Torture to be expected (From Stroud News and Journal)

Torture to be expected

I MIGHT be missing something but I really can't see why these photos of coalition troops torturing Iraqis have whipped up such a frenzy of disgust.

I'm not suggesting for a minute that abusing fellow humans in this way is acceptable but, hey, it's a war, what did we expect?

You have to wonder at those who supported this war in the first place who are now saying what is going on is unpleasant. What did they think went on in war zones?

I think it's safe to say that since mankind started hitting the tribe on the other side of the valley with clubs, torture has been part of almost every armed conflict.

It's part of the package and nobody's going to persuade me the Geneva Convention stopped all that. It just pushed it behind closed doors.

It is beyond me to see how people can say bombing cities, killing civilians and destroying their infrastructure in an attempt to cow them and bring them round to your way of thinking is acceptable, while physically and mentally abusing and humiliating an individual to break their spirit is wrong.

Surely it's just a matter of scale? War is, by definition, violent.

If you put people in a position of absolute power over those they have been told are their enemies, chances are you are going to get this kind of behaviour, especially when they have seen friends killed by said enemy. I suppose, in a way, the revulsion comes down to empathy.

We can perhaps imagine, to a degree, what it would be like to be beaten and urinated on.

That makes it seem more real and somehow worse than the day-to-day horrors of war that, thankfully, few of us in my generation have or will experience. When stripped down to the basics, you can't have your cake and eat it.

Ugly things happen in wars and the idea of a tidy, honourable conflict with clean deaths for soldiers, exemplary behaviour on both sides and no civilian casualties is a myth. You either have to accept the whole deal, or not. You are either with it, or against it.