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A friend just forwarded this to me:
Hell
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
Tuesday 04 May 2004
Wars are lost not only on the battlefield. The tortures for which the Abou Gharib prison was the theater are dishonorable, and, even more, idiotic, because they inflict an important defeat on the United States. Their images stoke anti-American hatred in the Arab world. They provoke disgust everywhere else. And they wrest from the Iraq occupation whatever little bit of moral legitimacy the coalition had acquired by having overthrown the dictatorship of which Abou Gharib was one of the sinister symbols.
Some partisans of this war will (perhaps) find reasons to put the
gravity of these acts into some kind of context. The enemy, they will say, did much worse. The authors of these acts are only black sheep who have already been sanctioned and condemned. None of these arguments holds in the face of what one American general has acknowledged as "serious violations of international law."
War is hell. It can free the bestiality that sleeps in the depths of each person involved in it. Democracies can only make war with a handicap, which is their honor and their raison d'être - the will to avoid the most unbearable barbarism by sparing civilians and prisoners from it. Consequently democracies must impose an iron discipline against the demons that haunt the battlefield on the men (and women) they throw into this hell.
Above all, however, their leaders must never go to war except by
absolute necessity. At least as much as with the reservists who were its authors and with their immediate officers, responsibility for the shame of Abou Gharib rests with the leaders, George W. Bush at their head, who threw their men into a war without having weighed its consequences.
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