested, the appalling behavior is more systematic? If, as the relatives of several of the soldiers involved have insisted, soldiers they knew would never have done this of their own initiative and thus must have been following orders from superiors? That would mean what people would like to view as the conduct of a handful of rogue soldiers actually may be part and parcel of rough-and-tumble interrogation tactics perhaps officially winked at. What US soldiers have done pales beside what Saddam Hussein himself did to Iraqis, as figures like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma have been quick to point out. Still, we've arrived at a sorry state indeed when the point of comparison to rationalize the scandal is Saddam's atrocious treatment of his countrymen. That's all the more true because in the absence of weapons of mass destruction, what remains of the rationale for this war has narrowed to liberation and human rights. The anger this scandal has sparked among Iraqis is likely to make those professions seem like little more than empty words. Grilled at yesterday's hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, neither Major General Antonio Taguba nor Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone could provide satisfactory answers to frustrated senators about how this could have happened. Taguba attributed the breakdown to a failure of leadership and supervision as well as a lack of discipline and training among the soldiers serving as prison guards. Cambone had less to offer by way of explanation. "It is, for me, hard to explain," he said. Courts-martial are now underway in the case. Yet to be both fair to our servicemen and honest with ourselves, the impetus must be to find the whole truth -- and not simply to take premature refuge in the (relatively) comforting belief that what has shocked the world is merely the work of a few bad American apples.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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