To most of the Arab editorial writers, and perhaps to most Arabs, the photos merely confirm what they've been saying since long before the invasion of Iraq: America is on an Orientalist rampage in which Arabs are systematically denatured, dehumanized, stripped of all human complexity, reduced to naked babyhood.
Defining the Orientalist project, Edward Said wrote of how occidentals feminized and infantilized Arabs, crediting them with "feminine" traits like intuition and an incapacity for reason (so Arab magicians figure large in the mythology, but Arab mathematicians not at all), and rendered Arabia as pliant, sensuous, passive, awaiting penetration by the rational, masculine West.
In classic Orientalist fashion, Iraq was brutally simplified before it was invaded. Because of the way that the British, operating on the principle of divide and rule, had cobbled together three profoundly dissimilar Ottoman provinces to make a nation, Iraq stands alone in the Arab world in its complex rifts of religion, politics, tribe, race, and class. For 80 years, Iraq has been an immensely tricky spider web of social and cultural lines and intersections. None of this was recognized by the invaders. The Bush administration rhetorically homogenized the several peoples of Iraq by the endless iteration of the phrase "the Iraqi people," or, when speaking of Saddam, "his own people."
When Saddam's gang of Tikritis gassed Kurdish villages or drained the water from the Marsh Arabs' swamps, they were decidedly not dealing with their "own people," but with people they regarded as dangerous aliens: tribally, racially, religiously, politically distinct from themselves. Now, when Coalition forces insist on blaming "foreign fighters" for homegrown, Iraqi insurrections, they unconsciously mirror the mindset of the Baathists, who regarded Kurds and southern Shiites as equally foreign fighters. War, said Ambrose Bierce, is God's way of teaching Americans geography, and in the last year some human geography has been learned, mainly to the effect that a very large number of Iraqi people appear not to belong to the "Iraqi people"--that Orientalist construct which was the catchphrase of 2002.
The Iraqi people were pictured as yearning--femininely, childishly, with one voice--for a pluralist, free-market democracy, and (bad taste though it is to recall this detail) they would greet their liberators, femininely, childishly, with flowers. In the early autumn of 2002, the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, warned that a Western invasion of Iraq would "open the jaws of hell," but the Orientalists listened to no one from the region, preferring to trust the Middle Eastern expertise of Paul Wolfowitz, who blithely represented Iraq as a comely bride, trapped in a dungeon by her wicked stepfather.
By the time of the invasion, Iraq had been so exhaustively Orientalised that it had lost almost all connection to reality. Much of this effort was grandly sentimental and all of it was dehumanizing, robbing Iraqis of their intractable thisness. None of it fooled the long-memoried Arabs in neighboring states, who'd seen this stuff many times before, and who might, perhaps, have recognized in the perorations of Wolfowitz of Arabia the ghostly voice of T. E. Lawrence in the poem that prefaces The Seven Pillars of Wisdom with a breathtakingly vain promise of mutual orgasm:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
In the event, Lawrence's seed was spilled like Onan's, and like that of every Orientalist who has dreamed of liberating Arabia, on the sand.
It's necessary to go over this old and painful ground in order to read the messages from Abu Ghraib. One searches the photos in vain for signs of furtiveness on the part of the torturers, for any indication that they were snapped on the sly. To the contrary: The soldiers, fresh-faced, smiling, happy, look as if they're taking pride in a job well done--and the job in question looks like the Orientalist enterprise, acted out in gross cartoon form. Here is Arabia nude, faceless under a hood, or ridiculously feminized in women's panties, forced into infantile masturbatory sex and sodomy. ("These people are ruled by their nether organs, not by their higher faculties," is the Orientalist line.) The jail has become a grotesque nursery, with Private Lynndie England (her very name like the nom de guerre of a sex worker), cigarette jutting from her cheerful grin, playing the part of the au pair from hell. The pictures appear to be so artfully directed, so relentlessly Orientalist in their conception, that one looks instinctively for a choreographer--a senior intelligence officer, perhaps, who keeps Edward Said on his bedside table, and ransacks the book each night for new ideas.
That speculation is probably misplaced. A chilling story in last Saturday's New York Times made plain that the humiliations depicted in the Abu Ghraib pictures are regularly practiced in domestic American prisons. The reporter, Fox Butterfield, dug up examples of hooding, stripping naked, and forced sex inflicted by guards in jails in Arizona, Utah, Virginia, and Texas. At least two of the American soldiers due to be court-martialed are reservists who are "corrections officers" in civilian life, and it seems likely that in Baghdad they were indulging in sadistic amusements perfected back home in the U.S. Like Esperanto, dehumanization is an international language with a universal grammar, and Orientalism is one of its local dialects--a distinction that will, unfortunately, be lost on every Arab and Muslim who brings the photos up on his or her computer.
However fortuitously, the pictures of torture fit snugly into the larger pattern of the Orientalist conquest of Arabia as it is perceived on the peninsula. What began as romantic simplification of the real life of Iraq--the Wolfowitz scenario--culminates in the erasure of human identity and the rendering of men and women as inanimate objects.
Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story in the New Yorker, quotes Specialist Matthew Wisdom of the Military Police: "I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its ribcage.... I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another with its mouth open." When pronouns drift so casually from he to it (and the speaker here is a whistleblower not a torturer), we are in a nightmare world where men are barely distinguishable from flies or black beetles.
The real nightmare--the one that should make us wake screaming in the small hours--is the mood of eerie, almost philosophical calm with which the pictures have been accepted, at least so far, in the Muslim world. It is as if Arabs knew all along that it was like this. Even before President Bush drew tides of men into his hands and wrote his will across the sky in stars, and long before the goons with digital cameras came on the scene, they knew they were thought of as its.
Jonathan Raban is the author of Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth and, most recently, Waxwings. This article was first published in the Guardian.
