Premeditated arrogance

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When the US and the UK declared war on Iraq, the claim was that they wanted to free Iraqis from Saddam's tyranny and injustice. Once Baghdad and other Iraqi cities fell, Western media started playing up Saddam's atrocities, contrasting the horrors he inflicted on detainees with the luxury evident in his palaces.

A year later, it is a changed scene in Iraq. In every town, commanders of the alliance forces live in presidential palaces. In prisons, Iraqis languish, abandoned to a terrible fate. The recent scandal has become an embarrassment to both George Bush and Tony Blair. Photos of prisoners and detainees being tortured and insulted in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere stirred anger and outrage in the region and beyond.

The despicable scenes show the contradiction between the declared objectives of the US and the UK and the events that unfolded on the ground since Baghdad fell. The cities of Iraq have witnessed massacres, crimes against humanity and war crimes of a scale matching that occurring in Palestine. Bush and Blair may still claim that they are spreading Western values of lofty human dimensions in Iraq, but few would believe them. Poverty and neglect, homelessness and extensive collapse of the infrastructure are the order of the day for Iraqis, a nation that was once among the richest and most sophisticated in the region.

The photos published in Western media show grave violations of the Third Geneva Convention that calls for the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Article 39 of the Convention requires commanders of detention camps to be in possession of a copy of the Convention, ensure its provisions are known to camp staff and be responsible for its application. Article 127 requires military personnel in charge of prisoners of war to hold copies of the Convention and be specially instructed as to its provisions. Did this happen in Abu Ghraib? Or have we witnessed a premeditated crime motivated by arrogance? Just before the war, the US asked countries that signed the protocol of the International Criminal Court to exempt its soldiers from possible trial. Why was this necessary? Now we know the answer.