What a nation values.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Note from a World Watcher

When U.S. president G. W. Bush was publicly confronted with photographic evidence that his liberating army had committed some extraordinarily ugly deeds at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he was mighty upset. "These acts do not represent the values America stands for," he said in scolding tones well modulated to appeal to the tens of millions of voters who have come to regard their president as a steadfast and righteous leader.

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"Values" are an abstraction Bush invokes often, but apparently without close examination. The values of a living society are not carved in stone. Contrary to Bush's assertion, the U.S. population includes some large constituencies for whom the behavior at Abu Ghraib is perhaps not so alien or abhorrent at all. Consider, for example, those who support the Republican Congressman James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who dismissed criticisms of the Abu Ghraib prison guards as simply an attempt to further the "political agendas" of the war's opponents. In response to outrage over the prisoner abuse, Inhofe said "these prisoners--they're murderers, they're terrorists.... Many of them probably have American blood on their hands." Inhofe apparently doesn't have much patience for the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" (most of the prisoners had not yet been tried, and hundreds turned out to be innocent). He said he was more outraged at the outrage than at the abuse.

When politicians make verbal stumbles that could be politically damaging, they typically hasten to apologize or "clarify." The fact that Inhofe did not do that says something important: he was betting that a majority of Oklahomans did not find the Abu Ghraib behavior particularly abhorrent, despite what they might say publicly. And for that matter, recall that the prison guards themselves didn't try to hide. If their behavior had been anathema to American values, in their view, it's unlikely they'd have taken photos of themselves committing degrading acts. If they'd thought what they were doing was truly offensive to mainstream standards, they'd likely have assumed that their officers, if not they themselves, would uphold those standards--and they'd at least have been secretive. But instead, they mugged for the camera. To the extent they thought at all, I suspect they thought "America" would applaud. And, unrecorded by the media, I suspect that a lot of America did.

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