The Associated Press reported
on January 28th that at least twice in recent months
the U.S Army in Iraq has seized and jailed the wives
of suspected insurgents in hopes of ‘leveraging’ their
husbands into surrender. One of the reported cases involved
the imprisonment of a young mother nursing a baby.
We can concede that war in any form is a messy business
indeed, and that pure allegiance to democratic ideals
in such circumstances (if a ‘pure’ allegiance
exists at all) is near impossible. In addition, while
this isn’t a case of tit-for-tat, insurgents and
terrorists in Iraq have, most certainly, made no qualms
of the fact that they will quite happily kidnap and,
sometimes, kill innocents –the recent January 7
abduction of American journalist Jill Carroll comes to
mind- in order to secure their own leverage. In the case
of Carroll’s abduction, her kidnapper’s principal
demand was that the United States and Iraqi governmental
authorities free all female Iraqi detainees.
But at the same time, we would hope that the United
States, a nation eager to wave the flags of freedom and
liberty is not engaging in a war in which they are willing
to ‘play to the level of the opposition’,
for after all this opposition has no interest in democracy,
or at the very least a democracy dictated to them by
an occupying nation. Desperate times do indeed call for
desperate measures, and there’s little doubt that
in such ‘just’ wars as WWI and WWII the United
States and her allies likely employed arguably questionable
practices to reach their goals that have not always made
it into the history books or popular, romanticized versions
of events. When, in their rhetoric, George Bush and his
administration place such a high onus of expectation
upon the democratic practices and ideals of other nations,
the United States must be mindful of so tainting such
considerations by their own actions as to hollow the
message. Elsewhere in the Middle East, Hamas’ recent
gains in a fair and democratic election have certainly
now brought to bear the issue of United States rhetoric
and idealism on the one hand versus United States policy
and regional considerations on the other that override
the recognition of an extremist group’s popular
victory made through just means.
Regardless of the initial or real motives for entering
Iraq, and regardless of the steps that must be taken
in war to secure ultimate goals, the United States must
never lose sight of maintaining in word and in action
the ideals they believe –or, if we are to be cynical,
that they are at least selling- as being integral to
the good of all people. Should they fail in setting the
standards by their own behaviour for the value and truth
of democracy, they will have become just another hammer
of power in the annals of history subjugating an enemy
nation’s population to their will and form of government.
Ezy Reading is out every Monday.
