Everyone loves a good scandal, and nothing delivers a juicy one like rape, murder, and war. And let’s be honest, folks, when it comes to delivering the goods, few can do it like the U.S. government’s War on Terror. At this point, you would figure that even the most earnest and dedicated among the journalistas might be beginning to wax a bit cynical about the ongoing Iraq/U.S. imbroglio. It’s got to be a difficult job to keep mustering all that moral indignation with every new outrageous revelation, but somehow they manage to do it.
The recent slurry of photos and video images to spatter out of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has all the key features of the best Internet torture porn. It’s got everything it needs to be completely compelling. There’s graphic nudity, humiliation, homosexual sex, bondage, and oh, more humiliation. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll be damned if I don’t want to. A female soldier leading Iraqi prisoners around on a leash sounds pretty hot to me. Add that to the video cybercast of Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists beheading American Nick Berg in retribution, mix liberally with a supporting cast of Jessica Lynch-esque characters and British media moguls getting sacked, and you’ve got one hell of a show.
Let’s be honest for just a second and ask ourselves how any of this is really so surprising anymore. Are we really so outraged, or do we just feel that we ought to be? Rape and murder are the kinds of things that make prisons scary. It’s no secret that prisoners-no less prisoners of war-are routinely raped, beaten, and humiliated by their captors. War, sex, and death are not strange bedfellows at all. When did we start thinking that they were? There really isn’t much moral high ground left to occupy.
What better way could there be to obliterate the morale of Iraqi insurgents? Torture and humiliation are standard equipment in the game of war. Ask Russia, or Korea, or China, or France, or. . . you get the picture. And in the end, we’re all playing the game. We’re reading the newspapers rabidly and we’re downloading the webshots. We’re frantic for it, and we want more.
The good folks that run the show at Britain’s Daily Mirror must have wanted badly to outdo the U.S. media’s coverage of the story. In a disastrous consequence of scandal-envy, they, knowingly or not, published falsified photos of British soldiers brutalising Iraqi prisoners. When the news that these were fakes broke Saturday morning, The Mirror released a huge front-page apology to everyone involved, and now media pundits everywhere are huddling together and fussing over the grisly carcasses of journalistic ethics and responsibility. The scandal itself has become material for a newer scandal. In what has to be a bid to spin some positive PR, the U.S. is now saying that they’ll pull out of Iraq, if that’s what the Iraqi interim government wants.
U.S. Secretary of Defence Colin Powell says he’s not worried about being asked to leave. And why would he be? The Iraqi interim government is friendly to U.S. interests. If it had been otherwise, it never would have been installed. So, no worries, the show will go on, and it can only get better. The tit-for-tat trading of scandalous prison-sex videos is just the beginning. Ask any elementary school graduate and she’ll tell you how a schoolyard game of “got ya last” will escalate, and we all know that by the time the game ends only the biggest kid is still standing.
