A few bad apples or one rotten war?

As soon the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib broke out, politicians, the brass, and the media all sang the same song: "it's just a few bad apples." In other words, the only people guilty of torture are the rank-and-file MPs who were in the pictures - not their commanding officers, not military intelligence who told the MPs to "set the conditions" for interrogations, not Donald Rumsfeld who drew up the new rules for interrogating prisoners captured in the "war on terror" that clearly violated the Geneva Convention, and certainly not Commander-in-Chief George Bush.

This is bull.

The atrocities committed in Iraq - whether it's torture, shooting civilians at checkpoints, arresting innocent people - are not the result of "a few bad apples," a few deranged GIs, a few stupid commanders, or a few idiots in the White House. They happen because of the nature of the war itself.

Like Vietnam, you cannot tell who is the "enemy" and who is not. The men walking down the street could be the ones planting roadside bombs; the women doing laundry could be lookouts for guerillas; the children playing in the street could be scouts for the Iraqi resistance. As disabled Vietnam vet and president of Veterans for Peace Dave Cline put it: "in wars when you find yourself fighting a resistance that has the active or even the passive support of the population, you can't distinguish who's a combatant and who isn't. It eventually leads you to consider everyone to be your enemy - and you use more and more brutality and racism. In Vietnam, the term was 'gooks'; in Iraq, the term is 'Haji¡.'"

A recent poll in the Washington Post showed that 57% of the Iraqis want all U.S. troops out of their country right now, which means that the ¡°enemy¡± and the Iraqi people are really one and the same thing. The only way to fight this kind of war is by targeting every potential resistance fighter which means raids on random homes, torturing innocent people and bombing and strafing neighborhoods and whole cities like Fallujah where the resistance is strong. And for every successful operation, for every Iraqi military age male killed or captured, for every resistance house blown up, 5, 10, or 15 more want to join the resistance to get revenge for their brother, father, mother, son, daughter, uncle, cousin, aunt, neighbor or friend and to end the bloody occupation of their country.

It's not a few bad apples but one rotten war that led to the torture at Abu Ghraib. Whether Bush or Kerry win the battle for the White House this November, they are both going to have to use the same means to fight the same war.

The idea that the U.S. could bomb the hell out of Iraq, after starving its people and economy with years of sanctions, set up a puppet government, get control of its oil, and win the ¡°hearts and minds¡± of the Iraqi people - in addition to being wrong to begin with - has turned out to be a huge and costly failure. It's time to end it and bring all the troops home now.

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