The real explanation for Abu Ghraib, according to many Berkeley students, has something to do with the ease with which this president turns the world into his enemy. Berkeley liberals have always chafed at the heavy-handed moralism implicit in the Bush worldview. Since Bush launched the war on terror three years ago, his war-rally rhetoric has implied that anyone outside of his narrow ideological domain is America’s sworn enemy. But Abu Ghraib makes the stakes seem higher. As we head toward the November election, voters here are taking a hard look at the president’s good versus evil outlook and the effect it’s having on our military overseas.
At first, the actions of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib seemed incomprehensible to Berkeley students. Most of these soldiers were our age–how could do they do something that is so clearly immoral to us? But when we consider that these soldiers are coming from a country that barely distinguishes Iraq from Afghanistan, an Arab from a Sikh or an enemy from a terrorist, the soldiers’ ugly behavior doesn’t seem that hard to explain. Soldiers are internalizing the president’s rhetoric and rationalizing it as true. Our political leaders are preying on the innocence of our young people who take the rhetoric of oppression at face value . They encourage us not to think of Iraqis as human beings. It’s no wonder, then, that average Americans could treat Iraqis so inhumanely.
So the president can keep on offering half-hearted apologies for Abu Ghraib. But if he really wanted to change things, he would stop dividing the world into an overly simplistic battle of good against bad. Many Berkeley students aren’t waiting for that to happen any time soon; they can’t believe this president has any interest in removing the destructively simple moral rhetoric from his foreign policy. The only way to really prove our commitment to Iraq and the flourishing of democracy there, those students think, is to elect new leadership. The president might call us the enemy, but some students here think ousting him from office is the only way to ensure outrages like Abu Ghraib don’t happen again.
