Abu Ghraib

Let's do a little word association.

Abu Graib.

What comes to mind?

Here is what Reuters pictures:

Abu Ghraib prison, a symbol of terror for Iraqis under Saddam Hussein which later became notorious for the abuse of prisoners by U.S. guards, is to be turned into a warehouse, Iraq's justice minister said on Friday.

Jeff Goldstein has found a convert in me with his pleadings that words and their specific meaning greatly matter. In this paragraph, author Mariam Karouny explains that Abu Ghraib was a symbol under Saddam Hussein, but implies that it was in actuality notorious when some idiot guards stupidly humiliated a bunch of prisoners.

Under Saddam Hussein, the building wasn't a symbol. It was actually a place where over 4,000 people there were executed for the crime of not submitting to Saddam.

Under U.S. control, Abu Ghraib was the site that was run by a bunch of morons, all which have been properly punished under the law for their transgressions. However, it is a symbol for the Left of the "immoral and illegal" war that is supposidly indicative of decay from the top all the way down. Those whom have pushed this meme from the beginning (and that includes some on the right such as Andrew Sullivan and Greg Djerejian) have without any actual evidence, libeled the entire administration for various reasons whether geniune or disingenuine. Because of this, the perception of bad-faith on the part of our leadership not only leads to Abu Graib, but also to the "colossal disaster" in the occupation stage post-invasion.

Regardless of how much they have been able to make stick, the effect of trying to shift perception from actuality, the real history has been buried. Saddam Hussein had murdered 4,000 people there, and before the Coalition invaded and deposed him, not a single person was going to be punished for those "human rights" abuse. Amnesty International was toothless in dealing with a dictator that would put a gun to your head and pull the trigger without even a twinge in his conscience.

Again, I don't want to minimize the transgressions of the U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib either. But Jules from Pulp Fiction very crudely explains the scale in which to put the American transgressions versus Saddam's. Sorry for the vulgarity of this, but I can find no better reference that this that strikes as close to the point:

Ain't no f--kin' ballpark neither. Now look, maybe your method of massage differs from mine, but, you know, touchin' his wife's feet, and stickin' your tongue in her Holiest of Holies, ain't the same f--kin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same f--kin' sport. Look, foot massages don't mean s--t.

In the end, this is yet another example of the other front in this war--the soft underbelly of the West. How far has the West sunk into it's self-loathing where many consider mass murder by an oppressive dictator to be a lesser offense to human kind than those by a few dummies who are now in behind bars?