Shame and humiliation, indignity and loss of face — these emotions have a power in the Middle East that is often compared to that of nuclear weapons. Lengthy wars are fought for personal dignity. The worst forms of torture involve sexual shame. The mere mention of public indignity can provoke lifelong conflicts.
As such, the photos at Abu Ghraib prison are more than just a source of shame to U.S. soldiers and their leaders. The images of naked men being dragged on leashes by women, sexually humiliated and degraded are the worst sort of weapons in the war of ideas, Arab observers say. In this view, the photo scandal has been the equivalent of a major tactical defeat for the United States.
“Nudity is not allowed — it's a conservative society. . . . So the idea of rape, of men or women, and the idea of sexual contact is really not accepted. It's really a culture of shame whenever it comes to sexual contact,” said Raghida Dergham, senior diplomatic correspondent with the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat. “I think this has disgraced America, if you will, in the minds of Iraqis and some Arabs. . . . I think there will be many people who will probably join the resistance.”
The images manage to combine everything that is considered most shameful in all Arab cultures: the display of naked flesh; the use of dogs and dog-like treatment in human company; the removal of space between people and forced contact, grovelling and prostration; physical and intimate touching by strangers; nudity and sexual exposure before other men; homosexual contact; the humiliation of men in front of women; filth; enslavement.
While most of these things are or have been considered at least somewhat shameful in most cultures, they are considered unspeakable offences in most Arab societies. One of the photographed prisoners told reporters in Iraq this week that he will never be able to move back to his hometown because of the shame.
Indeed, many of the victims say they are expressing stark disbelief that anyone would ask them to do such things.
“The interpreter told us to strip,” Hayder Sabbar Abd, who had been in favour of the U.S. invasion of Iraq until his time in Abu Ghraib, told The New York Times this week. “We told him, ‘You are Egyptian, you are a Muslim. You know that as Muslims, we cannot do that.' When we refused to take off our clothes they beat us and tore our clothes off with a blade.”
The effect on Arabs of such humiliations seems to have been well known to the military-intelligence interrogation teams that allegedly ordered the sexual and physical abuse at Abu Ghraib. Some of them were reportedly trained at the U.S. Army interrogation school in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., where interrogation instructor John Giersdorf boasted in 2002 that his job “is just a hair's breadth away from being an illegal specialty under the Geneva Convention.”
A Wall Street Journal reporter who was granted a rare visit to the facility noted that recruits are taught 30 interrogation techniques, many of them based on shame and humiliation.
The trainees are taught “to prey on a prisoner's ethnic stereotypes, sexual urges and religious prejudices, his fear for his family's safety or his resentment of his fellows,” the reporter wrote after reading their training manual.
Yesterday, military officials in Iraq announced that they would be outlawing as many as 10 of those techniques, some of which were presumably being employed during the incidents photographed at Abu Ghraib.
Nudity and sexual shame have long been considered the most powerful forms of torture in the Arab world.
Victims of Saddam Hussein's extensive torture regime, which included a major facility at Abu Ghraib, have reported that the acts that left the deepest scars included being stripped naked and forced to stand in a cell jammed with other naked men for long periods, or being stripped and forced to sit on a bottle.
But if U.S. interrogators believed that they could extract information more efficiently by emulating Mr. Hussein's shame-based techniques, they failed to realized the devastating effect these techniques would have on the Arab world. Throughout the Middle East this week, the photos have turned even former supporters of the U.S. occupation against the military.
“Arabs are even more offended when the issue has to do with nudity and sexuality,” Shibley Telhami, a professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland, told The Washington Post. “The bottom line here is these are pictures of utter humiliation which will give most Arabs a permanent sense that the situation in Iraq is one of occupation.”
Last year, Prof. Telhami wrote a much-discussed article titled “History and Humiliation,” in which he argued that the U.S. has failed to consider the powerful issues of self-respect involved in the occupation of Iraq.
“Today, militancy in the Middle East is fuelled not by the military prospects of Iraq or any other state but [by] a pervasive sense of humiliation and helplessness in the region,” he wrote.
Shame is such a powerful and misunderstood motive in Arab military and diplomatic affairs that former U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger once confessed that it had caused him to misunderstand the motive for the Egyptian war against Israel in 1973.
“Our definition of rationality did not take seriously into account the notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect,” Prof. Telhami quoted him as saying.
