The Destruction of Morality

The whole front page of the Indie this morning is given over to Robert Fisk. Beneath the headline “The Destruction of Morality” and the picture of Lynndie England holding a leash attached to a prone Iraqi prisoner, Fisk writes, “today, Lynndie smashes our entire morality, with just one tug of the leash.”

This is so over-stated that it seems counter-productive. This is the sort of report you might expect from the first journalists to arrive at Auschwitz. But Fisk is on a roll: at last he’s been vindicated.

First, Fisk makes the Saddam comparison; we’re as bad as them:

Not long after the occupation of Baghdad in April last year, we got our hands on videotape of the whipping of Iraqi prisoners by Saddam’s security police.

I’m not sure which circle of hell the victims were enduring in the 45 minutes of sadism which I still have on tape. They are whipped, they are kicked into sewers and they cower like dogs. And why were these war crimes filmed? I thought at first that it was intended for the enjoyment of Saddam or his disgusting son Uday. But now I realise the videos were taken so that the prisoners could be humiliated. Their suffering, their pathetic pleas for mercy were to be recorded – to add the final layer of degradation to their fate. And now I realise, too, that the pictures of the Iraqis so cruelly treated – so tortured – by the Americans, were taken for precisely the same reason.

No argument with the common theme of brutal humiliation, but there are a couple of points to be made which of course Fisk omits. Firstly, what happened to those prisoners of Saddam after the video finished? Nothing good, I imagine. In fact as we know this is mild stuff compared to the usual Saddam treatment.

But more importantly – crucially – under Saddam this brutality was standard and was sanctioned at the highest level. This was normality. It is not normality for the US. That’s why there’s such a huge furore about it, why a number of soldiers are facing court-martial, and why Bush has considered it necessary to apologise.

Fisk doesn’t buy this though, and is keen to establish that the soldiers involved, Lynndie England et al., were too stupid to come up with this sort of behaviour themselves (maybe that’s why he refers to England as Lynndie all the time; or maybe that’s just because she’s a woman):

We are not just talking “sick” here. We’re talking professionals. […] Lynndie and her boyfriend were not part of a “rogue” unit. They were told to do these despicable things. They were encouraged. This was an order from someone. Who? When can we see their pictures, their identity, their passports, their orders?

Where’s this leading? Who’s to blame? The US military? Well yes, but Fisk has a larger aim. We are all guilty: it’s our rotten racist Western culture. At last, for Fisk, it’s his moment of truth. He was right all along. The mask has slipped and the real nature of the occupying forces has been revealed:

“It’s part of a culture, a long tradition that goes back to the Crusades; that the Muslim is dirty, lascivious, unChristian, unworthy of humanity […] And our illegal, immoral, meretricious war has now brought forth the images that betray our racism.”