I hate to say I told you so. Some of you have read claims about the Iraq war that I've passed on from documentary movies - that it was horribly mis-planned from the start ("No End in Sight") and that it and the "war on terror" have involved massive torture and violation of human rights from the start ("Taxi to the Dark Side"). Late in June we got confirmation of this from two very reputable sources: the U.S. military and the "New York Times." A military report essentially conceded the mis-planning charge: that - even though we were essentially dismantling all of the Iraqi state and Iraqi military (by firing the military and de-Bathizing the government), we weren't really planning to take on any state-building role, that we somehow expected an Iraqi self-government to magically arise - a la the Committees of Correspondence and Committees of Safety and colonial legislatures - despite the serious ethnic and religious divisions in pre-war Iraq. Military and intelligence sources also confirmed that we have tortured to death at least 100 prisoners - as part of the war on terror - prisoners like the Afghan taxi driver in "Dark Side." A "Times" article described how - for those prisoners we did not torture to death - we turned many non-terrorist terrorists into terrorists, even in Guatanamo Bay. Battles and raids sent many people we had only flimsy evidence - if any - that they were terrorists into places like Abu Graib and Guatanamo Bay. There - for example - small-time crooks were subjected to a dangerous combination: widespread torture and humiliation by Americans and our allies, and intense contact with the handful of prisoners who were terrorists - for example, from Al Qaida - who essentially ran, from the inside, Guantanamo Bay - just like gangs today run most civilian prisons. Hating Americans now and converted and recruited by Al Qaida leaders, these once petty criminals - the ones who survived and were released - have no returned to places like Afghanistan as full-blown Al Qaida operatives. How about that for corrections?
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New revelations have also just come out of South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation that - as my father subtly conceded in principal - just as North Korean Communists mass-executed - without trial - suspected rightists - when the Communists were taking over the South- South Korean authorities mass-executed tens of thousands of suspected leftists (who would presumably then fall into North Korean hands and provide more soldiers for the North) - with eventual U.S. approval - making the Korean war seem more like a civil war. What my father had conceded was that - just as rightists and their family members began disappearing in the North in between World War II and the Korean War, so probably did leftist get "disappeared" in the South during the same period. These mass imprisonments and then mass executions of political prisoners just accelerated and deepened that.
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