Like everyone else, I have been overwhelmed by the efforts of every media pundit, blogger and letter-writer to affix meaning to the photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
I wonder if in our collective and individual desire to make sense of these outrages, we are covering the pictures in so many post-it notes we can no longer see them?
The need to understand is natural. The hunger to interpret, healthy. But too often in the last two weeks, these graphic images have been twisted to fit into pre-existing world views.
The left knows the right caused them. The right knows the left caused them. Many Arabs expect no better of Americans, many Americans know the Arabs are worse. If there has been humiliation, it isnt the fault of the west. It is Muslims fault, writes Cal Thomas of the allegedly abused prisoners.
The teenage boy who served me in a shop today said Arabs have no respect for human life. I said, thats nonsense, most Iraqis are just like you and me. But the Nicholas Berg decapitation video, which the boy had seen on the computer network at his rural high school, had persuaded him otherwise. He mimed for me how the killer had sawed at Bergs neck.
I wont watch the Berg video there is no hope in it. It might make me feel like striking back which must be exactly what its perpetrators want Americans to feel.
One blog quoted military sources arguing that the American assault on Fallujah, which cost uncounted Iraqi lives and 100 American lives, was not a military decision at all but a political one, made purely in response to the video footage of the four torched US security workers. Escalation through images.
But the Abu Ghraib images are different: they humble us, de-escalate.
Religions of the Word and the Book have periodically banished images altogether. Rumsfeld must wish he could do as Moses and Mohammed did in their day.
The falling towers, the videos of Osama, the Berg slaying. Isnt there something un-Islamic about using images to the extent that al-Qaida has done? I dont know. But images have power. That has been understood better, perhaps, by al-Qaida than by Donald Rumsfeld.
Great military powers like old-time religions try to control everything, especially the right side of the brain, where images are processed. We can only hope that digital photography becomes even more miniaturised, ubiquitous, uncontrollable. This is how we build democracy uncovering one abuse at a time.
Then I read the rumour perhaps old news by the time you read this that the US governments Arab TV network Alhurra, is going to show videos of beheadings, scourgings, and maimings by Saddams torturers.
Dont watch them. Its old news, that humans do these things. What we want to know is that there is something better. Something to aspire to. We want to know that democracy can work. That people are no longer castrated, burned alive and lynched by laughing white American crowds as they were so few decades ago.
That is why the photos of Americans abusing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib were more shocking and depressing to me than photos of worse things done by Saddam or al-Qaida. There was no hope in Saddam.
There is only hope in the abuse photos if they cause enough outrage. The Iraqi people need to know that Bush was compelled to apologise and change policy. That will give the Iraqi majority hope the evidence that democracy can work. That will encourage them to march and organise against their own oppressors: the Islamist militants and, yes, the American occupiers.
On 11 May, over 1,000 Shiites marched in Najaf to tell Muqtada al-Sadr to leave town. Lets hope they succeed. Then they can go on to demanding the Yankees go home. The right should welcome this as much as the left.
In a recent column, David Brooks, conservative columnist on the New York Times, argued that For Iraqis to win, the US must lose. He gets it.
By definition, democracy cannot be imposed from above or from without. Power given is not power won. Only power won has dependability, because it has to be won again, and again, and again.
Recently, I picked up an old copy of Vogue. An article explained that happily married people have healthier immune systems and their cuts heal faster. Such studies are powerful because they illuminate how our psyches are reflected by and embedded in the minute molecular structures of our bodies. I can believe it. In the last year I have had cancer and seen the best of the US medical system. It has saved my life. I have seen photos of my insides you would not believe, taken by CT, PET and MRI scans.
So America is a country where people are getting ever more fine tuned about their personal health. Its illegal to smoke almost everywhere. But when it comes to dealing with international terrorism, oil supplies, dictatorships, we are rough, tough and killing civilians by the hundreds, abusing prisoners, firing weapons that do more than disturb the minute molecular structures of bodies.
Isnt there a disconnection here? Dont we realise that creating democracy is as fine-tuned a skill as curing cancer? What was most astonishing was how little everyone concerned thought about the damage those photos, loose in the world, could do. But thank goodness for them. They have given us a chance to demonstrate democracy and rule of law in real time. We cannot afford to blow it.
(Note: My thanks to openDemocracy reader Erin Leonard for some of the links and background for this column)
