Abu Ghraib
Rich Galen
Monday May 10, 2004
I am now officially sick-and-tired of the self-serving and largely uninformed
hand-wringing about the goings on at Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad.
As someone who has actually been on the grounds of Abu Ghraib prison,
let me explain a few things.
First of all, there is no excuse for what a few soldiers did; but there
is also no reason to make this into the moral equivalent of the Black
Plague.
It should be pointed out that the prisoners at Abu Ghraib are not Boy
Scouts rounded up for jaywalking. These are bad guys who either blew up
or shot a
coalition member; or were caught assembling an explosive device; or were
caught in a place where the
makings of explosive devices were found; or were caught with a cache of
weapons. See the pattern here?
In short they were trying to kill me and others like me. And if they
succeeded in doing that, they were going to come over here and try to
kill you.
Ugly thought? You bet. But that is the kind of prisoner being held in
the terrorist section at Abu Ghraib.
The Roar du Jour from those who want to get into this story by beating
their chests over how terrible it all is, keep telling us that this has
damaged American credibility in the Middle East.
Let’s look at that.
First, lots of Arabs don’t like us in the first place. Those Arabs will
not like us any less for this incident.
That dislike has nothing to do with our cultural insensitivities. It
has to do with America’s
refusal to allow those same Arabs, many of whom have been bankrolling
the Palestinian terrorists for decades, to wipe the State of Israel off
the face of the Earth they way they have wiped it off the face of their
maps.
Second, those who claim that the Abu Ghraib situation will poison the
well of American
goodwill for decades, are really the ones who are under rating Arabs.
They have to believe that all Arabs will assign the actions of perhaps
a couple of dozen soldiers to the 280 million Americans who have pledged
to help the Iraqis attain security, independence, and prosperity.
Those making that claim must, therefore, believe that all Arabs have
the intellectual capacity of a frog (a real frog, not a French person)
and the emotional development of a three-year-old (a real three-year-old,
not a French person).
Finally, our friends on the Left are so very, very concerned about how
foreigners (read, Europeans) will see us.
I don’t care what the French, the Germans, or the Spaniards think about
us. The French and the Germans are up to their elbows in the fraud and
theft of billions of dollars in what is called the Oil-for-Food Program
but which was really the Oil-for-Palaces Program.
It will be interesting to see if the intellectual elites on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan are as upset with their vacation buddies in the
Paris 16th as they are with Secretary Rumsfeld when it becomes clear that
their pals were fully engaged in the systematic
depravation of the people of Iraq.
Very often doing the right thing is also the hard thing. The easy thing
is to close your eyes to evil; or to make a bargain with the devil.
You cannot stop doing the right thing because it is hard, or because
of what those who would make a deal with the enemy in an attempt to rent
their own
safety, might think about what you.
The actions of a few soldiers in Abu Ghraib were wrong. But we cannot
allow thespotlight currently shining on them to cast a shadow over the
other 135,000 soldiers who are in Iraq doing their jobs professionally,
properly, and with honor.
Copyright ©2004 Richard A. Galen
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