Abu Ghraib
I've learned over the past couple of years that opinion is not my strong point. Op-ed requires focus, consistency, and a leaness and discipline in summing up in 700 words. None of these are strengths of mine. So mostly I write about my life and leave the serious issues for serious people.
This morning, though, I wrote about Abu Ghraib prison, a situation that is bad on so many levels. It was difficult to do; I have a tendency to want to hear the other side, and this story so desperately needs another side. How could this happen?
I straddled the fence some on Iraq last year. Saddam was bad news, a monster, and obviously the world would be better off without him and with a free, democratic Iraq. And Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. seemed genuine and more than a little scary.
The idea of attacking a country that had not attacked us, though, stuck in my craw, as did the idea that most Americans vaguely sensed a connection between Iraq and 9-11, and weren't dissuaded at all by this administration. So mostly I hoped and prayed for a quick war, a quick collapse of Saddam and rejoicing in the streets and all that good stuff we were told would happen. Not to mention finding and destroying the weapons we'd been warned about.
Now we've got a mess, and Abu Ghraib has made it messier. And I realized today that instead of anger or outrage, mostly what I feel is disillusionment.
I'm not naive. I know bad things happen in war, and that there are bad soldiers on any side. And worse things have been done. Lots worse.
But I see the pictures, and I think of American POWs in Vietnam, the stories we heard and hear. The degradation, abuse, torture, coercion: These were things The Enemy did.
With apologies to my non-American readers, idealism runs like a river throughout American history. Our past isn't hidden; we know where we've been and what we've done, we know the mistakes and the bad decisions, but still we believe that in the end, a nation of immigrants, stitched together by some first-rate 18th-century thinkers and purchased with the blood of patriots, will somehow manage to do The Right Thing. This is what we're taught in school, what we think when we honor our veterans, what we remember. This may be American arrogance but there is truth here. We're supposed to be the good guys.
And we are.
But we see the pictures. We see a young woman from small town America, smiling and pointing. We read the reports. Worse is coming, we hear.
The idea that young soldiers were not aware of the Geneva Convention is staggering to me. We ARE Geneva, that's who we are, that's part of the package. We hand out Hershey bars and billions in foreign aid, we take our wealth and power and spread it over the rest of the world, watching for danger and keeping it safe, and when we mess up we correct it.
And I guess we will now, too, weed out the bad apples and the incompetents and the just plain stupid, knowing that most of our soldiers represent us well in a difficult situation.
But I've seen the pictures now, and they remind me of other pictures, and other wars. Other prisoners, other tormentors.
So maybe I was naive after all. It was just disconcerting to once again see the smiling face of The Enemy, and realize that it suddenly looks awfully American.
11:40:12 AM 
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