It has been two weeks since the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the TV screens and news stands. Images of atrocious forms of abuse committed against Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers have since been making news day in day out. They also prompted a torrent of opinion pieces that used the scandal as an opportunity to roundly criticise the US occupation of Iraq. Throughout the week, commentators in the Arab press levelled a long list of accusations against Washington, most arguing that America fought an illegitimate war with Iraq, without support from the UN, for reasons that have nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction that were never found anyway, all to secure American economic and strategic interests in the country. In his article in Al-Quds Al-Arabi on Monday, Abdel-Bari Atwan, the editor-in-chief, argued that the significance of Abu Ghraib does not concern just the practices of US soldiers but about the dilemma facing both the US and Iraq. According to Atwan, the scandal revealed that the current US administration had allowed itself to be hijacked by a group of supporters of the Zionist lobby that are using it to launch war on Arabs and Muslims. The result, he argued, "is a short- sighted foreign policy that turns friends into enemies and makes the 21st century an era of political and military chaos ... [as a result of] a total bias by the US president of the Israeli point of view and his prejudice against everything Arab or Muslim." Abu Ghraib, Atwan wrote, is also putting Iraqis face to face with the fact that the Americans, who were supposed to be "the messengers of liberation" and who have been issuing Iraqi newspapers and producing Iraqi TV channels, "have failed to print in these papers or broadcast in these channels news and photos of Iraqis being violated." Abu Ghraib also confronted Iraqis with the fact that "while members of the Iraqi Governing Council have been criticising UN envoy Lakhdar Labrahimi's [plan for a power hand-over] that apparently deals with Iraqis as being incapable of handling their own affairs, they have failed to resign in protest at the violations committed by the Americans." Many Arab commentators remarked on the tacit apologies made in the US for the abuse to which Iraqi detainees were subjected to in Abu Ghraib. As Rageih Khouri wrote in the daily Lebanese An-Nahar on Saturday, "Unfortunately, the apology of George Bush will not reach the detainees who died [as a result of torture] in Abu Ghraib at the hands of the messengers of democracy in Iraq. Neither will this apology heal the wounds of the beaten and tortured bodies, souls and dignities of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib just as the letter of assurances offered by US President Bush to King Abdullah of Jordan will not annul the violations of Palestinian rights that were included in the letter of assurances the same president had earlier offered to Israeli Prime Minister Sharon," Khouri wrote. In his article, "Save America from America", Khouri, like Atwan, argued that Abu Ghraib is not just about the inhumane torture inflicted by US soldiers upon Iraqi detainees but rather about "the US problem with itself." This problem, he argued, is much more complicated than it appears on the surface. "When absolute power is coupled with absolute arrogance and when armies fail to honour basic human rights and when soldiers become invaders, then the big powers must be on the decline," Khouri wrote. Arab American commentator James Zoghby also wrote in support of the argument that Abu Ghraib is more about the moral and political crisis in the US than about acts of torture. "The US and its troops are faced with a crisis in Iraq... and Abu Ghraib has to be seen within that context," Zoghby wrote. According to Zoghby's article, appearing under the headline, "Lessons from the Abu Ghraib scandal" on Sunday on the opinion page of the UAE daily Al-Ittihad, the Abu Ghraib scandal is "only one reflection of this war that has all along been associated with lies and misleading public opinion." In her weekly article in the London-based, Saudi-run daily Asharq Al-Awsat, Syrian Minister of Immigration Bothiyna Chaaban argued that the US administration was trying to address the concerns and worries that were prompted by the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid harming the political future of an American president who is running for re-election. This as such, she argued, says much about how committed the US is to the values of human rights when it comes to non-Americans and how much it is willing to compromise these values if the perpetrators are Americans. "We did not hear the crimes [of Abu Ghraib] being qualified as war crimes [which they really are] ... the perpetrators were considered to be only a few who do not represent the American people ... but [we heard] the perpetrators of the 11 September attacks being described as representative of Arabs and Muslims ... which means that it is OK for crimes to be committed against Arabs and Muslims so long as the media does not know about them," Chaaban wrote. For Jassim Al-Foheid, a commentator in the daily Kuwaiti Al-Ra'i Al-Aam, Abu Ghraib was really about human rights violations. Therefore, he argued, Arabs are probably not the most ideal people to criticise these violations since Arab prisons do not necessarily offer much better treatment for its detainees. In his article, "The many faces of humiliation" on Tuesday, Al-Foheid argued that humiliation inflicted on Arabs is not necessarily an American monopoly and that Arabs, too, can harm their own people and cause. According to the Kuwaiti writer, while condemning the scandal of Abu Ghraib, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa should have equally condemned the situation in many Arab prisons and he should have called on Arab ministers of interior "to allow concerned national and international human rights groups to inspect Arab prisons."
