Thursday, November 17, 2005

Accountability, Western Style

We're told by the NYT here, and others that Americans and Iraqis now plan a full-scale investigation of Iraqi-run prisons:
But it came in stark contrast to comments made earlier today by the Iraqi interior minister, Bayan Jabr, who tried to play down the discovery of torture at the prison by American soldiers. Mr. Jabr is a conservative Shiite, and almost all the prisoners were Sunni Arabs.

"There has been much exaggeration about this issue," Mr. Jabr said at a news conference, speaking in an angry, sarcastic tone. "Nobody was beheaded or killed."

Mr. Jabr acknowledged that seven of the 169 emaciated, malnourished prisoners discovered by Americans on Sunday night had been tortured. He said the Iraqi officers responsible would be punished. But he added that many of the Iraqis and foreign Arabs being held in the prison were suspected of heinous bombings and assaults.

Mr. Jabr also suggested that the furor over the prison was being drummed up by "those who support terrorism" since "it's natural for them to attack the Interior Ministry."

The logic here is familiar, of course, even in the way it implicates those of us in the United States who express furor over the prison: we are, Bayan Jabr insists, supporters of terrorism. We are either with him--come on, these are people suspected of heinous bombings and assaults--or we are against him and support such measures.

We're used to hearing this from Bush, of course, and we have mostly trained ourselves (at our peril, probably) of ignoring it. Jabr sounds--especially given the way he's characterized here, sarcastic, angrily righteous--like Cheney. But whereas I know Cheney's just a battery-powered jackass, Jabr scares the hell out of me. Not because I thought Iraqis were incapable of such a dangerous, simplistic rationale for abuses of human rights, but because now we're hardly in a legitimate position to criticize him for these kinds of remarks. What do we say? "The new Iraqi constitution has outlawed torture, so it can't have happened"?

The dominoes are falling in the middle east, all right. If what we meant to inspire was "Western Style" democracy--i.e. to hell with judicial processes, with transparency, with universal respect for human rights when you're faced with an enemy you don't understand completely--we're succeeding wildly.

The simplistic desire for black-and-white logic is contagious, it turns out. What I hope happens: that this guy, this Jabr, is appropriately impugned by what little free press is available and accessible to folks in the Middle East; that he resigns his post in shame. That would be an excellent, illustrative example of what "freedom" is. What I fear is that his parroting of the infantile logic of Bush will lead only to additional terror, that Bush and Cheney will back him up like overzealous parents at a high-school hockey match, that this thing will last forever.

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