Omar at Iraq The Model posts an interesting conversation with an Iraqi doctor about Abu Ghraib.

There are other interesting posts there about Iraqi and Middle Eastern reaction as well.

Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.

…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.

Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.

I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.

And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.

[Update on Friday morning]

As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.

Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.

…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.

Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.

I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.

And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.

[Update on Friday morning]

As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.

Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.

…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.

Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.

I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.

And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.

[Update on Friday morning]

As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.

A grab bag of thoughts and observations on the news of the past week or so:

(1) The administration still doesn’t seem to fully grasp the seriousness of the damage done by the revelations of abuse in Iraq. For one thing, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have been on the case since last year, while administration spokesmen have been denying that anything bad was happening. These revelations give credibility to news sources we are trying to undermine, quite apart from the direct damage of pushing literally hundreds of millions of muslims further into the arms of the islamists. Bush has finally said the word “sorry” but it’s not clear he’s taking any other effective action to undo the damage.

Continue reading Thoughts on the War →

Michael Totten has an interesting and clarifying essay about who the enemy is. It’s a restorative for those tired of arguing with people who mistakenly think that Iraq was a “distraction” from the “war on Al Qaeda.”

There is no Christian counterpart to what Saudi Arabia does. Imagine if the white supremacist “Christian Identity” movement (which includes David Duke among its adherents) made billions of dollars a year and founded churches throughout the Christian parts of the world to spread its hateful, racist, xenophobic ideology. Imagine if their brand of Christianity were the fastest growing on Earth, that they had also seized nation-states and used their powers to massacre millions. Whole swaths of the Christian world would look much like 1990s Yugoslavia, where Serbian Orthodox Christian supremacists did their worst to put the Muslim population of Europe to the sword.

On a related note, Steven den Beste says that we’re fighting a two-front war, some parts hot and some parts cold, and some of Europe (and indeed, many within the US itself) are on the other side. It’s long (as is often the case) but worth reading.

Andrew Sullivan has an appalling summary of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and a suggestion for the president. He should take the advice.

And on a slightly different but related topic, how is “Ghraib” pronounced, anyway? I keep hearing people (including NPR people, who are usually sticklers about pronunciation, at least if it’s some trendy lefty country) saying “Grayb,” with a single syllable. I’m no Arabic expert, but I’d think that it should be “Grah-eeb.” Anyone know?

A Saudi Imam has praised the “resistance” to the American occupation of Iraq.

You may not be totally shocked to learn that he also laments that “our Palestinian brethren in Palestine are suffering from state terrorism by the Zionist entity, which carries out assassinations of Palestinian leaders,” while doing nothing to diminish their plight, other than supporting continued murder against innocent Israelis.

I wonder if the torture incident in Iraq will become this generation’s My Lai?

I’ve little to say except that, by providing fodder for anti-American propaganda, what these morons did certainly had the effect, if not the intent, of providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Given that this occurred in the land of Hammurabi, I’m tempted to suggest that they get the same treatment, with live broadcast rights to Al Jazeera, but it would actually be too good for them.

[Update a few minutes later]

It’s already happening, in Pravda. Note the headline.

That’s what Mark Steyn calls it.

The scale of the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme is way beyond any of the corporate scandals that so excite the progressive mind. Oil-for-Food was designed to let the Iraqi government sell a limited amount of oil in return for food and other necessities for its people. Between 1996 and 2003, Saddam did more than $100 billion of business, all of it approved by Kofi Annan’s Secretariat.

In return, by their own official figures, $15 billion of food and health supplies was sent to Iraq. What proportion of this reached the sick and malnourished Iraqi children is anybody’s guess. Coalition troops discovered stockpiles of UN food far from starving moppets. But let us assume there is an innocent explanation. Even so, by the UN’s own account, Oil-for-Food seemed to involve an awful lot of oil for not much food.

So where’s the media that couldn’t get enough of the Enron scandal?