One thing that just occurred to me now, is that many muslims may view the photos of torture and abuse from another perspective, that of preserving traditional Islamic gender roles. In many of the photographs, the same woman is posing with a gesture of “thumbs up”, uniformed in the same uniform as the men, with close cropped hair, and smoking a cigarette, all while posing in front of the hooded, stacked bodies of Iraqi men. Promoting equal rights for women has been a big part of the media campaign of the US war effort, especially in Afghanistan. It adds a real warm, fuzzy dimension to warfare and occupation. I don’t know much about the Arab or Muslim point of view, but it is hard to imagine anyone in the Arab world not taking this seriously and not having serious qualms about dealing with the Americans.
Last night, on Nightline there was a section that talked about how people will obey authority even when it commands that they act against their normal nature, and about how evil can be perpetrated by “normal” people, the point being, it seemed to me, that with regards to the Abu Gharib situation, anyone could have acted the way those guards did. Why is that important? Many of the comments I have heard about this attempt to diminish the seriousness of the issue as if what happened there was frat-like hazing, and that it does not connote brutality otherwise. I’ve also heard others talking about a “double standard” against the US. There is no double standard. There is A standard and it’s called right and wrong.
As someone who did activism around Afghanistan women’s issues way before 9-11, I am totally certain that women’s rights have nothing to do with anyone’s motivations when it comes to the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq. The Clinton administration did nothing but make sympathetic statements about women’s plight under the Taliban, while allowing American oil companies to enter into profitable contracts with them. They definitely cared more about their heroin production, which is not saying much. The Bush administration didn’t give a rat’s ass about what the Taliban did to Afghan women until it became a convenient rationalization to try to add legitimacy to their attack on the country.