The stage-managed toppling of ex-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's statue will not, after all, be the image defining the Iraq war. Like the famous photo of the young girl on fire running naked to escape the horror of napalm in the Vietnam War, the photographs emerging from Abu Ghraib prison will be the icons defining this most ill-advised and ill-planned war. They have managed to combine everything that is most depraved in victors by inflicting the worst possible humiliations and indignity in the Arab world: the grotesque pyramid of naked bodies in suggestive poses while soldiers ham it up for the camera; a woman guard with a naked prisoner on a leash; forcing men in hoods to kneel before the guards in the presence of their wives and children.
The inhuman cruelty is exceeded only by incompetence beyond belief. The conquerors have sunk to the same level of depravity as the thugs they sought to displace. Yet the reactions within America also point to the fallacy of imposing moral equivalence between Hussein's regime and the U.S. administration.
It is worth making four arguments: