Like I said...

Updated ...learn from the best. Via AP for Friday:

The U.S. military has launched a criminal investigation into photographs that appear to show Navy SEALs in Iraq sitting on hooded and handcuffed detainees. ...

One man lies on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat.

In many photos, faces have been blacked out. What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in a room in one photo. Other pictures show debris and upturned furniture. ...

In several of the photos obtained by the AP, grinning men wearing U.S. flags on their uniforms, and one with a tattoo of a SEAL trident, take turns sitting or lying atop what appear to be three hooded and handcuffed men in the bed of a pickup truck. ...

John Hutson, a retired rear admiral who served as the Navy's judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000, said they suggested possible Geneva Convention violations. Those international laws prohibit souvenir photos of prisoners of war.

"It's pretty obvious that these pictures were taken largely as war trophies," Hutson said. "Once you start allowing that kind of behavior, the next step is to start posing the POWs in order to get even better pictures."

Hutson's point is the important one here. The issue before us is not so much whether or not the particular pictures or the particular behavior are "illegal" but what it tells us about what we are teaching the soldiers and what in turn those soldiers are teaching the world about us.

Don't you understand? This isn't an aberration. Abu Ghraib wasn't an aberration. None of it was. It's the natural outgrowth of what we are teaching our soldiers, what we are telling them about who they're dealing with and acceptable ways of dealing with them. Massive power! Intimidate! Dominate! Control! So what is the aftermath except an expression, a demonstration, of that dominance, the very dominance they were taught to impose?

But it must be said that what it will teach the world about us is the wrong lesson - or, perhaps more accurately, an incomplete lesson. Because no, this is not "the true face of America" any more than Zarqawi's beheadings are the "true face" of Iraqis or Arabs or Muslims. It is, rather, (and this is the lesson that should be, but will not be, learned) the true face of war. The hidden face, the one that underlies the rest. Intimidate! Dominate! Control! is indeed the Order of Battle - but it always has been. Humiliation of the vanquished is not a new phenomena. Rather, it is part and parcel of the entire concept of warfare. Rape the women! Burn the fields! Steal the cattle! Strip them naked! Pile them in a pyramid! Take pictures! Behead the infidel! Make a video! It's all the same, all for the same purpose, all cut from the same cloth, all driven by the same impulse: humiliate the defeated and intimidate the rest.

I had a friend back home, a Quaker pacifist who scoffed at things like the Geneva Conventions and dismissed those who argued for war crimes trials during Vietnam. Why? Because he rejected the idea of a "clean" war, a war fought by "rules" like it was some sort of boxing match with referees and judges. "When you buy war," he would say, "you buy the whole package." These photos may in some grand scope be a bagatelle, but they are still a thread in the fabric of war. And we only fool ourselves if we imagine that we can engage in the latter without weaving in the former.

Updated with a changed link. I had originally gotten the AP story via CNN - but when I went back to check a detail, I discovered the story was gone. CNN's own story, dated today, had fewer details. So I found a link to the original AP story and inserted it here in place of the CNN one. I have no idea why the story was removed.