Reflection on Abu Ghraib

By the Rev. Brian J. Kiely
Member of the Board of Directors,
Canadian Unitarian Council

May 12, 2004

They have been impossible to avoid, those unsettling pictures from Iraq.

I am not a media junkie, but thanks to Canadian newspapers and both Canadian and American television, it's been impossible to not glimpse at least a few of them flashing by.

And having glimpsed them, it's equally impossible to avoid thinking about them. They haunt. Why is that? There have been horrible pictures of the dead and injured coming out of Iraq for a year now. They don't seem to be as powerful or as disgusting. But then we have been seeing dead bodies since Matthew Brady photographed the American Civil War.

Perhaps corpses are less upsetting because we never see the dead in the act of dying, or being killed. We seldom know exactly how it happened or who specifically did this harm. We tend to distance ourselves from the dead. But here we have living, breathing human beings - fathers, sons, brothers. We can't ignore their humanity or their humiliation. What's worse we can also see their torturers gloating triumphantly, proud at having crushed another human being.

Bombs and bullets kill bodies. That's terrible. But in these photos we witness the murder of souls. Somehow that seems much worse. It is impossible to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of another person and commit such an atrocity. These are acts that kill two souls, those of captor and captive both. It is impossible to affirm our first principle and not be horrified.

The majority of Canadians have opposed this war from the outset. No one had any special affection for Saddam, but there was widespread disbelief that this war was about anything more than oil, profit and perhaps presidential grudges. I suppose there has even been the odd outburst of malicious glee watching Mr. Bush's house of cards crumble as lies were revealed.

But aside from general expressions of horror and disgust, there has been very little Canadian America-bashing over the prison scandal. Several years ago there was a smaller scale but similar incident of torture involving Canadian “peacekeepers” in Somalia. A young man died, much to our shame and discredit. And leading Canadian bestseller lists a few months ago was a book by our former top military leader in Rwanda. Gen. Romeo D'Allaire had a breakdown over the U.N.'s inability to prevent the genocide. We can't point fingers. Both stories bring awareness that the idea of a good or moral war is patently absurd. War is nothing less than the failure of evolution and civilization. Soldiers giving candy to local children cannot hide the essential immorality of war. It debases victor and vanquished equally exacting a terrible physical and spiritual price from those who fight and from those around whom it is fought.

The only thing that will be sadder than those haunting images will be allowing the blame to stop with the torturers and their military superiors. It is the institution and culture of war that is to blame, along with the political masters who “let slip the dogs of war”.

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