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Between Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg
In Dissent, Number One Hundred and Sixty-Five
by Brian S. Wise
12 May 2004

If any of the things alleged by William Pitt turn out to be true - in other words, as heinous as what was done to Nick Berg - I will take to this space and demand the death penalty where applicable, lifetime imprisonment without view of another blue sky for others, unemployment and forced homelessness for whomever should remain. (Not coincidentally, the willingness to do so is what separates some of us here on the Right from some of those there on the Left.)

Meanwhile, Nick Berg’s execution video continues to make the rounds. No better way to explain the thing other than to say it portrays a barbarity and inhumanity unfathomable to stable intellects. Berg sits in front of five hooded captors, one of whom reads a statement before commanding Berg to read one prepared for him: his name, those of his parents and siblings, his city of residence (Philadelphia). Berg is grabbed by the middle captor, a large knife is brandished and brought to his throat; his screams fill the room until his body relents, at which point his head is presented to the camera. Nick Berg’s body was found by an overpass in Baghdad last weekend. He was twenty-six.

Let’s back up. We have developed a difficulty in saying what bothers us most about the prisoner photos. Why? Because to utter that truth lends credence to the idea of Ugly Americanism, and too many of us fear that label more than are willing to accept and speak the truth. But the fact of the matter is, the sorts of humiliations forced onto the prisoners aren’t expected to come from our side of the Iraqi conflict because we are morally superior to our enemies, and are expected to act morally superior when it comes to the treatment of prisoners. Nick Berg’s beheading, so tragic and horrible, is par for the course. And nothing new. Daniel Pearl was beheaded; others have been beheaded.

Now to the Left, where is has been implicitly said that the prisoner photos represent such a great, across-the-board moral failing that the Iraqi effort is a lost cause. William Rivers Pitt wrote, before the release of the Berg video, that this week brought to an end “a week so awful, so terrible, so wrenching that the most basic fabric of that which we believe is good and great – the most basic moral fabric of the United States of America – has been torn bitterly asunder.” More, “The worst, amazingly, is yet to come. A new battery of photographs and videotapes, as yet unreleased, awaits over the horizon of our abused understanding. These photos and videos … are reported to show U.S. soldiers gang raping an Iraqi woman, U.S. soldiers beating an Iraqi man nearly to death, U.S. troops posing, smirks affixed, with decomposing Iraqi bodies, and Iraqi troops under U.S. command raping young boys.”

President Bush and Congress have seen confidential pictures and videos. One assumes these are not confidential materials because they are more of what we have seen; what we have seen seems, as Rush Limbaugh so perfectly suggested, no different than a Skull and Bones initiation. If any of the things alleged by Pitt turn out to be true, I will take to this space and demand the death penalty where applicable, lifetime imprisonment without view of another blue sky for others, unemployment and forced homelessness for whomever should remain. (Not coincidentally, the willingness to do so is what separates some of us here on the Right from some of those there on the Left.)

But until and unless that material proves so horrible, you’ll have to forgive me for not having the desire to dismantle the entire military establishment for the actions of a very small number of soldiers (and probably some in the chain of command), or to fire Rumsfeld, or to impeach Bush. I have seen the Nick Berg video; I have seen the Daniel Pearl video; I have seen the video of the four Americans massacred, their body parts hung from a bridge to burn. I have watched them not because they’re enjoyable, but because they remind me we are fighting a battle for humanity more than for “democracy in the Middle East.” It’s nearly impossible to give a damn about the nude pyramid and the guy on the leash when you’ve seen a man scream until the exact moment his head is removed from his body.