It Takes an Army to Raze a Child

August 12 2004
Counterbias.com
Cory M. Marshall

Winston Churchill complained of the British navy that it was all rum, sodomy and the lash.  It would seem that this hallmark of service has become somewhat transcendent, given new life through the ground forces of the coalition of the willing.

            In a move that would be endorsed by a Michael Jackson caliphate, the British army in Iraq herded up children to be detained at such never-lands as Abu Ghraib.  One is left to wonder where the rum comes in, although it would hardly be surprising to find that it had been poured on some open wound.

            According to one account, the children were put in positions of humiliation in an effort to entice information from parents whose presence was, naturally, compelled.  According to another, there is video of children being invaded by members of the US forces, accompanied by a reportedly blood curdling soundtrack.  This gives Mr. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” an entirely nefarious underside, an act that’s title could be very easily rendered as something else, using basically the same words. 

            But surely one can’t add misery upon misery and hope to achieve less misery and so neither can one add terror to terror and end up with less terror.  Perhaps someone less sentimental would not see rounding up the citizenry and subjecting it to whatever institutional sadism as terrifying.  However much this whole Abu Ghraib complex is increasingly seeming like frosh week at an ivy league frat house; whatever context it takes to make abuse and molestation under the color of might palatable: this is terror, also.

            Terror has been called a tactic, nothing more than another sling in the armory of stratagem.  Having a war against terror, per se, is as absurd as having a war against tanks.  That would be unheard of, and in a just society, such sentiment would be ridiculed.  Similarly trying to vanquish a nebulous enemy like terror by increasing the aggregate amount of terror is irrational.  It would seem that by not engaging in the tactic, itself, the US would lessen the amount of terror in the world; its repudiation of the tactic would at least shed that one hypocrisy.  Why isn’t this more obvious.

            And why isn’t grabbing up children seen as terror when the Americans do it and the British abet?  But one man’s rapist is another’s hero, yet still another’s villain another’s martyr.  It fits squarely with all of the other absurd appearances of difference and hostility that have been visited upon the world, purportedly in deference to one god or other godhead, incorporeal or corporate.

            And while terror is foisted upon the world through the acts of Islamic ideologues, so terror is foisted upon the American populace through the curious emergence of alerts by the very people who had to hard sell a war when they ought to have been scrutinizing intelligence for action rather than opportunity.  Boldly drawn and bellicose conclusions blare across the pliant media; evidence to follow.  The evidence shows something else, though.

            When there is such a willingness to engage in horrific techniques it gets harder to hope for the best.