Human rights groups also called for a probe, with New York-based Human Rights Watch saying that the United States may have broken international law if it knowingly transferred prisoners to potential places of abuse.
China leaped on the chance to condemn us:
"The magnitude of the crimes should make every righteous person angry. It again puts a big question mark against the US self-proclaimed image as the world human rights champion," the China Daily said in a commentary.
China can go pound sand, given their record of breaking tens of millions of eggs to make a deadly omelet.
But back to the accusations.
One, I'm disappointed that we couldn't do more to control Iraqi forces and prevent abuses.
Two, either the abuse wasn't so bad in context or my assumption that too much abuse (short of carrying out a campaign of extermination) undermines a counter-insurgency is wrong.
Three, our enemies behaved far worse during the war. Our enemies will never earn the level of outrage that we or the Iraqi government will receive from this leak.
Four, despite claims that we were guilty of torture, the documents show that is far from the truth. The fact that the frat house humiliation at Abu Ghraib is still raised as an issue of "torture" shows how hollow that charge was and remains, even after the data dump.
And five, coming back full circle, I'm sure we actually did restrain the Iraqis a great deal. Our presence kept the Iraqis from descending to the enemy's level as a matter of routine practice.
Data dumps require context. Up close, any war looks like Hell. Only context explains and justifies them.
Including that the context of the Iraq War was that the imperfect Iraqi government faced losing to people far more brutal than the Iraqi government forces and not to the League of Women Voters.
Oh, and the idea that a dispute over casualty numbers in the range of 10-15 percent is thought of as a scandal is beyond parody. Why shouldn't those groups that peddled numbers of over 600,000 or up to a million civilian deaths--from massive American air strikes, no less--get the "scandal" treatment?
If the lies of anti-war groups (or those just on the other side) that claimed massive war crimes failed to lose the war, why should snapshots showing far lower casualties and nothing that we did terribly wrong have any effect?
In the end, this is just Atrocity Porn for our professional Left to pleasure themselves with for a little while.
UPDATE: Victor Hanson has similar thoughts (but without the porn reference, of course). The most compelling part?
Had the public known in real time from periodic media leaks about operational disasters surrounding the planning for the D-Day landings, intelligence failures at the Bulge or Okinawa, or G.I. treatment of some German and Japanese prisoners, the story of World War II might have been somewhat different. But then, in those paleolithic days FDR and Winston Churchill did not have to be flawless to be perceived as being far better than Adolf Hitler.
War really is Hell. It is no mere cliche.
Don't let the pursuit of perfect hinder achievement of good--and the defeat of evil is surely a good. This doesn't excuse evil done in the name of good, as an "ends justify the means" argument. But it isn't like the Iraqi government was abusing Buddhist monks out of the blue--they were in a fight for their lives--literally--against monsters who gleefully committed atrocities and mass murder to win. It's all about the context.
