Meyerson on the Price of Empire
Harold Meyerson makes some really good observations in this Washington Post op-ed piece: Fantastical Occupation.
…military occupations offer the worst possible terrain on which to fight the battle of ideas. From the French in Indochina and Algeria to the British in South Asia and the United States in Central America and Vietnam, occupations are where liberal democracies go to betray their ideals — if not as a matter of intent then, inevitably, as a matter of execution. One way or another, it becomes necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.
But if one thing is clear beyond dispute in the muddle of post-Saddam Iraq, it is that the Bush administration gave no thought whatever to the problems inherent in occupation. No one thought to protect Iraq’s cultural treasures. No one thought to secure the nation’s power grid. No one thought to enlarge our own armed forces, so that we weren’t sending civilian National Guard troops and private contractors to do a soldier’s job, with a clear chain of command in place.
And clearly, no one sought to train those Guardsmen assigned to duty at Abu Ghraib prison in the rudiments of the Geneva Conventions and our Army’s regulations on the treatment of prisoners. Instead, they were thrown into a system that was being redesigned to “Gitmo-ize” the treatment of detainees there — that is, to deal with prisoners the same way we treat the al Qaeda prisoners and others at our Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, free from prying eyes and the codes of either civilian or military law. And Gitmo-ize the prisoners is just what some of our guards at Abu Ghraib did. Some prisoners, apparently, were Gitmo-ized to death.
It defies all belief that the young women and men of an Army Reserve unit from West Virginia were some kind of sadistic cult just waiting to be called away from their civilian lives to torture prisoners in Iraq. I doubt they brought the hoods, the dogs, the nightsticks with them. They were doing the very dirty work of an occupation that, as it’s developed, could hardly be more counterproductive to our ultimate goal — the liberalization of the Islamic world — if we’d planned it that way.
