ABU GHRAIB: ON OFFICERS AND CONTROL

Via Eric Alterman, a professional infantry officer's explanation for why Rush Limbaugh's remarks comparing the Iraq prisoner abuses to fraternity pranks hurt the military: Think Again: On Officers and Control. An excerpt:

But the fact is that as an officer my job is really about the control of state sanctioned violence. I give the potential violence a specific purpose and guide its direction in order to achieve ends. I also ensure that the violence is used only within the confines of the Geneva Conventions and our own code of laws. That's what being an infantry officer is really about. Hell, that's what being any combat arms or combat support officer is about. Because it is easy, it is so terribly easy, to destroy. You could say that the whole sum of my professional education has been about how to apply the correct amount of violence at the right time, at the right place, against the right target, to achieve the right effect…and no more. The same applies to my peers. Which is why we're so upset.

In the end that is why it is the actions, or lack of actions, of the officers at Abu Ghraib really upset me. Those officers demonstrated that they were, well, rank amateurs. Not by virtue of the fact that they are all part-timers who only practiced the profession intermittently before the arrived in Iraq, but by virtue of their loss of control.

As a result of that loss of control the soldiers under their command ran rampant. Violence, in a military context, is like a genie in a bottle. So easy to uncork, but you need good officers, moral officers, hard and smart officers who know their profession to stuff that genie back in to the bottle...
And now somebody like Limbaugh is broadcasting to 20 million people and saying that the photos he saw "weren't so bad" and that effectively this was "no big deal."

His comments just make it that much harder for officers today, and officers elsewhere in the future, to retain control of the genie. By denigrating our decision to court-martial these soldiers, Limbaugh is undercutting our moral authority to control and contain violence so that it is used only in the right way…on the battlefield. He's giving all his listeners (and all the people who they, in turn, influence) the impression that this sort of thing is okay, despite what we officers in the Army are saying.