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It is the same morally intolerable balance, between justice and self-preservation, which sullies those who attempt to justify support for tyrannical regimes that are allies of the war on terror, even though they engage in torture. The most egregious example is the Uzbek regime, whose president, Islam Karimov, once famously boasted about his methods for stemming insurrection: ‘I'm prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic…If my child chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head.’ This is a man who boils his political opponents alive, and yet still enjoys substantial western support—in spite of calls for the US to cut funding from human rights groups. Now that the west has been lowered in the eyes of a critical world, what moral authority does the west now have to act against tyrants and torturers?
The deep-rooted problem that the Muslim world today perceives with the west, is that it lacks a clear moral philosophy to underpin its stated ideals. Expediency, while effective in getting quick results, is a sorry basis for a US political order with visions of world leadership. The result of this hubris is a deep-rooted perception amongst Muslims that the west is hypocritical in applying its ideals harshly on Muslims while acting contrary to those ideals itself. The problem with intangible values and ideals being ‘self-evident’ is that they are all too easily left behind whenever they run counter to the very powerful arguments levelled by those with all too tangible interests. When New Labour first took office in Britain a ‘moral foreign policy’ was promised, but it took only a matter of weeks for the very immoral Machiavellian nature of British foreign policy to rear its head in Sierra Leone. This expediency is far from being a universal measure. Muslims throughout the Middle East, oppressed by sycophantic dictators who care more for western interests than those of their own populations, are reaching back to the roots of their own political philosophy founded upon Islam's fixed moral underpinning, and they are outraged when western nations wage war upon them in the name of ideals that only seem to work against them. Michael Howard aptly remarked during ‘Breakfast with Frost’ on 23rd May that when we try to advocate ‘western values’ from now on it would, ‘provoke hollow laughter in the Arab world.’ What is not appreciated enough in the west is that these pictures, far from being the smoking gun in Muslim eyes, are potent icons encapsulating already deeply held grievances against the west.
To make matters worse, what has happened in Abu Ghraib is part of what increasingly seems to have been a clear policy of abuse for the sake of expediency. On CNN's ‘Late Edition’ with Wolf Blitzer, Senator Joseph Lieberman, a member of the Armed Services Committee said, in relation to the interrogation of suspected terrorists for information that might save lives: ‘I don't think there are many Americans who would say we shouldn't use whatever means are necessary to extract that information.’ In addition, Newsweek magazine reported that in 2002, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales wrote a memo saying he believed the war on terror: ‘renders obsolete Geneva's [the Geneva Conventions'] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.’ The New Yorker article, by Seymour Hersh, claimed that in the war against terrorism, Rumsfeld set up a highly secret program to gather information from ‘high-value’ targets about al-Qaida through interrogations, capture and killings. The tactics of so-called 'torture lite' and sexual intimidation were introduced for their effectiveness after lessons learned from Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan's notorious Bagram detention facility. The ICRC and Human Rights Watch to name just two organisations had been complaining for at least a year before the torture scandal became public and yet nothing was done about it. The fact that the US guards at Abu Ghraib seemed to be enjoying their work too much should take nothing away from the fact that they claim that they were acting under orders, and believed that softening up the prisoners was actually serving their country well by helping to provide vital intelligence in the war against terror. By selling their own humanity in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere they made a truly Faustian pact.
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