The last bandit. Gone too soon.
What is it good for? · 5 May 2004, 15:45 · File under: Reading Hating
I’ve just been reading on the Media Guardian web site about some claims that the photos of Iraqi prisoners being tortured are a hoax. Apparently there’s some bizzare explanation that they were actually taken by MoD investigators who were reconstructing scenes of alleged abuse taking place. Interesting idea. What seems more strange in some ways though is why anyone should care either way. It’s not hard to see why the Daily Mirror would want such an image on their front page, and it ain’t got anything to do with right or wrong… it does seem like they’ve got a little carried away though. On their web site they publish some of these supposedly ‘controversial’ images with bizzare straplines. One says WRONG: Troop boots Iraqi. So it’s okay to shoot him, drop bombs on him, blow up his home and family, but somehow a quick kick is going too far? Or what about TERRIFYING: Soldier puts gun to prisoner’s head for another? What? Really? A Gun? To the head of the enemy? Oh. My. God. Surely not. What could these beasts be thinking of?
It’s got nothing to do with whether war is right or wrong, or even if this war is right or wrong – it’s just about basic common logic. Whatever way you look at it, a bunch of people have (for whatever reason) decided to become soldiers and have been trained to kill by their government. Then the same government tells them who the enemy is and sends them off to fight them. Let’s just roll that back for a second… yep, fight them. Then they do that and it’s ‘vile’. Any more vile than sending them off to do it in the first place? I don’t know… but I think it was a bit unrealistic to expect it was going to be all handshakes and popping your head over the trench to share fags and play football with the Hun. It’s dull, it’s childish it’s tedious and it’s more than a little stupid and the Daily Mirror really should just go away now…
Given the choice (not that it’s a choice anyone should ever have to make or have made for them) would you rather be a prisoner of war or a casualty of war? Would you rather have a gun put to your head or a bullet put through your head? And I wonder which of the big tough boys at the Mirror would, in that situation (where getting a piece of information out of a ‘prisoner’ might just take you a step closer to reaching the objectives handed to you by your country and therefore ending the war and letting you get home to your wife and kids…) would resist the temptation to lash out? Or knowing that the person on the floor in front of you represents the ‘regime’ that’s behind a bunch of your buddies being killed… you gonna stop that leg swinging out and the boot going in, especially knowing he ain’t going to retailiate. Right? No, of course not. Acceptable? No, of course not. Inevitable? Certainly… it’s not exactly rocket science is it? If you wind a couple of dogs up and throw them in a ring they’ll fight. If you hold one of them down the other one ain’t going to stop fighting. Because they’re fighting for survival. A boxer might not stick the boot in when his opponent is on the floor because it’s sport and it wouldn’t be, er, sporting to do that would it?
My favourite bit though, is the Media Guardian quote from Colonel David Black claiming that one inconsistency was that the lorry pictured was a Bedford MK. “The MK … was not deployed by the army to Iraq at all. That vehicle can’t operate with the fuel that was available in Iraq.”
fait accompli.
