Perhaps We Haven’t Seen Enough of War

It wasn’t you, of course, and I’m sure it wasn’t me, no sir, but somebody -- an awful lot of American somebodies -- saw those photos of Iraqis posed in some sicko game of naked Muslim Twister, humiliated with hoods and leashes, and for one exultant instant felt:

Right on! Murdering thugs. Those creeps have it coming -- after what they did to our guys.

Maybe, in the next instant, the somebodies felt bad about feeling so good. But for just that flash, those weren’t Iraqis they saw in the photos -- not men with faces and families. They were all just The Iraqi. The bad guy. The eternal “other.” The enemy.

That’s what war does to us. It’s a difference of degree, not of kind, between those blood-slaked Iraqis mugging merrily for the camera in the foreground as the charred and mutilated bodies of Americans swung from a bridge in Fallouja, and the uniformed American soldiers mugging happily for the camera behind their handiwork, the posed piles of naked Iraqis -- and then to the Stateside Americans who thought, Yeah, give it to ‘em.

One such American’s comments were posted on a self-described conservative website: “Most of these prisoners are murdering scum who would sell their children into slavery for the right price, and we’re getting our didies twisted because we imagine there’s a risk some of them might be (oh, no!) humiliated?”

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Maybe you took no delight at all in those pictures. Not many people did. They are at least as degrading to the soldiers who posed for them as to the prisoners shown in them.

But back in 1993, didn’t you feel a little “You go, girl” oomph for Ellie Nesler, who walked into court in the Gold Country town of Jamestown and sent five .22 slugs into the man on trial for sodomizing her little boy at church camp? Maybe you even bought one of the bumper stickers, “Nice Shooting, Ellie.”

And in 1988, didn’t you want to hurl the remote control across the room in disgust when Mike Dukakis was asked in a presidential debate if he’d still oppose the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered? His bloodless, heartless answer was that, Why, yes he would, and off he went on some clinical ramble about deterrence and drug wars -- when anybody with warm blood would have said, Hell, yes, I’d want to run him over with my snowblower and dump him in a wood-chipper while he was still breathing. Who wouldn’t? But we’re a nation of laws and not men, and we don’t hand criminals over to victims, we hand them over to the courts, and that’s what makes this country different.

Different, implying better. The big difference between good guys and bad guys is that good guys play by the rules. Sure, it’s hard for a person to meet that standard, much less a country. This country often gets to make the rules, too, and still, it isn’t always good at meeting them (hello, Iran-Contra).

But flying planes into buildings, barbecuing American civilians -- we believe that’s what THEY do, not what WE do, hence all the ethical agonizing over these photos, as the back-and-forthing on that website shows:

* Yes, the Islam-O-Nazis are murdering dirtbags, but don’t defend the Americans who engaged in this perverted and disgusting behavior.

* Doing this makes us no better than them. And while I’m not suggesting that we treat these prisoners with kid gloves, a line has to be drawn somewhere.

* Through their cultural lens, this is 1,000 times worse than the burnings and hangings on the bridge. I’m not saying I agree with the islemmings, not one bit! But our military success in Iraq depends on understanding their culture enough not to commit any fatal errors. This one breaks the needle on the gauge.

* We are no better than the Iraqis at this point, and that saddens me.

* Who is included in your “we”?

* Look at the big picture, which is the struggle for middle eastern “hearts and minds.” We come over to give them “freedom,” and this is the image of American “freedome” that they will remember.

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Paul Fussell is a World War II infantryman, an intellectual contrarian and one of my favorite authors; he wrote, among other works, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” which, if you’re short on time, spares you the trouble of reading it -- you can get mad over the title alone.

Fussell’s hustling on a deadline on his book about Patton, so he couldn’t talk to me about the Iraqi photos. But he’s written about what happens when war is “systematically sanitized and Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied,” for home-front consumption.

And he was speaking of World War II, stripped of its horrors by propagandism that made “our” conduct -- like boiling the flesh off the heads of Japanese soldiers to send the skulls home for souvenirs -- acceptable, and “their” conduct -- like the famous photo of a World War II Australian flier, bound and blindfolded, kneeling in the dirt as a Japanese soldier swings a sword in the downstroke that will behead him -- the handiwork of savages.

Gen. Robert E. Lee believed that it’s a good thing war is so terrible, “or we should grow too fond of it.” That’s why I think we haven’t seen too many photos out of Iraq -- we haven’t seen enough.

When you spray Lysol and spread flags across the landscape of war, when you Rockwellize and Disneyfy it, when you hide the coffins and the legless and the armless and the sightless soldiers to the point that some digital photos of naked prisoners are the most appalling images of war you’ve seen -- if you don’t know how terrible war really is, then you might in fact grow fond of it, and find it all the easier to wage the next time.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt. [email protected]. Her earlier columns can be read at latimes.com/morrison.