A Few Bad Apples or One Big Apple Rotten to the Core?

I've written numerous times how the lack of proper planning for nation building after invasion in both Iraq and Afghanistan is the major cause of the failure in both of those nations for real material and political improvement in the general population's lives. This lack of planning has revealed itself in numerous ways, the most recent being the torture of Iraqi detainees.

Initially, Bush and crew billed the incidents of torture as "a few bad apples". As I've written earlier, the "a few bad apples" scenario has already been disproven, even before the notorious photos from Abu Ghraib were published by the press. Amnesty International has been documenting numerous examples of torture and mistreatment of Iraqis by American troops in Iraq for months. Press reports from the beginning of the occupation have been cataloguing examples of brutality, from randomly shooting into crowds of demonstrators, to looting and other far more terrible crimes.

It is true that part of the explanation for these atrocities is the brutality of war, but that is insufficient. The "war" in Iraq ended well over a year ago, that the occupation has continued to deteriorate has primarily to do with the incompetence of the Bush Administration. A effort such as nation building requires strict control and an immense influx of troops, who must shift from soldiering to policing, and resources that must shift from making war to rebuilding a shattered society. The aforementioned control must be exercised just as, if not more, stringently on those who make up the occupiers than on the population being occupied. Why? Because for cooperation to take place those occupied must see the benefits of cooperation as being greater than resisting. If acts of brutality are allowed to take place unpunished, not only does it encourage further acts, it gradually reduces the likelihood of transitioning to real cooperation by the occupied people, because they can see no benefit in cooperation. They see that they are brutalized whether they cooperate or resist.

The following article published in Friday's Guardian underscores exactly the kind of behaviour on the part of American troops that will continue to lead to a deterioration of the Iraq occupation. It is an interview with "Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantanamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year,":

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbor came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.

According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds. (for the full article click here)

This is clearly institutionalized incompetence. What it shows is an serious lack of leadership, accountability and planning. Responsibility for this stupidity starts right at the top.

The roots of the incompetence lie in the deceptive practices of the neo-conservatives who pushed not just for war, but billed it as a cakewalk. All this is not simply the "reality of war", it is the fruit of the lies used to obstruct reality so completely that properly handling a situation becomes impossible.

The horror in Iraq, the torture, the brutality is first and foremost a symptom of passivity. It shows what happens when people let others think and decide for them. Americans themselves are responsible for this brutality, not because they are as a whole brutal monsters, that kind of characterization is completely mistaken. Their share of responsibility comes in not wishing to disturb the comfort of their daily lives to truly and carefully evaluate decisions as important as going to war. There is no evil intent, just a kind of sloth. It is a problem all people regardless of ethnicity are susceptible too.

I just hope enough people, Americans in particular, begin to take note and realize that they have a role to play in trying to make a change, however small their contribution may be.