Review: What We Owe Iraq
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200606100319 |
| Author | Arzoo Osanloo |
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 766 | International Journal | Summer 2006 |
tions of prisoners (xx). The broad intention of this migration of policy,
Hersh notes, was to turn Abu Ghraib into a “center of intelligence for the
Bush Administration’s global war on terrorism” (31).
The Schlesinger report acknowledges, also, the confusion created on
the ground by President Bush’s decision to honour the principles “consis-
tent with military necessity” rather than the letter of the Geneva conven-
tions in the conflicts with al Queda and the Taliban, and with subsequent
advice emanating from the Justice Department that pared the legal definition
of torture down to the bone. This analysis, however, highlights perhaps the
central problem of the Schlesinger and Fay reports for the reader—their lim-
ited remits in focusing on
military
responsibility. But Hersh is able to go fur-
ther, and in so doing cuts to the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal. By remov-
ing itself from the accepted requirements of international law, the adminis-
tration could engage in what it saw as “a war against terrorism in which the
old rules did not apply. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence,
including by intimidation and torture, was the priority” (46).
The activities of Specialist Harman and her co-defendants, and the policies
and decisions that made them possible, ask uncomfortable questions about
America’s perception of itself as a moral leader in the international communi-
ty, about the methods it employs to conduct a new, asymmetrical form of war-
fare, and about the relevance of current international law in this new environ-
ment. Seymour Hersh has prepared the ground by producing perhaps the
most complete, if occasionally flawed, account of this period we are likely to get
this close to events.
The Abu Ghraib Investigations
constitutes a valuable addi-
tion to a growing body of official material, including Karen J. Greenberg and
Joshua L. Dratel’s
The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib
, and Mark
Danner’s
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror
,
that may eventually reveal Abu Ghraib’s full and horrifying story.
Dean Williams/University of Edinburgh
WHAT WE OWE IRAQ
War and the Ethics of Nation-building
Noah Feldman
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 154pp, US$19.95 cloth (ISBN
0-691-12179-6)
Noah Feldman’s book on the ethics of nation-building in Iraq attempts to
“jump-start” a discussion on “why we should want to do such a thing as
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