In mid-April, Abu Ghraib was
closed down
. It was a grim end for the Iraqi prison where the Bush administration gave autocrat Saddam Hussein a run for his money. The Iraqi government
feared
it might be overrun by an al-Qaeda offshoot that calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. By then, the city of Fallujah for which American troops had fought two bitter, pitched
battles
back in 2004 had been
in the hands
of those black-flag-flying insurgents for months. Needless to say, the American project in Iraq, begun so gloriously -- remember Iraqi exiles assuring Vice President Cheney that the invaders would be greeted with "
sweets and flowers
" -- was truly
in ruins
. By then,
hundreds of thousands
had died in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, the insurgencies that followed, and the grimmest of sectarian civil wars. And the temperature was rising anew in that divided land, where only the Kurdish north was relatively peaceful. Iraq was once again threatening to fracture, with suicide bombers and car bombs
daily occurrences
, especially in Shiite areas of the country, and the body count
rising rapidly
.
The legacy of America's Iraq is essentially an
oil-producing
wreck of a state with
another autocrat
in power, a Shiite government allied to Iran in Baghdad, and a Sunni population in revolt. That, in short, is the upshot of Washington's
multi-trillion-dollar war
. It might be worth a painting by George W. Bush. Or maybe the former president should reserve his next round of oils not for the world leaders he met (and
Googled
), but for those
iconic photos
from the prison that might have closed in Iraq, but will never close in the American mind. From the
torture troves
of Abu Ghraib, there are so many
scenes
that the former president could
focus on
in his days of tranquil retirement.
Those photos from hell were, at the time, so run-of-the-mill for the new American Iraq ("
as common as cornflakes
") that they were used as screen-savers by U.S. military guards at that prison. The images then returned to the United States as computer "wallpaper" before making it onto "60 Minutes II" and into our collective brains. They revealed to this country for the first time that, post-9/11, Washington had taken a cue from the Marquis de Sade and any other set of sadists you cared to invoke. Of course, the photos and the systematic torture and abuse that went with them at Abu Ghraib were quickly blamed on the usual "few bad apples" and "
some hillbilly kids
out of control."
As it happened, those photos that first entered public consciousness 10 years ago this week exposed a genuine American nightmare that led
right to the top
in Washington and has never ended. Included in the debacle were Justice Department lawyers who, at the bidding of the highest officials in the land, redefined torture in remarkable ways. They made it clear, for instance, that the
only person
who could affirm whether torture had actually taken place was the torturer himself. (If he didn't think he had tortured, he hadn't, or so the reasoning then went.)