Government will look for a scapegoat

By JAMES P. PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
War is hell, so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that being a prisoner of war can sometimes be hell, too.
However, even as facts from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison come trickling out, it's possible to reach two conclusions -- and to make one prediction.
First, the Pentagon seems to have forgotten the reason military organization was created in the first place: so that command and discipline could be regularized, so that everyone, from top to bottom, would feel part of the same force and live by the same rules. The extensive use of civilian contractors, who typically do their own thing even as they are paid far more money than those in uniform, is an affront to the egalitarian all-for-one, one-for-all ethos of the soldier.
Such affronts are compounded when these contractors insert themselves into the normal chain of command, especially when the contractors' mission is interrogation -- which, shall we say, can be "messy." According to reports, civvies from CACI and Titan were giving orders to the American MP's at Abu Ghraib, even as Army higher-ups were told to butt out and look the other way.
Warning signs
All these claims and counterclaims need to be sorted out -- and they will be, on front pages throughout the world -- but warning signs have been gathering for a long time. In 2002, it was revealed that employees of another private contractor, DynCorp, had been running forced-sex shows and prostitution rings in Bosnia, right under the noses of U.S. peacekeepers. Some DynCorp employees were fired, damages were paid, but the privatization trend continued. Today in Iraq the U.S. military is a kind of public-private mutant, and we've just learned that this mutation, whatever its other virtues, can cause problems that ripple far beyond Iraq.
In the words of Rana Sweis, a journalist writing for The Jordan Star, "To the Arab mind, physical torture is preferable to sexual humiliation." Indeed, her newspaper is now closely chronicling the fate of the 1,000 Jordanians believed to be in U.S. custody in Iraq.
Second, the United States is now seeing a painful consequence of its decision to operate in defiance of the United Nations. The U.N., of course, is an object of scorn in the minds of many Americans; without a doubt, it deserves some of that scorn, as the unfolding "oil-for-food" scandal demonstrates. But on the other hand, the U.N., for better or for worse, is representative of the rest of the world. So if the institution seems anti-American, that's because most of the world is anti-American.
Global study
A study of international public opinion released March 16 by the Pew Research Center concluded, "A year after the war in Iraq, discontent with America and its policies has intensified rather than diminished." Moreover, "perceptions of American unilateralism remain widespread in European and Muslim nations."
Many Americans, of course, don't care. The United States is doing what's right, they say, and that's that. But now we see one consequence of this approach, which has left us with few allies -- and no Muslim countries -- bearing any real burden in Iraq, including the extraordinarily sensitive work of interrogating prisoners in an occupied country. Thus it was that only Americans and Britons have been tagged as the villains in the world-public's mind; here were no other faces in the photos. And now, without help from the United Nations, the United States will have a hard time finding political "cover" as the photo-storm howls across the planet.
So to a prediction: As President Bush scrambles to do damage control, the White House will send out word that it wants "results" -- defined as convictions and heavy punishment. Right now, possible suspects are hiring lawyers, already pleading their cases on TV. But the government is going to shock and awe its underlings, looking for the right goat to scape, and due process be damned.
How do I know this? Because it's happened before. If you're curious as to one place when and where, rent the movie "Breaker Morant," depicting the investigation and prosecution of crimes during the Boer War. Most likely, nothing much has changed.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service