HEARTS AND MINDS.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq War)

In the days of Saddam Hussein, hangings at Abu Ghraib prison took place on Wednesdays and Sundays--up to fifty or sixty a day, year after year, decade after decade. Prisoners were often shuttled to Abu Ghraib--a vast complex twenty miles west of Baghdad, with three miles of cinder-block walls and twenty-four watchtowers--in an ice-cream truck. Tens of thousands never came out. In the nineteen-eighties, according to a Washington Post report by Peter Finn, the executioner was a tall, burly man known as the Sword. He wore a pistol with Saddam's name inscribed on the handle, and his breath reeked of whiskey. The Sword's successor used to embrace the condemned prisoner from behind on the scaffold, so that when the trapdoor opened the two dropped together and the prisoner's neck snapped more efficiently. Torture was routine in Abu Ghraib: isolation, beatings, rapes, attack dogs, electric shocks, starvation. In the death house, the walls were covered with graffiti. Most marked the days left to the prisoners. "God save me," one man wrote, "and I will pray seventy thousand times." A report published in 1993 by Human Rights Watch quoted a former inmate as saying, "No one, not Pushkin, not Mahfouz, can describe what happened to us."

From the beginning of the war in Iraq, the Administration's rhetoric placed moral progress at the heart of its mission. "I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture," President Bush said last June, emphasizing the ethical underpinnings of Operation Iraqi Freedom. "We are leading this fight by example." The sentiment was laudable--and it is precisely what has made the revelations of American misconduct in Abu Ghraib so profoundly disheartening.

There are order-of-magnitude distinctions to be made. Major General Antonio M. Taguba's confidential report on the brutality, humiliation, and sadism at Abu Ghraib can hardly compare to descriptions of the horrors there under Saddam. What happened is not on the same scale as the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, or, indeed, the routine torture of prisoners that continues to be countenanced around the world. It is nonetheless shocking, and indefensible, and has made a mockery of this Administration's pretenses to moral leadership in the Middle East.

Iraq is not like the Second World War, in which victory consisted of the triumph of one conventional army over another. F.D.R. and Churchill did not spend much time worrying about winning the hearts and minds of the Germans or the Japanese. (If they had, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo would likely not have been considered.) Victory in Iraq depends not only on the successful overthrow of Saddam but also on the maintenance of security there and on the attainment of some measure of legitimacy, in order to make good on the idealistic project of building a stable, secular democracy. From the start, moral and political acumen was just as essential as military efficiency.

This preemptive invasion, in all its complexity, was carried out in a particular kind of information universe. In Iraq, as elsewhere in the Arab world, people have an understanding of the United States that is shaped (and skewed) by a combination of real information and history, on the one hand, and by resentments and conspiracy theories, on the other. The region's newspapers and satellite television stations will never see the world as the Times or CNN does. In Baghdad, the Coalition collects all the paranoid or malevolent rumors in circulation in order to rebut them. But Abu Ghraib was no rumor; it was an incident--indeed, part of a pattern of incidents--of indiscipline, cruelty, and moral failure. The photographs and reports have deepened every resentment, every sense of grievance and subjection. Our moral standing in the region was low enough before Abu Ghraib. ...