Keeble McFarlane

Jamaicans have Anancy stories, and the Americans have Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. In the story of the tar baby, Brer Fox is tired of Brer Rabbit's prancing around and getting into everybody's business, so he makes a baby out of tar and places it strategically so that Brer Rabbit would be sure to come upon it. So he did, and after insulting the tar baby for some time and getting no response, proceeds to thump, kick and finally, to butt it, becoming in the process, hopelessly stuck to the lump of tar.

George Bush the Younger seems to have met his tar baby in Iraq. Almost no one holds any brief for Saddam Hussein, as nasty a character as any horror-fiction writer could devise. At Bush's behest, he is no longer running the oil-rich country, often labelled as the cradle of civilisation. But that was not the reason Bush gave for his ill-thought-out exercise in Iraq. It was about fighting terrorism, about getting rid of all kinds of terrible weapons of mass destruction, about sending a message to those who would do us harm. But now he's stuck to the tar baby set up by his own lieutenants - Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, et al.

Bush embroidered the whole Iraqi venture as an exercise in bringing democracy to a downtrodden people, and the whole thing began unravelling before it was even off the loom. The US armed forces - the most mighty war machine the world has ever seen, rolled over the Iraqis in a few weeks, with minimal casualties. The British and the other countries which provided Bush with the skimpiest of fig leaves enjoyed similar success. That was the easy part.

The fumbles began as soon as the soldiers and marines established their bivouacs across Iraq. Lack of planning for the next steps became immediately obvious, and the occupiers began ad-libbing their way. Plans to hand the country over to its people have been batted around like a shuttlecock on a badminton court, and although the target date for an Iraqi administration is just a few weeks away, they won't be the choice of the Iraqi people. Rather, the junta will be something lashed up out of remnants, rags and mis-matched material, held together with spirit gum, duct tape and baling twine. No one outside of the White House and the Pentagon will be surprised when it comes apart in the succeeding months.

The people around Bush seem oblivious to their own history. After a shaky and unrealistic start in occupying Germany after the Second World War, the Americans, British and French grew to be quite sure-footed in fostering a strong, functioning democracy in a soil of bigoted, twisted, totalitarian sensibilities. That imperious warmonger, Douglas MacArthur, displayed remarkable sensitivity as chief occupier of defeated, flattened Japan. He made sure his forces treated the Japanese with respect and courtesy, and they repaid the US and the world many times over with a sound, functioning democracy and a dynamic economy that is the envy of many nations.

Right now, after the publication of graphic pictures of degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners, and hearing the accounts of those who were tortured and humiliated, the American and British occupiers have lost any slack ordinary Iraqis may have cut them.

The US military has removed from duty and handed out severe reprimands to a junior general and several other officers and troops for their disgraceful behaviour at some prisons in Iraq. Ironically, one of them - Al Ghraib near Baghdad - was the site of one of Saddam's most infamous torture venues.

The pictures - not all of them published, but available on the internet - depict activities intended to humiliate, as well as cause actual physical pain to Arabs, a fairly straight-laced set of people. Some, showing naked men wearing hoods and forced to pile on top of each other while male and female occupiers pose with them for the camera, have inflamed people all across the Arab world. Men were forced to do degrading things in front of women soldiers, and in one case there is a picture of a British swaddie urinating on a hooded, naked prisoner. There's at least one case of an MP raping a woman prisoner.

This is not how you win hearts and minds, to use the Vietnam-era phrase popular among the White House crowd of the day. Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced to remark "That's what we went there to stop." And Bush went on US-financed Arab-language television channels to mumble that the behaviour was disgraceful and un-American. He waited until the fires started singeing his pant legs before offering an apology to the visiting king of Jordan, and while he did give what amounts to a public reprimand to his secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, he did not fire him, as he should, for the latter's waiting until the thing blew up publicly before admitting that the atrocities were taking place.

The Anglo-Saxon world has a pious and pompous view of itself as the bringer of decency and good behaviour to the rest of the world. "Those sorts of things are just not done" is the attitude from London and Washington. But those same people have practised their own forms of brutality. It was the British, during the Boer wars a century ago, who introduced concentration camps to the world. The Americans - both the military and the CIA - have for more than 40 years devised and taught doctrines to others on just how to strike fear in the hearts of captured opponents.

War has a way of taking on a life of its own, and some of the people who wage war do so by their own rules. One way is to use brutality and humiliation against their opponents. Many are the rationalisations - to make them talk, to pay them back for what they did to us, etc, etc. You very rarely hear the real underlying reason - that people have a bit of the beast in them and will commit brutality because they like it and above all, because they think they can get away with it.

The long tradition of chivalry and military codes of honour have a parallel history of callous ill-treatment, looking at others as lesser beings and therefore not worthy of sympathy, right down to deliberate savage brutality. The cynic in me believes that even though many of us are outraged at such behaviour, we will never completely breed this tendency out of human beings. All of us at some time, and a few of us all the time, take some satisfaction - if not outright pleasure - in making someone else suffer. The decent ones among us will try to offer rationalisations. But as my late colleague and friend, Peter Walker, once remarked:
"It doesn't matter whether it's a fascist, a communist or an anarchist who attaches the electrodes to your testicles. You still holler for your mummy when the current is turned on."

Keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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