We have entered our heart of darkness at Abu Ghraib, a prison haunted by horrors Saddam Hussein unleashed there. Now that prison has become the setting for images of young American men and women we'll never forget. For the rest of our lives we'll see them laughing for the camera while they force Iraqis to commit sex acts, hook them to electrodes, cover them with hoods and beat them with sticks, drag them on dog collars and pack out bodies in ice.
Does anyone believe these young women and men acted from patriotism? No, the program of abuse in Abu Ghraib served a force quite apart from patriotism. It served the flip side of war — the savagery and cruelty that every war unleashes.
Nothing has brought the horror home to us more starkly than the beheading of Nick Berg, a young man who set out to make a dollar while doing some good in Iraq. Now he's entered the annals of warfare in the modern age. His beheading plays endlessly in digital time on the Internet.<snip>
If an evil spirit is a force with an appetite for misery, a force with its own internal logic, an ability to enter the hearts of its hosts and bring out the worst in them, then war is an evil spirit. It thrives when reasonable people surrender to its perverse logic.Read the column in its entirety here:
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/opinion_columnists/article/0,1406,KNS_364_2884236,00.html
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