QandO

May 03, 2004

Hot gay action at Abu Ghraib
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Jed Babbin writes at NRO that the reserve MPs who were caught up in the...uh...hijinks at Abu Ghraib should pay a steep price for what they did.

We have to handle this right. The courts martial should be open to any media that want to attend--even al-Jazeera--and the perpetrators' names dragged through the mud. Those who are guilty should be imprisoned for as long as the law allows. No plea bargains, no deals--just the max. As a result of their actions, these few have dishonored their country and every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine who now serve. And they have created a firestorm of anger at the American presence in Iraq that reaches all through that country and the whole region. The damage they have done will reverberate throughout the process of forming the new Iraqi government. By trying the perps publicly and quickly, and imposing the harshest sentences possible, we can begin to repair the damage.

I have some pretty complicated feelings about the firestorm this has created.

Oh, sure, Babbin's right, we have to throw the book at these morons. They've dishonored the uniform, their fellow soldiers, and the reputation of the United States. At any other time, in any other place, these guys might've gotten off with lighter sentences than the ones they'll eventually receive. But they stepped on their...swords pretty badly with this one.

Indeed, I'm inclined to tack on a few extra years for sheer stupidity. "Hey, let's make the prisoners engage in a little homosexual petting. And let's take pictures of ourselves giving the thumbs up while they do it!" Maybe prison can get these morons isolated from the gene pool before they reproduce.

And the whole gay aspect is kind of...odd. Now, I understand that Muslims are kinda fanatical when it comes to homosexuality, so there is an argument that this kind of humiliation has a special psychological undertone when used against Muslims.

But look, the explicitly homosexual nature of the humiliation is something that's not completely unknown in the military. I mean, I spent a decade on active duty as an MP and an Air Base Ground Defense specialist. And, whenever you investigate military hazing incidents, something involving making lots of fit, handsome young men get naked always seems to crop up, for some reason.

I'm certainly not casting aspersions on anyone. I'm just saying.

Still, it seems to me that much of the uproar is a tempest in a teapot. In the former Iraq, and, indeed, in a the Arab world in general, prisoners are not just homoerotically humiliated; that's, in fact, the least of their problems. Prisoners are really tortured, in very painful ways, and in places like Syria or Iraq, bumped off in a variety of imaginative ways. Remember the industrial plastic shredders? Uday and Qusay thought they were really keen.

Indeed, people who commit crimes like this in the Arab world are routinely lionized:

Palestinian fiends mercilessly gunned down a pregnant Jewish settler and her four terrified little girls in their station wagon yesterday as the family headed to protest Israel's planned Gaza Strip pullout.

After riddling the car with gunfire on a road leading to Israel, the two terrorists then ran up to the vehicle and coldbloodedly pumped bullets into each of their victims' heads to make sure they had finished the job, Israeli police said.

One of the gunmen also shot the swollen belly of the eight-months-pregnant mom at point-blank range.

"At first, we thought we could do something to save the mother, but it was too late," one distraught Israeli settler said.

"The children were already dead, with bullets in the head. Little children. I don't know, I really don't know," the man said.

Killed were Tali Hatuel, 34, and her four daughters: Meirav, 2, Roni, 7, Hadar, 9, and Hila, 11.

Rescuers found the dead baby still strapped in her car seat, just above a blood-soaked children's book that had fallen on the floor.

Not a peep of concern about this from al-Jazeera, of course. No, no, the humiliation of Arab men is far more important. They'll gleefully broadcast terrorists hacking the head off of Danny Pearl, and they'll willingly serve as Osama bin Laden's PR mouthpiece, but the routine, murderous repression of the Arab world? Hardly worth a mention, really.

Arab "Human Rights" organizations are now foaming at the mouth. Too bad they didn't see their way to show equal concern over the inhabitants of the Syrian village of Hama, when Hafez Assad razed it to the ground and murdered its inhabitants.

But, of course, the real difference isn't that our soldiers do bad things occasionally and theirs don't. The real difference is that when our soldiers do bad things, we clap them in chains for a couple of years, reduce them to the lowest enlisted grade, make them forfeit all pay and allowances, then give them a Bad Conduct Discharge as a lovely parting gift when they get out of prison. When it happens in the Arab world, it's policy. When Palestinians pop a cap into a 2 year-old little girl's head, they're freedom fighters.

That kind of hypocrisy is just a little hard for me to stomach.

The Arab world wants to pretend the actions of the MPs at Abu Ghraib are somehow indicative of the character of our soldiers. In truth, what is indicative of our character is that those soldiers are about to get royally boned for doing what they did. And that's as it should be. But it's cynicism and hypocrisy of the highest order for the Arabs to get their noses all bent out of shape over crimes that aren't a tenth of what they routinely ignore--or celebrate--in their own culture, and what we punish in ours.

Idiots and Leftists--but I repeat myself--over at Democratic Underground give us this little tidbit.

During a press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Martin last week, Bush said, "A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we'd accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq." Funny that he should say that just days after CBS showed a shocking report on conditions at the Abu Ghraib Army prison facility in Iraq, including disturbing photographs of prisoners with wire taped to their genitals, prisoners stripped naked and made to pile on top of one another, and prisoners who were forced to simulate sex acts on one another.

Let's see, on one hand, we have Iraqi mass graves containing tens of thousands of innocent people, and rapists employed by the state to rape Iraqi women as an instrument of policy. On the other hand, we have some morons forcing Iraqi prisoners to pretend to have gay sex, and who are preparing for their Article 32 preliminary hearings even as we speak, and whose commanding general has been removed from command for cause.

Why, the similarities are just uncanny.

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