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Few can forget the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq: the naked prisoner led around on a leash by a woman, the hooded, bound and naked detainees, the pyramid of naked men posed to simulate having sex with each other, and most of all, the grinning American soldiers, smug and victorious captors of both genders. For me, fresh out of a four-year study of the racial violence of Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia in 1993, when soldiers also took trophy photos, in this case of hooded, bound Somalis whom they had tortured, what came out of Abu Ghraib was deeply familiar. Such photos can be found in every peacekeeping encounter since the 1 990s between troops of Western nations and the non- Western peoples they supposedly came to help. When I saw the Abu Ghraib photos and I considered what I knew about peacekeeping violence, my stomach contracted and I knew in my body that what I was seeing was racism.
Confronted with the Abu Ghraib photos, very few commentators talked about racism, and few as directly as the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif. She said simply that the abuse reflected the "deep racism underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the third world generally".1 Significantly, although they were not prepared to say anything about racism, few people were able to dismiss the photographs altogether. One exception was National Post columnist Andrew Coyne, who declared on the Canadian television show Counterspin on 12 May 2004 that the photos portrayed isolated events. At last report, United States lawmakers investigating Abu Ghraib were asked to view 1 ,800 photos and an undisclosed number of videos, which makes for a lot of "isolated events".
Explaining Racism Away
For most observers, however, the extent and nature of the abuse were hard to ignore. Early on, even CNN began to use the word "systemic". But the common use of the word "systemic" rarely means "racist", and rarely explains the grins of the torturers. It's not surprising that CNN found the photos "hard to explain". Struggling to keep the West on high moral ground, journalists spun out articles daily reminding us that anyone can become a torturer under the right circumstances. Here, racial abuse disappears into the...