Wow, we are smooth!

LINK

I was really impressed when I heard we were going to destroy Abu Ghraib prison. Finally, the Bush administration is going to do something right, I thought. But I read into this article and I find we're going to replace one prison with another. It is unclear whether the site of the new prison will be nearby. However, an act like tearing down a symbol of oppression and evil like Abu Ghraib prison is a symbolic act, and the symbolism has to be right- the symbolism here is not right, not right at all.

Symbolism is important to the actions of and occupier/liberator nation. This is not to say that we should concern ourselves with public relations above all else, but presenting oneself with careless symbolism can make political success impossible and military success meaningless.

After all, the fact that the recently exposed torture (or "abuse") occured in Abu Ghraib, one of the primary symbols of Saddam's brutality, accentuates its ugliness and begs comparison to the previous regime. This salts the wound. Even Coalition use of Saddam's palaces as operational centers, although not without pragmatic justification, sends an ugly message. If these apparent p.r. boners weren't intentional, then they are evidence of incompetence for which heads should have rolled. If they were intentional- if there was a conscious decision to show that the Americans in Iraq were going to be as hard-assed as Saddam- then we are little better than thugs, and I am deeply embarrased.

***

There remain more than a few voices in the American chattering- and screaming- classes that think that the only way to "win" in Iraq is to be as brutal as our predecessor. That the answer to insurgency is the type of brutality that has characterized counterinsurgency in the Middle East for at least the past half century- Egypt, Syria, Israel, Iraq.... You do not build a democracy by torturing insurgents, by enacting collective punishment, by bombing population centers. And after all, warbloggers, that's what we're there for, right? After all, save for a disputed, decade-old sarin container, the WMD rationale is a wash. It is sad, really, that so many otherwise normal people think that brutalizing Iraqis in the same sort of ways that created Al Qaeda's brains (Ayman al Zawahiri) is going to win this war on terror.