From: ‘ FROM TROY TO ABU GHRAIB: THE PRINCIPLES OF VICTORY'

By the Rev. Clifford M. Reed
Unitarian Minister for Ipswich, Bedfield and Framlingham, United Kingdom

A year ago the downfall of a vile and bloody tyrant was greeted with euphoria by most of Iraq's people. Saddam Hussein's regime had murdered hundreds of thousands of its own people. It had tortured without mercy, in the Abu Ghraib prison amongst others. It had used chemical ‘weapons of mass destruction' against the Kurds of northern Iraq and against its Iranian neighbours. It had waged war against two Muslim countries and butchered countless Muslims from amongst its own population. It had allowed its own people to bear the brunt of UN sanctions while maintaining itself in luxury and excess. And it had done all this without any great protest from either the Arab world or the West. But when Saddam and his regime were toppled a year ago, Iraqis celebrated, leaving the protests to those remote from the realities of Saddam's brutality and corruption.

But the euphoria was short-lived, as it usually is in such situations. Iraqis wanted rid of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen because they wanted freedom, human rights and the ability to choose who should govern them – and to get rid of them if they governed badly. They appreciated the fact that someone had finally acted to remove their tyrannical ruler, as opposed to passing ineffectual resolutions in New York and elsewhere then doing nothing about them. They even appreciated the fact that someone was going to help reconstruct a country shattered by wars and misrule. But what they did not appreciate or anticipate was the lengthy occupation of their country by foreign troops.

The sense of humiliation that they felt soon began to rankle, especially when the promised improvements were slow to arrive. Nevertheless, opposition to the Coalition was not as widespread or as general as was often portrayed. Specific groups (some not even Iraqis) in specific areas commenced violent resistance, their efforts much inflated by the coverage given by a sensation-hungry news media with agendas of their own. But then came those pictures from the notorious prison of Abu Ghraib.

As Prime Minister Tony Blair said, 'We went to Iraq to stop this sort of thing, not to do it ourselves.' The moral case for the war was based on the premise that Saddam Hussein posed a real and continuing threat to the rights, liberties and peace of his own people and of their neighbours. It would, of course, be naïve to suppose that the moral case was the only factor that led to war, or even a major one. Nevertheless, it was the moral case that led many people, myself included, to give the war our heavy-hearted support.

But if you claim to be acting on a moral basis, you have an obligation to act morally yourself. If you claim to be acting out of concern for human rights, you have an obligation to respect them yourself. If you claim to be acting on behalf of a long-oppressed and dishonoured people, you have an obligation to honour them and not oppress them yourself.

The revelations about the systematic degradation, abuse, torture and even killing of Iraqi prisoners in Coalition custody have undermined, perhaps totally, the moral case for the war and continued occupation. It is not that what has happened in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere equals Saddam's atrocities in either scale or extent. It is that they have been perpetrated by an occupying force which claimed a moral superiority over the regime it overthrew and replaced.

Those responsible have besmirched the name of their countries and their cause. They have made the peaceful transition to restored Iraqi rule infinitely more difficult. They have put the lives of their fellow soldiers and fellow citizens at risk – as we saw in the sickening on-line murder of Nicholas Berg by masked fanatics with as much relation to Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to Christianity. They have confirmed in many Muslim minds the image of the West first established by the Crusaders nearly a thousand years ago, when they took Jerusalem and slaughtered every Muslim and Jew they found there.

And just as the events of that time have passed into myth and gained a dangerous potency in the Muslim world, so too have the events of the past year at Abu Ghraib. Apologies, inquiries and courts martial cannot undo the damage done by those images of ritual humiliation and cruelty – reproduced a million times on the Internet, on television and in newspapers. And as we have seen with one British tabloid, it doesn't even matter if some of the images are exposed as fakes.

However untypical and aberrant the behaviour of the troops in Abu Ghraib may – hopefully – have been, it has probably rendered the continued occupation of Iraq untenable. And it has soured relations between the Western and Islamic worlds with far-reaching and dangerous implications, not only in Iraq and other Muslim countries, but here in our own society as well.

Magnanimity and mercy in victory is an ideal we uphold. This principle is not only morally right, it is also right in a practical sense. To degrade and mistreat those you have defeated is to store up a whirlwind of bitterness and resentment that you will reap one day. And to degrade, mistreat and even kill those who are in your care as well as your custody, is in gross violation of all that we like to think our free and democratic societies stand for. ‘Blessed are those who show mercy,' said Jesus, ‘mercy shall be shown to them.' (Matthew 5:7) ‘Always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the law and the prophets.' (Matthew 7:12)

And as the Qur'an says: ‘Whoever killed a human being…should be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind; and…whoever saved a human life should be regarded as though he had saved all mankind.' (Sura 5).

The actions of a few in Iraq have tainted, undermined and betrayed the principles that we originally claimed to be upholding there. This doesn't mean, of course, that all Coalition servicemen and servicewomen should be tarred with the same brush as those who have actually offended against the human rights of their prisoners. It doesn't mean that a basis of truth that is bad enough in itself, should be further elaborated into malicious and self-serving propaganda by politicians, media or terrorists. And it doesn't mean that the offences committed under the aegis of the Coalition can be used as retrospective cover or excuse for the crimes of Saddam Hussein.

But it does mean that those who claim to act and to fight in the name of humane and righteous principles must, even under the pressures of war and especially in the event of victory, do their utmost to abide by them.

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