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<font size=3><br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=5><b>This torture started at the very
top</b></font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>A profound racism infects the US and
British establishments</font> <br><br>
<font size=2><b>Ahdaf Soueif<br>
Wednesday May 5, 2004<br>
The Guardian</b></font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font size=2>The media in this country is politely shocked at
photos of Iraqis being tortured and humiliated by US and British
soldiers. A BBC1 news presenter says the pictures seem to have been
"merely mementos". That's all right, then. The folks at home
will have a good laugh and paste them into the family album. <br><br>
In the first half of the last century, the French in Algeria and Morocco
used to send home postcards of prostitutes posing sullenly, with breasts
bared and skirts pulled up to their thighs, over captions like "Le
harem Arabe" or "Fille Mauresque". The Americans have
pushed it further: their pornography of occupation is at once more
childish, playful, crude and sinister than that of "old
Europe". Also, we assume the prostitutes were paid. <br><br>
BBC commentators and British politicians have been reminding us that the
soldiers' activities "do not compare with Saddam Hussein's
systematic tortures and executions". Hussein is now the moral
compass of the west. <br><br>
The media are fearful that these images will go down badly in the Arab
world because "they show Muslim men being humiliated by American
women". Again the not-so-subtle reduction of the Arab world to an
entity that reacts only to religious prodding. Actually the photographs
have confirmed people's belief that the US and Britain are not in Iraq as
an act of goodwill. They have strengthened the feeling that there is a
deep racism underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the
third world generally. <br><br>
It was only a matter of time. In the past year the world has seen photos
of many Iraqis stripped with their wrists tied behind their backs with
plastic cord. At first we could look into their eyes and bear witness to
what was happening. Then they were bagged. At no point was there an
outcry. <br><br>
We have grown used to seeing Arab men bound and hooded, in the occupied
territories and Gaza. Israel advises the US on how to control civilians
and interrogate them. Ariel Sharon has made the Israeli army's
"rules of engagement" available to the US military. The world
notes the similarity between the practices of the US army in Iraq and
those of the Israeli army in Palestine. There is evidence that scenes
like the ones now shocking the world have been common in "Facility
1391" (Israel's secret prison), and some say in other jails. We just
haven't seen the photos. <br><br>
It is no use for US spokesmen to talk about "rogue elements",
how "contractors" are not answerable to the military and how
Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick had not read the Geneva conventions before
taking charge of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This abuse is going to turn out
to be widespread. Amnesty International has already said it is
systematic. <br><br>
The acts in the photos being flashed across the networks would not have
taken place but for the profound racism that infects the American and
British establishments. At squaddie level, Sarah Oliver reports in the
Mail on Sunday that "the British soldiers loathe the dirtiness of
Iraq and the native population's slothfulness, kleptomania and
determination to do as little as possible for themselves".
<br><br>
There have been reports of US troops outside Falluja talking of the fun
of being a sniper, of the different ways to kill people, of the
"rat's nest" that needs cleaning out. Some will say soldiers
will be soldiers. But that language has been used by neocons at the heart
of the US administration; both Kenneth Adelman and Paul Wolfowitz have
spoken of "snakes" and "draining the swamps" in the
"uncivilised parts of the world". It is implicit in the US
administration's position that anyone who does not agree that all of
history has been moving towards a glorious pinnacle expressed in the US
political, ideological and economic system has "rejected
modernity"; that it is America's mission to civilise and to punish.
<br><br>
I've seen a photo of a young American soldier with two Iraqi boys. There
is no nakedness or torture, but it is no less nasty for that. The boys
are holding a cardboard sign. They and the soldier are smiling and doing
a thumbs up. He is pointing at the cardboard sign, on which he's written:
"Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad. then he knocked up my sister!"
Imagine the scene: Lance Corporal Boudreaux, a soldier on a liberating,
civilising mission, asks the natives to pose for a "memento".
He gives them the sign to hold. What lie did he tell them about its
message? "Iraq is liberated", or "Mission
accomplished"? And who, in this scene, is the more civilised?
<br><br>
The one good thing in all of this is that there are soldiers in the US
and British armies who could not live with what was happening and who
blew the whistle. The world needs to see the photos coming out of Iraq
not as "deviant" but as an authentic message from the heart of
the thought system that is seeking to control our planet. <br><br>
<b>· </b>Ahdaf Soueif's collected essays will be published by Bloomsbury
in the autumn <br><br>
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