Linda S. Heard, Arab News

CAIRO, 11 May 2004 — The US administration’s “Greater Middle East” initiative has been rendered completely devoid of moral substance. Photographs depicting the deviant practices of America’s “finest” at Abu-Ghraib have surely put an end to the hegemonic pact of the Jewish and Christian Zionist/hawkish military neocons within and around the Bush camp. No longer do they have any kind of moral platform from which to point condemnatory fingers at Arab leaderships. No longer can they hide behind the mask of freedom, justice and democracy. From Casablanca to Khartoum, from Algiers to Aleppo, from Dhahran to Dubai, the game is up.

Not only is the street of Cairo boiling with righteous indignation at the sight of hooded Iraqi prisoners attached to electrodes, leashed like dogs, made to twist their disrobed bodies into pornographic pyramids. While Egyptians seethe at fuzzy pictures in the Al-Waft Egyptian daily showing the rape by US soldiers of young Iraqi women, Arab-born Americans are stricken with shame.

“I used to be proud when I traveled around the world and said ‘I am an American’”, Bassem El-Kurd, a Palestinian told Ben Fox of the Associated Press. “I don’t have that pride anymore. A country that stands for democracy is being viewed as a tyrant,” he said. “Those people were treated this way under Saddam, so what did we accomplish? We just brought another Saddam to them.”

Alexandria-born Ahmed Ramadan (not his real name), a businessman holding British citizenship told me: “Due to the actions of a few power-mad, greedy individuals in the Bush administration, Americans are no longer respected in the region and can no more expect a warm welcome. We used to trust the US and admire the American way, but since the invasion of Iraq our feelings have changed. However we may perceive our own leaderships, they are preferable to submitting to a repeat performance of the Iraq fiasco when Arabs have had to stand by as their children are killed or maimed, their men-folk gunned down and their sisters and daughters sexually abused.”

He went on: “The US has demanded reforms in the Arab world but America should fix itself first. Arabs are waiting to see how the American people intend to repair their sullied international portrait. Bush’s apologies won’t suffice; they can’t erase those disgusting images seared on the minds of every single Arab.”

“If the US thinks it can bribe Arab military heads to open the doors to their capitals as may have happened in Iraq, it had better think again,” he said. “The Americans went into Baghdad, albeit under a false pretext, as saviors but ended up as occupiers and oppressors. We all know that now and nobody in the region will fall for their empty promises and lies again.”

The May 7 “Girl Blog from Iraq” reads: “Every newspaper you pick up in Baghdad has pictures of some American or British atrocity or another. It is like a nightmare that has come to life.”

According to the Iraqi Girl blogger, “... pictures of dead Iraqis are easier to bear than this grotesque show of American military technique... people would rather be dead than sexually abused and degraded by the animals running Abu Ghraib prison... No matter what one’s attitude was toward the occupation, there were moments of pity toward the troops, regardless of their nationality. We would see them suffering under the Iraqi sun, obviously wishing they were somewhere else and somehow, that vulnerability made them seem less monstrous and more human. That time has passed. People look at troops now and see the pictures of Abu Ghraib... and we burn with shame, anger and frustration at not being able to do something.”

As the US has squandered a wealth of international goodwill after Sept. 11 with its unilateral, arrogant, and self-interested foreign policies, so it has misspent the opportunity to really make a difference by handing back to the Iraqi people everything they lost under Saddam. They began by allowing widespread looting, failed to get essential services up and running and appointed a puppet council. Their trigger-happy, often badly trained, soldiers and reservists have gunned down civilians approaching checkpoints, kicked in doors in the middle of the night and tied up small children.

Those so-called purveyors of freedom have fired on demonstrators, closed down newspapers, set up a US propaganda television station and banned some of their Arab media detractors from reporting. Those who take up arms against them to free their own land are called “terrorists”.

So how does the actions of those the US administration refers to as a few bad apples impact on the “War on Terror”? The problem is no matter how many times Bush, Rumsfeld and Powell call those abuses “Un-American”, those who have read a report on US prison conditions in Iraq from the International Red Cross aren’t falling for that argument. The report says that mistreatment (of Iraqis) was “widely tolerated”. Red Cross director Pierre Krahenbuhl says, “We are dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts.”

Arabs inevitably compare the abuse meted out to Iraqi detainees with the kindness shown to the young American soldier Jessica Lynch, captured during the invasion and tended to by Iraqi medical staff. They recall the fuss made by Donald Rumsfeld when captured members of the US military were shown on Iraqi television drinking tea and his outraged invocation of the Geneva Conventions and compare that with his futile attempts to whitewash the brutal misdeeds of his own.

These horrors have served as a recruiting tool for the firebrand Iraqi cleric Moqtada Sadr, whose militia has been offered a bounty should members manage to kidnap a coalition soldier, who, if female, can be used as “a slave,” his spokesman says. As we brace ourselves for worse to come, as predicted by Rumsfeld, we can scarcely imagine more abhorrent images than those already circulating. The US should have borne in mind the adage: When fighting the enemy, be careful you don’t become the enemy you are fighting. But it didn’t and now it’s too late. All it can do now is cut its losses, pull out and work on polishing its image irreparably tarnished by the grotesque leering features of Lynndie England and her equally degenerate uniformed friends.

— Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs and welcomes feedback at morgandewales@yahoo.co.uk