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By Dr Abdullah Robin
Managing Editor: New Civilisation
abdullah.robin@newcivilisation.com
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Men with anguished faces, stripped naked, quivering before snarling dogs. Women disrobed and dishonoured before the camera. Brutal beatings, drowning and more, all captured on film for a tormentor's enjoyment later on, while at home with family and friends. I am referring not to the American penchant for cruelty, but to Saddam Hussain's. The press had earlier published the lurid details, revealed by one of his former mistresses, of a dictator sipping gin at home on his sofa while in catharsis watching the videos of his screaming torture victims. Those videos were never found; they vanished, as did the much-vaunted weapons of mass destruction. No one doubts that the torture stories were true—that is what Arab dictators do, but what shocked the west was the litany of pictures and video footage of Americans torturing and raping their own prisoners in Saddam's old dungeons.
These pictures have hurt the west, which has difficulty defining itself without first presenting a picture of what the west is not: an alien, uncivilised world where torture and abuse are commonplace. What the pictures from Abu Ghraib have done is to dent the purity of that reassuringly simple perception. What has heightened the discomfort is the irony that the torture in Abu Ghraib occurred as part of the War on Terror—a war between good and evil, which can never end, because it can never decisively be won or lost. The danger of fighting such a war against an abstract noun, rather than a tangible noun such as the former Soviet Union, is that one may end up fighting against oneself. President Bush managed to combine the irony and tragedy of this, just days before the scandal became public, with his remarks on the USA Patriot Act in Pennsylvania on the 19th of April 2004. Referring to ‘supporters of the outlaw cleric’ he said that they are ‘still bitter that they don't have the position to run the torture chambers and rape rooms… They will fail because they do not speak for the vast majority of Iraqis who do not want to replace one tyrant with another.’
The final sentence of George Orwell's Animal Farm comes to mind - a tale of revolutionary animals who took over the farm and whose new leaders, the pigs, assumed the character of their former masters: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’
The War on Terror is also reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984, in which the hero overcomes torture only to succumb, finally, to the mind-altering propaganda of a totalitarian state. Central to the state’s ability to exert control over Winston’s mind was its success in projecting the spectre of larger than life incarnations of evil, whose terrible crimes could be used at any time to generate hysteria; evil itself thereby had a face by which to be known, yet was disembodied enough to slip in and out of reality with staged precision. The western world, now relieved from the uncomfortable self-reflection that followed the implosion of the former Soviet Union has been allured by a similar psychosis, which took hold when the mad phrase 'war on terror' was dreamed up by the neo conservatives in the US administration. Ron Reagan, son of the late former president Reagan, complained in an interview with David Talbot for Salon magazine in April 2003, that the neo conservatives have used this war on terror as a false pretext to attack Iraq and: ‘to justify everything from tax cuts to Alaska oil drilling.’ In the war against an amorphous foe, anyone who opposes the US risks being cast as a crazed terrorist, Saddam loyalist, or foreign fighter-as if by some incredible oversight we are to consider coalition forces in Iraq as something other than 'foreign fighters'. Relentless propaganda has characterised those who resist the US led occupation of Iraq as nihilistic incarnations of terror, motivated by an inexplicable intellection, and this has led America and her ally down the slippery slope to the torture chambers and rape rooms of Abu Ghraib.
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