Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners: Part of the Dehumanizing Pattern

By Omid Safi

The images of Iraqi prisoners are painful, hurtful, and agonizing. They strike at the very heart of decency and humanity of all who see them. And yet as I will discuss below, they are not unexpected or isolated developments, but rather a continuation of twenty years of American foreign policy centered on dehumanizing Muslims.

The irony is inescapable: the American and British soldiers who are in Iraq—so we are told—to “liberate” the country and bring “Freedom” and “democracy” to the country are humiliating, violating, torturing Iraqis. To add one more layer of irony, all of this takes place in the very same Abu Ghraib prison, the site of some of Saddam Hossein’s worst atrocities. Similar atrocities, same site. Different abusers. And we act shocked and surprised that the whole world, including Muslims in this country, have not, do not, and will not buy this war as a “liberation”?

There is much to be said about this atrocity. Some of the strongest condemnations come from human rights organizations. Amnesty International said:

Amnesty International has received frequent reports of torture or other ill-treatment by Coalition Forces during the past year. Detainees have reported being routinely subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during arrest and detention. Many have told Amnesty International that they were tortured and ill-treated by US and UK troops during interrogation.

Methods often reported include prolonged sleep deprivation; beatings; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with... prolonged hooding... Virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill-treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities.

Human Rights Watch has correctly pointed out that this case is not an isolated one of 6-7 soldiers “behaving badly,” but rather one tied to a culture of depravity and lack of accountability. Kenneth Roth of HRW states:

The brazenness with which these soldiers conducted themselves, snapping photographs ... as they abused prisoners, suggests they felt they had nothing to hide from their superiors.

Already the NY Times has stated that “the theory that these horrific acts were committed by a few renegade soldiers has been undercut by charges that the men and women shown in the pictures were actually working at the direction of military intelligence officers." Another solid piece of critical journalism was the recent Seymour Hersh essay in the New Yorker.

The British Independent records Major General Antonio Taguba, as stating that there were "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib. Taguba listed some of them:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees ... beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomising a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees ... and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

These brutalities violate international agreements such as the 13th article of the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which states:

Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention. … Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.

As it might be expected, these images have brought out cries of anguish and frustration in most of the Arab and Islamic world as well. These stories, which have come to dominate outlets such as Aljazeera, have merely confirmed the worst suspicions of people in the regions about the veracity of American claims to fostering human rights and democracy.

Offended, injured, but shocked?

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have each resulted in civilian casualties far greater than that of September 11th, yet the loss of these lives has hardly been engaged by the American media or government with the same humanity that we have treated the loss of American life—both military and civilian. The estimate by the Associated Press puts the number of Iraqi civilians who died in the first month alone of the 2003 war at 3240. Independent evaluations of the Iraq casualty count put the total number of casualties so far even higher, between 9,018 and 10,873. When pressed to explain such a high number of civilian deaths in a war that was represented as being conducted through “precision targets” and “smart bombs”, General Tommy Franks responded: “We don’t do body counts.”

For American Muslims this callous disregard for Iraqi civilians, coupled with the pomp and circumstance which surrounds the rightly joyous occasion of rescuing American prisoners such as Private Jessica Lynch , can only be explained as arising out of the different worth attached to American as opposed to Muslim lives. It is this much resented double standard which Muslims in both this country and beyond see as an unspoken and unjust aspect of American foreign policy.

As much as I hold Bush and his neoconservative chicken-hawks responsible for this cruel disregard for human life, it is important to acknowledge that these policies have started more than a decade ago, and continued under Bill Clinton as well. The largest number of Iraqi casualties, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, came as a result of the US enforced sanctions on Iraq which led to so many perishing from lack of food and simple medicine. The epitome of this disregard for human life in Iraq was the May 12th 1996 conversation between Madeline Albright and the 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl. Stahl asked Albright: "We have heard that a half million children have died...I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And -- and you know, is the price worth it?" Albright, responded: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."

I started this essay by stating that the images of abuse from Iraqi prisoners are offensive, yes, hurtful, yes, but in some ways they are not completely novel developments. What we have seen this past week in Iraqi prisoners can not be separated from this longer pattern of dehumanization. In the last 20 years, we as Americans have had a singular obsession with the “Hitler-substitutes”, as it were: Qaddafi, Khomeini, Bin Laden, Saddam Hossein, etc. It is as if there are no people in the Middle East, no beating hearts, no mothers clutching their children, no ordinary human beings going about the poetry of their every day existence. It is as if in discussing “Middle East” we can’t see past the tropes of “the terrorists”, “Islamic fundamentalists”, oil, “threat to Israel”, etc. Once we fail to engage Iraqis (or any other group of humanity) as human beings, it is easy to justify bombing them, having sanctions on them, raping them, torturing them, etc.
We have been sold a war that is premised on us not engaging the humanity of the people that we have bombed, of us not seeing their corpses and their suffering, and even resisting seeing our own soldiers’ names and faces on the airwaves. Dehumanizing is a virus that eventually contaminates all of us.

During Vietnam, Bob Dylan sang:

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

To today’s masters of war who “hide in their mansion” we say indeed that we can see through your mask. We see your games of dehumanizing, we see through your deadly game of frightening us to submission and silence and neglecting the full humanity of those who are weak, those who are hungry, those who are bombed to their grave. And we will play your game no more.

We have to be clear about this point: our task is not to “humanize” Iraqis. One can only humanize something that is not already fully human. The Iraqis, exactly like us, already possess their full God-given humanity. If we have failed to see and interact with Iraqis on a human level, if we have not listened to their cries, seen their tears, mourned their deaths, it is because they have been presented to us as in-human, sub-human, or non-human.

Our task as Muslims and indeed as human beings committed to the dignity of all of us human beings is to engage in an unrelenting critic of the US military might (disguised as “the coalition”). I also believe that we have a moral duty to speak up against the culture of violence that now pervades segments of Iraqi societies, a violence that is unleashed against UN workers, fellow Iraqis, and yes, American soldiers. Our task is to do more than condemn, but rather work with Iraqis in finding a way of voicing their righteous rebellion of resistance, indeed their jihad against the American occupation, while doing so in a non-violent way.

In speaking against both of these forms of violence, I recognize that we are led to an isolated space in the middle. And yet it is from this space in the middle that we reach out to all of humanity. In doing so we recall the Qur’anic injunction that states notions of social justice (‘adl) and spiritual excellence (ihsan) are indeed connected. May we bring some healing into this much-fractured world. May that healing begin with you and me, at this very moment. Amin.

Omid Safi is a professor of Islamic Studies at Colgate University. He is the Co-Chair of the Study of Islam section at the American Academy of Religion. He is the editor of Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003).