Terror
The images of torture from the US and British prisons in Iraq are terrifying. Beyond the awful degradation and torture they depict, and the shame and anger they must induce in the Arab world, they represent a shocking Western Democracy’s hypocrisy. How can we pretend to stand on the high moral ground when we (our governments, whether we voted for them or not) condone and perpetuate such things? Those, typically right-wing commentators, who seek to draw some sort of moral equivalence between the prison atrocities and the hideous murder of Nick Berg miss the point - Al Qaeda doesn’t pretend to be a moral organisation.
Beyond the symbolic dimension, the practical ramifications of this are equally scary. The US senator Diane Feinstein sums it up perfectly, “If somebody wanted to plan a clash of civilisations, this is how they’d do it.” (Maureen Dowd, How to plan a clash of civilisations, The Age 14-05-2004). The highly sexual nature (almost S&M) of the “softening up” techniques used on the prisoners will be optimally offensive to the Muslim world and will therefore act as a perfect catalyst for another round of radicalisation and recruitment to extremist groups.
The US, British and Australian governments have succeeded in turning the “War on terror” from a fight with an unhinged organisation into an ideological battle with a movement. Every ham-fisted attempt to stomp on local manifestations of this movement infect more with its nihilistic ideology. All my hubristic hopes that the 21st century would be more enlightened and less blood soaked than the 20th are fading rapidly. I simply do not see a tenable way out of this - even without politicians using terror for short-term political capital, every attack will further polarise the general public (hmm, this sounds familiar.)