OP/ED pieces are restricted to columnists who contribute their opinions solely to the Kurdistan Observer

KurdistanObserver.com

Of Abu Ghraib, the Kurds, and the Bush Administration

By: Dr. Sabah Salih

7 May 2004

America has done some very good things in Iraq.  To deny that is to look at the situation with a type of ideological blinkers that trade in the resources of logic and dialectic for sophistry, something many in the corridors of the American academy and the international press routinely do these days, if only because they were never for the removal of Saddam Hussein in the first place.  Those who claim that the intervention has made the situation grotesquely worse than it was before are intoxicated by dogma. No matter how one looks at it, replacing tyranny with pluralism was no mean feat.  America deserves to be applauded. 

Bu, as it was to be expected with such a mammoth undertaking as a regime change, mistakes also have been made. America kept Abu Ghraib, refurbished it, and allowed it, perhaps inadvertently, to continue to play a role in defining post-tyranny Iraq.

For the Kurds, as well as for others, no image, no monument, no spectacle had been more synonymous with state brutality than Abu Ghraib.  The very mention of this sprawling infamous prison was enough to send jitters down one’s spine.  It was a summation of the regime, a storehouse of its methods and techniques, a place where fear, torture, dismemberment, disappearance, and no return had actual faces. 

There is no shortage of testimony in Kurdish collective memory to back that up. For me, one, in particular, is unforgettable.  I was a middle school teacher in 1977 in the town of Galala, one of hundreds of Kurdish towns and villages depopulated and completely destroyed by Saddam in 1986.  We were at midday recess, three teachers and some120 students, enjoying the April sun, when several military trucks pulled up.  They were packed with people we knew, families of our students.  The military had come for the students.  One by one they were shoved into the monster Russian-made trucks for a journey of no return.  Everyone but the soldiers was crying. The good bys were faint but piercing: “They’re taking us to Abu Ghraib; please don’t forget us.”

But forgotten they will be, for their narrative has always had very few takers to begin with.  And now that these recent images of Iraqi prisoners from Abu Ghraib have taken the center stage, images like the one I’ve just described will not only recede into oblivion but will also be damaged by them.  

The Abu Ghraib images are here to say; they will become an integral part of intellectual justification about and opposition to the war.  There are several reasons for that.  First, there was a vast, passionate revolt against the war, as Perry Anderson wrote in the March 2003 London Review of Books, despite the fact that the principles for going to war differed little from prior military interventions that were accepted by so many of those now up in arms against the Bush administration.   For these people, the Abu Ghraib images provide ample opportunities for ideological manipulation, and, in this election year, this is definitely welcome news for those hoping to unseat George W. Bush.  But this is bad news for the Kurds: from now on their suffering will scarcely draw a shrug.  Already, much to the delight of Arab pundits in London, Cairo, and elsewhere, Kurdish particularity is being steadily swept aside as terms like “the Arab world” and “the Muslim world” occupy the center stage in America’s political discourse about Iraq.

Second, the Abu Ghraib images, part brutality, part drama, part art, give the world a spectacle like no other. Humiliation and poses of this kind belong in the sinister world of our private imaginings.  In public, we are ashamed by them, or at least that is what we pretend.  They stand in stark contrast to our everyday sense of right and wrong.  But we tolerate them in art, which helps us become philosophical in a general way about the frailty of the human condition.

Third, the power of the images lies not so much in themselves as in their twin powerful constituencies: the Arab and the Muslim.   There would certainly have been little or no international outcry had the images been of, say, Serb men.  For one thing, the Serbs have already been demonized by the war in Bosnia.  For another, they number less than eight millions.  The Arabs are 280 millions, with many more millions of Muslims on their side.  The images will reinforce the perception, popularized by the likes of Edward Said and the Arab political culture’s perennial obsession with victimhood, that America is no friend of the Arabs or the Muslims.

Fourth, today much of the world seems to be united in hostility towards the Bush White House.  The plain-speaking President, his sharp-tongued Secretary of Defense, and his working-behind-the scene Vice President, Dick Cheney, are seen by many, even in the United States, as an incarnation of evil: a cabal of diehard Christian conservatives, with little cultural sophistication but plenty of imperial arrogance, trying on to remake the world.  Many see in the President’s words that America would not need “a permission slip” from anybody to defend itself and in Rumsfeld’s disparaging remark about France and Germany as “old Europe,” though true, a replay of Ronald Reagan-style politics, standing tall and wielding the big stick.  No matter what the President says, the Abu Ghraib images will feed into this anti-American frenzy, which, like all ideological constructions, is based more on sentiment than fact. 

Fifth, the images also revive the age-old European notion, popularized by Bernard Shaw and others, that America is culturally inferior to Europe, that, as Shaw put it in 1903, the country was “a nation of villagers” hooked on violence, greed, and lawlessness. This is how many Europeans these days view Bush’s America.  Who is right, who is wrong is besides the point here.  The issue is that the images from Abu Ghraib are sure to intensify such fixations. 

Some of the Abu Ghraib prisoners may very well have blood on their hands; some may very well have been former Saddam henchmen, trained in more gruesome forms of torture and humiliation than they have themselves experienced as prisoners.  But that matters little.  In the eyes of a world increasingly at odds with an America it feels dwarfed by it, these men now are the true victims.  They, not the thousands upon thousands exterminated by Saddam, will become synonymous with Abu Ghraib.  Therein lies the harm to the Iraqi narrative in general and the Kurdish narrative in particular. 

Dr. Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA. <ssalih@bloomu.edu>