Galen's Perspective on the Abu Ghraib Mess

A balanced perspective is needed in addition to the handwringing. Here's one.

Rich Galen
Monday May 10, 2004


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I am now officially sick-and-tired of the self-serving and largely uninformed hand-wringing about the goings on at Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. As someone who has actually been on the grounds of Abu Ghraib prison, let me explain a few things.

First of all, there is no excuse for what a few soldiers did; but there is also no reason to make this into the moral equivalent of the Black Plague.

It should be pointed out that the prisoners at Abu Ghraib are not Boy Scouts rounded up for jaywalking. These are bad guys who either blew up or shot a coalition member; or were caught assembling an explosive device; or were caught in a place where the makings of explosive devices were found; or were caught with a cache of weapons. See the pattern here?

In short they were trying to kill me and others like me. And if they succeeded in doing that, they were going to come over here and try to kill you.

Ugly thought? You bet. But that is the kind of prisoner being held in the terrorist section at Abu Ghraib.

The Roar du Jour from those who want to get into this story by beating their chests over how terrible it all is, keep telling us that this has damaged American credibility in the Middle East.

Let's look at that.

First, lots of Arabs don't like us in the first place. Those Arabs will not like us any less for this incident.

That dislike has nothing to do with our cultural insensitivities. It has to do with America's refusal to allow those same Arabs, many of whom have been bankrolling the Palestinian terrorists for decades, to wipe the State of Israel off the face of the Earth they way they have wiped it off the face of their maps.

Second, those who claim that the Abu Ghraib situation will poison the well of American goodwill for decades, are really the ones who are under rating Arabs. They have to believe that all Arabs will assign the actions of perhaps a couple of dozen soldiers to the 280 million Americans who have pledged to help the Iraqis attain security, independence, and prosperity.

Those making that claim must, therefore, believe that all Arabs have the intellectual capacity of a frog (a real frog, not a French person) and the emotional development of a three-year-old (a real three-year-old, not a French person).

Finally, our friends on the Left are so very, very concerned about how foreigners (read, Europeans) will see us.

I don't care what the French, the Germans, or the Spaniards think about us. The French and the Germans are up to their elbows in the fraud and theft of billions of dollars in what is called the Oil-for-Food Program but which was really the Oil-for-Palaces Program.

It will be interesting to see if the intellectual elites on the Upper West Side of Manhattan are as upset with their vacation buddies in the Paris 16th as they are with Secretary Rumsfeld when it becomes clear that their pals were fully engaged in the systematic depravation of the people of Iraq.

Very often doing the right thing is also the hard thing. The easy thing is to close your eyes to evil; or to make a bargain with the devil.

You cannot stop doing the right thing because it is hard, or because of what those who would make a deal with the enemy in an attempt to rent their own safety, might think about what you.

The actions of a few soldiers in Abu Ghraib were wrong. But we cannot allow the spotlight currently shining on them to cast a shadow over the other 135,000 soldiers who are in Iraq doing their jobs professionally, properly, and with honor.

Copyright ©2004 Richard A. Galen