The Spread

It looks like those darned Iraqis have really picked up on the Bush administration's "freedom and democracy" model. The Iraqi Prime Minister, today, announced that 173 detainees were "found" in the basement of an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, malnourished and apparently subjected to "some kind of torture." The lost souls all appear to be Sunnis, on the receiving end of torture this time after years of being on the other side of an all too unpleasant arrangement. It's like a torture see-saw in Iraq, yet another prediction that was ignored by the White House. I guess the administration assumed everyone would follow the grand example that US forces would set with their treatment of prisoners. Well, they were right about that.

But who knows. After years of being under the Hussein/Sunni thumb, it was easily expected that such activity might have been the result once a Shiite majority gained the inevitable control granted them by elections. It should have been obvious to US officials that this would have been an unholy tendency amongst the Shi'a after Hussein's brutal repression. But rounding up and torturing Sunnis is obviously doing no good for the nascent, struggling Iraqi democracy -- for lack of a better word -- and after years of brutalism, the last thing that should be happening is sectarian retribution. Steps should have been taken to strongly discourage this behaviour and one of those steps should have been for US forces to never, ever set such an example. Of course, we are supposed to be doing this for all the world so that everyone will know how we stand by the rule of law and human rights.

Oh, right. Never mind.