The images of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners is making political waves, and is forcing a re-think of the US Middle East policy, writes Mohamed Hakki from Washington On Saturday 8 May, The Financial Times captured the crisis America is going through with a very telling cartoon. It showed a bomb hitting the White House -- a bomb in the shape of a TV set showing the photograph of Lynndie England holding an Iraqi prisoner by a leash. Isn't it ironic that one picture proved to be more powerful than all the tanks, the weapons, the Apache helicopters, the planes, the thousand-pound bombs, and all the armies of the empire? Now it is the empire which is completely naked. I was heartened and refreshed when I watched the senators and congressmen grilling Donald Rumsfeld mercilessly for six hours. But with all due respect and admiration for Senator McCain and Lindsay Graham and others, the only aim in their minds was to pin down those responsible for the atrocity. Not a single question was asked about what has gone wrong with the American people. No soul-searching about the kids who went to fight for America and all it stands for, and who ended up behaving like depraved beasts. I remember in the 1960s, shortly after I first came to the US, a student climbed to the clock tower of the University of Texas campus and started shooting his peers, killing several of them. Within hours -- not even days -- the whole country was in agony, soul-searching and analysing over what went wrong. The same thing happened later in New York when Katie Genove was being stabbed repeatedly by an assailant. Each time she was stabbed, she screamed for help, yet no one called the police, not one person came to help her. Again, people, social scientists, psychologists filled hundreds of pages of newspapers and took up endless hours of airtime, both on radio and TV, trying to divine what is wrong with us. And the aim of Michael Moore's excellent movie about the Columbine high school shooting was to answer this question: what is wrong with us? The subject this time is the Abu Ghraib prison. But there was not a single question about the prevailing culture which produced human beings who seek pleasure in the sexual humiliation of Arab captives. No probing questions. Could such behaviour be the result of the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim culture which has been building up for years and is supported by the media and Hollywood? The story that these are "rogue elements" and "contractors" who are not representative of the military is not something which will be believed in the Arab world. I refuse to believe that these are acts of deep- seated racism. The overwhelming majority of Americans abhor racism. But as the brilliant Egyptian novelist Adhaf Soueif said: "Those photographs have confirmed people's belief that the US and Britain are not in Iraq as an act of good will." There have been reports of US troops outside Falluja discussing the different ways to kill people, talking of the "rat's nest" that needs cleaning out. Some will say soldiers will be soldiers, but that very language has been used by neo-cons at the heart of the US administration; both Kenneth Adelman and Paul Wolfowitz have spoken of "snakes" and "draining the swamps" in the "uncivilised parts of the world". The US administration has linked Iraq with terrorism and Al-Qa'eda despite the fact that the CIA and all the government branches failed to provide a shred of evidence to prove this claim. In his book, Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke says that the US received no threat of terrorism from Saddam Hussein over the 10 years prior to the invasion. Yet this is what the rogue group inside the administration continued to claim for the 10 years before the war. Nobody in the mainstream media questioned these claims or the ulterior motives for making them. This rogue group inside the Department of Defense was named "The Counter Terrorism Evolution Group" by its creator Douglas Feith, the under-secretary of defense for policy. They exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to justify the war, and they succeeded. In fact, when George Tenet, director of the CIA, delivered his speech at Georgetown University in March about 9/11, every single student who asked questions afterwards asked him about the rogue group -- the rogue intelligence unit within the Department of Defense and their conclusions about Iraq's link to Bin Laden. He vehemently denied their "influence" on the president, saying he himself briefed Mr Bush every morning. So this sinister pro-Israeli group was widely known to everybody throughout the US. In fact, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is now investigating whether this unit exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to justify the war. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is precisely what Senator Ernest Hollings from South Carolina wrote in an op-ed piece on 7 May. He said, "of course there were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was no threat. So, why invade a sovereign country?" He supplied the answer: "President Bush's policy to secure Israel." He went on to say, "led by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Charles Krauthammer, for years there has been a domino school of thought that the way to guarantee Israel's security is to spread democracy in the area." Wolfowitz wrote that, "the United States may not be able to lead countries through the door of democracy, but where that door is locked by a totalitarian deadbolt, American power may be the only way to open it up." And on another occasion: Iraq as "the first Arab democracy... would cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran, across the whole Arab world". Every president since 1947 has made a futile attempt to help Israel negotiate peace. But no leader capable of making a binding agreement has surfaced from among the Palestinians. President Bush realised his negotiation efforts would be no better. He came to office with one thought only -- to be re-elected. But the truth is that no US leadership could offer the Palestinians a fair deal. The only two presidents who came close to understanding the Palestinian plight and felt their pain were Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Ever since 1967, the Arabs felt that in order to exist at all in the Middle East they had to co-exist with Israel. They have come to that collective conclusion and declared it many times. The Palestinians agreed when Yasser Arafat recognised Israel's right to exist in secure and recognised borders. Before and after, there was the King Fahd plan, as well as the Crown Prince Abdullah plan which was introduced during the Arab League Summit in Beirut in April 2001. The Arab problem has always been the final map -- where Israel finally stops grabbing land. But how should they co-exist? As peace-loving neighbours, benefiting from each others' culture, or, with animosity and hatred and continued destruction and violence? The Israeli peace camp understands this. A substantial segment of the American Jews understand this and yearn for this. I listened to Akiva Elder of Ha'aretz newspaper saying that he, and all liberal Jews, felt betrayed when he heard Bush giving Sharon the carte blanche in Gaza. The liberal Jews know that both people can live together in peace under a set of mutually acceptable rules, and not as the occupiers and the occupied. The whole world sees how the Palestinians live in the West Bank. President Bush doesn't. Condoleezza Rice, who will be meeting Ahmed Qurei, doesn't either. I listened to the parents of Rachel Corrie, the young idealistic girl who was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer because she was protesting peacefully against Israeli occupation. I heard them saying, along with another idealistic American Jew, Adam Shapiro: "We are all Palestinian now." But there may be change in the air. That sane, mature and experienced voice may well prevail. Most of the former diplomats who served in the Arab world are hoping that maybe Colin Powell will be empowered again to save the administration's face in the Arab world. I am told that John Negroponte, due to take over from Paul Bremer in Iraq on 30 June, has done so on condition that Douglas Feith take his hands off Iraq completely. Difficult to believe, but there we are. Also, Martin Indyk is now telling us in The Washington Post that Bush asked Sharon to postpone the Gaza disengagement plan until after the US elections. Senator Hollings has sound advice. He says, "In the Middle East, terrorism is a unique problem. It can be defeated by diplomacy and negotiations, not militarily. Here, might does not make right. Right makes right." Take the advice Mr President.
