Abu Ghraib

Jim Kunstler thinks the photos are depressingly close to a cross between America's Funniest Home Videos and GI's Gone Wild. Barbara Ehrenreich says Abu Ghraib has broken her heart and taught her she's had "illusions about women":

I'm not the only one wrestling with that assumption today. Mary Jo Melone, a columnist for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, wrote on May 7: "I can't get that picture of England [pointing at a hooded Iraqi man's genitals] out of my head because this is not how women are expected to behave. Feminism taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal from men, we were morally superior to them."

In the New York Times, Susan Sontag cites the Geneva Convention:

Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession." (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3 -- common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 -- and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention declares, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors.

What seems clear is the Paul Wolfowitz's ideas that might makes right and that we could quickly and easily turn Iraq into a Western democratic state were both wrong. It's disturbing that we, Americans, took these pictures; that we show off with these pictures; and that at least some of us think destroying the Geneva Convention — for ourselves as well as others — isn't much different than spring break in Cancun. It's a reflection of our struggle to find our moral center now that we've said goodbye to the old leadership class and the individual is more responsible than ever.