Since I have no background in politics or the military I try to confine my commenting on such matters to cases where illogic is commonly being presented as the truth. I feel qualified to comment on that subject because as a software guy, logic is my profession. It is possible to make errors in reasoning, so I may be wrong, of course. Yet I think that a logical perspective, whoever presents it, is adding something that is sorely lacking in much of the media.
In a country where there is a police force, no one claims that no crimes will ever be committed. The fact that a crime is committed doesn't mean that having a police force is useless. Rather, having a police force is superior to not having one because with a police force, the overall amount of crime can be kept under control. No one with any sense doubts that this is true.
So I think it is grossly irrational that so few in the media are picking up on the following point: Abu Ghraib doesn't mean the Western-style democracies as represented by the American system, are comparable to the alternatives, any more than the existence of crime means that having a police force is the same as not having one.
No democracy (and no system, period) can automatically and perfectly prevent all possible bad things from happening. Rather, in a Western-style democracy, the truth has a decent chance of coming out, and then whatever was bad will be likely to change if the people agree that it was bad. And if the people don't like the way that the government immediately deals with the bad thing, the people can vote in a new government in a few years to do it better.
Such a system a huge leap forward over any dictatorship, whether Saddam's or anyone else's. A dictatorship seeks to keep things as they are, whether good or bad, as long as the dictator thinks it keeps him a power. A democracy seeks to make things better. Those are very different goals.
In fact, one of the outcomes of the Abu Ghraib debacle is a concrete demonstration of this process in action. If it were stressed in the media, it could be the most important outcome.
But this obvious and extremely fundamental and important fact is being almost totally neglected. If the media was doing it's job, it would be educating people to understand it. Then Abu Ghraib, while certainly exposing the corruption and incompetence of many individuals (possibly including an incompetence charge against the President himself) would also expose the incredible value of our system compared to that which most Arabs have been living under for many many years.
Under our system, the practices exposed by the Abu Ghraib scandal will almost certainly be changed. Under a dictatorship, they wouldn't be. That difference is far, far, too important to ignore. Hopefully there are many Iraqis smart enough to pick up on it despite the single-minded focus of the media on pure scandal-peddling.
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