Every time I see these pictures that show some American soldiers and officers abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners I feel very upset and disgusted. Many of you wanted to know how we feel about those crimes and the people responsible for them and my opinion is simply this: those soldiers must be brought to justice and punished.
There are tens of thousands of coalition soldiers in Iraq, and of course not all of them are pure angels; they’re tough warriors among whom we can find the good and the evil, and the evil are always less but unfortunately, they draw more attention just like a small black point on a white paper and this applies to any group of human beings anywhere on this planet. That’s why we should not generalize this to the whole coalition soldiers. I’m not trying to defend the coalition here; I just want to show my point of view in an objective way.
The way the Arabic media handled this incident reminds me of the way they handled the barbaric crime in Fallujah a month ago, they tried to show that all the people in Fallujah supported that crime which they called “resistance” and now they’re trying to make Iraqis believe that all the soldiers of the “occupation forces” are involved in this atrocity and that every single soldier in the coalition can’t wait to seize the chance to humiliate Iraqis.
The media seems to be always trying to exaggerate things and to describe any violent action from Iraqis (or Arabs) as “resistance” and any violent action from the coalition as “crimes of the occupiers” to make a good story that sells or that serves their masters' objectives. Anyway, this is not the subject I want to talk about today.
I want to tell you that I felt great relief when I saw and heard the highest-ranking officials in the coalition apologize to the Iraqi people for what a small group of their soldiers did and assuring us that there will be serious investigations to expose those who committed the atrocities and to punish them the way they deserve.
What happened was awful, that’s true but I feel comfortable with the good intentions of the coalition leaders and people who rejected the crimes against the detainees.
Let me tell you this, under the past regime Iraqis were the victims of worse atrocities (by the hands of Iraqis) everyday but no one could say a word about that, now, nothing can be hidden from the people and no one can get away with his crimes. For the first time, law is starting to govern our country and this will force anyone to think twice before he plans to harm someone or break the law in any way.
The crime was a step backwards but the way it’s being dealt with is-in my opinion-a step forwards on the way to strengthen the trust between the coalition and the Iraqis because this will help putting an end to many of the conspiracy theories that many Iraqis still belive in and this will tell Iraqis that the Americans are not hiding facts about their soldiers behavior here and once they feel that something wrong is happening they will move to correct it.
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