Help Wanted--Must be able to Drive, Cook--or Interrogate

I saw this Guardian report cited both at TalkingPointsMemo and the Angry Arab News Service. That cooks and drivers were assigned as interrogators is shocking enough. The admission that a good number--perhaps a majority--of Iraqis were detained without just cause should open the eyes of everyone. Reverse the situation: if somehow you were under the control of an occupying army who took yourself or a loved one off to prison one night JUST BECAUSE YOU HAPPENED TO LIVE WHERE YOU LIVE--well, I don't think it'd make for a positive impression.

One question we need to ask ourselves is why we would do that--detain people without cause--in the first place. I think it reflects a desperation on the part of the occupying authorities. They don't have the first clue as to who the resistance is, and have taken to basically terrorizing the civilian population in the hopes that perhaps some useful intel will come of it. The abuse at Abu Ghraib is despicable. But so is the tactic of nighttime raids and random detentions. Imagine your house being stormed at night by upwards of twenty heavily armed soldiers, breaking down doors, shouting in a language you don't understand, menacing you or your family with lethal weapons. That sounds a lot like what we were ostensibly trying to stop by invading in the first place--well, once it became clear that our invasion wasn't going to unearth any Weapons of Mass Destruction, and once we realized that the Iraqi people had their own ideas about a post-Saddam nation. As I've noted before, combine this overall confusion on the ground with some good old fashioned racism, and you've got a recipe for Palestine on steroids in Mesopotamia. Let it cook long enough, and it will become Afghanistan in steroids.

An invasion is doomed to fail without substantial support among the civilian population. The actions by the military have turned the tide against us, as Iraqis doubtless just want us to go before we humiliate more in the prison itself, or enrage more with our nighttime raids. On a broader scale, we are losing the so-called "war on terror" with such heavy handed actions. Torture, abuse, and killing in the name of "freedom" isn't much of a sales pitch, even if you say we're "less evil" than, for example, Saddam Hussein. And is THAT what we want to claim as our legacy? Not as bad as Saddam?

Meanwhile, the big "news" in the US today seems to be the final episode of Friends. Light comedy for heavy times. Oh--and Rumsfeld "apologized" to Congress for "not keeping them informed about the abuse." Ah, if only he'd just told them, then it would have been all better.