A gruesome tale, from the Religion of Peace™.

I’m with Andrew Stuttaford.

Bush was right to apologize to the Iraqis for what was done, and, politically it may have been shrewd to couch that apology in wider terms to all Arab peoples, but we should be clear about one thing. The denunciations of America by the Arab press outside Iraq has no more moral (politically speaking, it is something else) significance than the sight of a weeping Goebbels. It

Wretchard has a sobering post about what we should be trying to avoid, and what many of the ringmasters in the ongoing circus in Washington may be, unwittingly, leading us to.

While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory. Japanese tourists are welcome in Asia everywhere today because the Second World War ended in 1945. And if by contrast Palestinians hand out sweets whenever a Jewish orphanage and Old Folk’s home is bombed it may be because the UN refugee camps there celebrated their 50th anniversary in 1998. If the outrages at Abu Ghraib hasten the end of war it will not have been in vain, but if they lead, as the Left most earnestly desires, to a Vietnam-like stalemate, it will be not the last but the first of many sad mileposts.

[Warning, graphic descriptions of violence]

Omar at Iraq The Model posts an interesting conversation with an Iraqi doctor about Abu Ghraib.

There are other interesting posts there about Iraqi and Middle Eastern reaction as well.

Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.

…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.

Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.

I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.

And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.

[Update on Friday morning]

As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.

Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.

…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.

Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.

I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.

And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.

[Update on Friday morning]

As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.

Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.

…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.

Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.

I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.

And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.

[Update on Friday morning]

As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.

A grab bag of thoughts and observations on the news of the past week or so:

(1) The administration still doesn’t seem to fully grasp the seriousness of the damage done by the revelations of abuse in Iraq. For one thing, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have been on the case since last year, while administration spokesmen have been denying that anything bad was happening. These revelations give credibility to news sources we are trying to undermine, quite apart from the direct damage of pushing literally hundreds of millions of muslims further into the arms of the islamists. Bush has finally said the word “sorry” but it’s not clear he’s taking any other effective action to undo the damage.

Continue reading Thoughts on the War →

Michael Totten has an interesting and clarifying essay about who the enemy is. It’s a restorative for those tired of arguing with people who mistakenly think that Iraq was a “distraction” from the “war on Al Qaeda.”

There is no Christian counterpart to what Saudi Arabia does. Imagine if the white supremacist “Christian Identity” movement (which includes David Duke among its adherents) made billions of dollars a year and founded churches throughout the Christian parts of the world to spread its hateful, racist, xenophobic ideology. Imagine if their brand of Christianity were the fastest growing on Earth, that they had also seized nation-states and used their powers to massacre millions. Whole swaths of the Christian world would look much like 1990s Yugoslavia, where Serbian Orthodox Christian supremacists did their worst to put the Muslim population of Europe to the sword.

On a related note, Steven den Beste says that we’re fighting a two-front war, some parts hot and some parts cold, and some of Europe (and indeed, many within the US itself) are on the other side. It’s long (as is often the case) but worth reading.

Andrew Sullivan has an appalling summary of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and a suggestion for the president. He should take the advice.

And on a slightly different but related topic, how is “Ghraib” pronounced, anyway? I keep hearing people (including NPR people, who are usually sticklers about pronunciation, at least if it’s some trendy lefty country) saying “Grayb,” with a single syllable. I’m no Arabic expert, but I’d think that it should be “Grah-eeb.” Anyone know?