“This is not Norway here, and it is not Denmark.” – Lebanese Forces militia leader Bashir Gemayel.
FALLUJAH – Next to the Joint Communications Center in downtown Fallujah is a squalid and war-shattered warehouse for human beings. Most detainees are common criminals. Others are captured insurgents – terrorists, car-bombers, IED makers, and throat-slashers. A few are even innocent family members of Al Qaeda leaders at large. The Iraqi Police call it a jail, but it's nothing like a jail you've ever seen, at least not in any civilized country. It was built to house 120 prisoners. Recently it held 900.
“Have you seen that place yet?” one Marine said. “It is absolutely disgraceful.”
“The smell,” said another and nearly gagged on remembering. “God, you will never forget it.”
I hadn't seen or smelled it yet, but I was about to.
“Come on,” American Marine Sergeant Dehaan said to me. “Let's go take a look.”
I picked up my notebook and camera.
“Leave the camera,” he said. “The Iraqis won't let you take pictures.”
“Don't you have any say in it?” I said. This was the first and only time during my trip to Fallujah that somebody told me not to take pictures.
“Nope,” he said. “The jail is completely run by Iraqis. They'll freak out if you show up with that camera. If it were up to me, yeah, you could take 'em. But it's not.”
If the Marines wouldn't mind if I took pictures, I think it's safe to say the No Photograph policy is not a security measure. The Iraqis, it seems, don't want you to see what I saw.
The problem with the jail ties in with the problem of why our soldiers and Marines are still in Iraq doing what they are doing.
Why don't we just turn the place over to the Iraqis and let them sort it out like every other society has had to "sort it out" (think of our own Civil War or countless conflicts in Europe)? Why are we spending American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars when Iraq could be run by Iraqis?
Why didn't we keep the Iraqi Army in place in 2003, or at least pay those soldiers not to loot or to become insurgent fighters? If there is anything almost everyone left or right agrees on these days is that the Paul Bremer path was the biggest mistake.
The policy option of finding some "strong horse" among the factions of Iraq and turning the power over to them was always on the table and is probably still on the table. But if we pursue that option, we have to be prepared for Iraqis to maintain order in their country according to the way they are predisposed to do according to the customs of their culture, and I am assuming that Hell-hole jails is a cultural custom regarding punishment in that society.
If we want Iraq policed and governed according to our own ideals of humane treatment, or at least the UN Guidelines on policing that our people are teaching the Iraqis, we are going to have to stay there. Even staying there isn't guaranteeing compliance as evidenced by the jail. If we want to pull out, that can work for us just fine, but that jail will get writ large.
Is it worth our soldiers and Marines sacrifice just to have a less foul-smelling jail? If there is one position or principle that you can assign blame to President Bush, it is not the one of preemption and overthrow of Saddam -- that had bipartisan support. The thing you can fault the President for is his obstinant insistence on "nation building", that is, reshaping Iraq in the image of a liberal Western society in the manner that we have become or perhaps are still building within our own borders. The reasoning behind this is that "business as usual" of deposing Saddam but handing power over to the next tyrant waiting in line will not do, because that caused the conditions that led to 9-11. Will this ever work, I don't know, but this is the nub of the policy that the President is sticking with but now has everyone in America hating him for.