The Taguba Inquiry confirmed independent reports that U.S. soldiers had raped women prisoners. Some of them were forced to bare their breasts for the camera. The women detainees sent messages to the resistance, pleading with them to bomb and destroy the prison and obliterate their shame and suffering. As far back as November, 2003, word was getting out. Earlier this year, The Guardian reported a woman prisoner pleading, “We have daughters and husbands. For God’s sake don’t tell anyone about this.” Another Iraqi prisoner, a male, was more forthright: “We need electricity in our homes, not up the arse.” This was Western civilization at its rawest, and reprisals were inevitable.
Circulating on the streets of Baghdad is a photograph of a U.S. soldier having sex with an Iraqi woman. War as pornography. In the West, this and similar images have been suppressed. (Was it out of deference to John Ashcroft, the U.S. Attorney General, a fanatical evangelist who blushed each day when he saw the stone breasts of the gorgeous Spirit of Justice in the hallway outside his office and so had them covered?) Was the Pentagon fearful of the reaction from the world at large? And what about the women of Afghanistan, who, we were informed only a few years ago by the White House women – Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush – would be liberated by invasion and occupation? The women are still waiting, while rapes and tortures in that country go unreported.
Into this amoral terrain, the other side responded with eye-for-an-eye justice. The Iraqi resistance responded to the U.S. rapes and torture with kidnappings, car bombings targeting U.S. military and civilians alike, and, in Saudi Arabia (because, to the resistance, this war is borderless), ritualized beheadings of Western hostages. At first, the images of rape and torture trickled out (shame seemingly keeping their reproduction in check), but the opportunity to exploit these hideous transgressions was too ripe, too available, and the slow seepage became a flood. Newly equipped, local mullahs, clerics from neighbouring states, and others demanding the immediate evacuation of the “Western infidels” busily recast the short history of the war: since Gulf War I the West has been bombing Iraq; economic sanctions, not the Baathist regime, crippled its opportunity; and only we can protect the proud face of Islam against the Christian hordes. You can hear the chant: “I ask you, which civilization, Islam or the West, is collapsing?”
I was in Egypt and Lebanon when news of the Abu Ghraib torture broke. I did not meet a single person (not even among Europeans and North Americans who work there) who was surprised. Outside the U.S., the echoes of history have never ceased to resonate. The tortures in Iraq revived memories of Aden and Algeria, Vietnam, and, yes, Palestine. But what can explain the shock evinced by so many in the West when the torture was made public? One can excuse forgetting the Inquisition or the Ordeal by Fire or the heresy-hunters of Christianity who tortured and killed Cathars and Albigensians, or, later, the majestic polemic by Voltaire against the cruelty of torture. But have the citizens of North America forgotten what happened in South and Central America, Asia, and Africa less than fifty years ago? When dead Iraqis are not even counted, why the surprise that the live ones are mistreated? To understand this collective amnesia we must, against the strongest impulses of a U.S. Administration intoxicated by the future, straddle the present while stepping back in time.
On June 8, 2004, The Financial Times reported that U.S. lawyers said, “American interrogators can legally violate a U.S. ban on the use of torture abroad,” and “legal statutes against torture could not override Mr. Bush’s inherent powers.” From leaked Administration documents, it is now clear that the U.S. justification for torture at Abu Ghraib (and at Guantanamo Bay) was predicated on the notion that Al-Qaeda “irregulars” do not observe, and therefore cannot be covered by, the laws of war. In the battle against these anarchic warriors – this asymmetric devil intent on destruction – the U.S. sought to circumvent not only the Geneva Conventions, but its own 1996 U.S. War Crimes Act. It is pointless to pretend that the implicated GIs were indulging in spontaneous fun. The soldiers were wrong to obey orders, but who will punish their leaders?
Collective memory loss in the West could be the result of a superiority complex. We won. We defeated the “Evil Empire.” Our culture, our civilization is infinitely more advanced than anything else, which might explain the shock waves created by the torture revelations at Abu Ghraib. One of the features of domination is that those who do not identify with it are categorized as the enemy. George W. Bush’s post-9/11 injunction, “If you’re not with us you’re with the terrorists,” was, for a while, accepted without question throughout the Western world and by elites everywhere. It was merely an adaptation of the New Testament’s “He who is not with me is against me.” The notion that he might not be against you but in favour of something more constructive was/is regarded as impermissible.
It was Carl Schmitt, a gifted legal theorist of the Third Reich, who insisted that the totality of politics was encompassed by the essential categories of “friend” and “enemy.” This view suited most empires and Schmitt’s writings were influential in the United States after the Second World War. Conservative thinkers such as Leo Strauss acknowledged his influence. The message – studied, learned, and adopted by the “Straussians” now surrounding President Bush – was straightforward: if your country does not serve the interests of our empire it is an enemy state. It must be occupied, its leaders removed and more pliant satraps placed on the throne. In time, they hoped, the presence of a Roman legion would become unnecessary. However, soon after the legion withdraws, the satrapy begins to crumble. Occupation, withdrawal, rebellion, another occupation, and, sometimes, self-emancipation, is a pattern in world history.
To justify their excesses, imperial regimes require intellectual legitimizers, and, in the U.S., the torch was passed from Leo Strauss and the Chicago School to Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama. Huntington was a senior counter-insurgency expert in the Johnson administration at the time of the Vietnam War. His fertile imagination contributed to the scheme of “strategic hamlets,” after studying the insurgent texts of the enemy – Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Vo Nguyen Giap – on guerrilla warfare in which all four practitioners explained that success was impossible without the support of the population. Failing to understand what motivated the guerrilla fighters or the causes of the war, and believing the main problem was the links of the resistance to the people (“fish in water,” according to Mao), Huntington conceived of separating the two. The scheme envisaged herding poor peasants into “strategic hamlets,” which were glorified rural concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire and guarded day and night by soldiers. The U.S. military decided to give it a try. What Huntington and his superiors had failed to grasp was that many of “the people” were, in fact, members or supporters of the Vietnamese resistance. Soon they began to organize inside the “strategic hamlets.” The weaknesses of each hamlet were mapped and dispatched to the guerrillas, and the scheme came to an ignominious end.
Fukuyama did not engage in anything as dramatic, but as a State Department employee he wrote a policy paper on Pakistan during the years of General Zia’s brutal dictatorship suggesting that Pakistan turn its back on India and concentrate on its links with the Islamic world, i.e., the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. The generals were grateful for this advice, which suited their material and strategic needs, and were very admiring of Fukuyama’s démarche. When the Berlin Wall came down, a new version of an old idea, the triumph of liberal democracy, began to agitate Fukuyama.
Then came the total collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of a peculiar form of gangster capitalism in that world. Did the triumph of capitalism and the defeat of an enemy ideology mean we were in a world without conflict or enemies? Both Fukuyama and Huntington produced important books as a response to the new situation. Fukuyama, obsessed with Hegel, saw liberal democracy/capitalism as the only embodiment of the “world-spirit” that now marked the “end of history,” a phrase that became the title of his book. The long war was over and the restless world-spirit could now relax and buy a condo in Miami. Fukuyama insisted that there were no longer any available alternatives to the American way of life. The philosophy, politics, and economics of the Other – each and every variety of Socialism/Marxism – had disappeared under the ocean, a submerged continent of ideas that could never rise again. The victory of capital was irreversible. It was a universal triumph.
