Sharing the Blame for Torture in Iraq

This week the New England Journal of Medicine released a new report analyzing the causes of death of civilian casualties in Iraq during the first five years of the war. The findings were surprising. Executions, not headline-grabbing bombs, have killed the most. Researchers say 33 percent of the victims examined in the study died by execution after abduction or capture. And 29 percent of those victims had signs of torture on their bodies such as bruises, drill holes or burns.

Many of the incidents of torture undoubtedly were the work of Shi’ite militias, chiefly the Mahdi Army, which launched a year-long sectarian revenge quest beginning in 2006 against Sunnis. But the government of Iraq has been involved in torture too, and almost certainly still is. As I noted in a dispatch for TIME, the most recent U.N. human rights report on Iraq cites "continuing reports of the widespread and routine torture or ill-treatment of detainees, particularly those being held in pre-trial detention facilities, including police stations." How much the Iraqi government is torturing in its jails and elsewhere is not clear. Neither the United Nations nor any human rights group has published any verifiable statistics on the trend, and the Iraqi government isn’t saying. Almost no one doubts that it’s happening, however.

It’s tempting to chalk up this sad fact as just one more ugly thing from a very troubled country, especially considering the legacy of torture left by Saddam Hussein. But ongoing torture in Iraq poses a moral dilemma for any leaders in Washington willing to consider it: The U.S. government supports the government of Iraq, which has established a pattern of torturing prisoners. Therefore the United States is at present a party to torture.

Of course there is no shortage of countries with shady human rights records who’ve enjoyed U.S. support, past and present. Egypt and Israel come to mind. But Iraq is a special case for two reasons. One, the U.S. military gives direct support to Iraqi security forces, working closely with the very institutions accused of so many crimes. And two, U.S. efforts to remake Iraq represent the most ambitious mission America has undertaken on the world stage since the fall of the Berlin wall. The new Iraq is American-made, a 51st state in many regards as some have noted.

There is no seeable way at this point in the history of the war in Iraq to offer any meaningful accountability for human rights abuses that have occurred since 2003. The full extent of the abuses is unknown, and the notion of U.S. culpability by supporting the Iraqi government goes largely unconsidered by officials in Washington and Baghdad. Moreover, the war is not over. The government of Iraq is still battling an insurgency in Mosul and Diyala province while fighting to preserve the relative calm in Baghdad, all with help from the U.S. military.

The Iraqi government will be fighting insurgents and militias for the foreseeable future. The U.S. military role in that will lessen obviously as U.S. troops begin to withdrawal over the next year or so. But some military assistance is certain to continue, and the current administration should be more, much more, demanding on human rights toward the Iraqi government if indeed President Obama is serious about shunning torture.

Failure to do so will leave the United States playing much the same role in Iraq as it did Guatemala, where Washington offered military assistance to a series of governments that grew utterly brutal through decades of internal conflict in that country. More than 200,000 people died in violence that stretched from 1960 to 1996 in Guatemala. In its landmark 1999 report, the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification documented 42,275 victims. Of those, 23,671 were arbitrarily executed, while another 6,159 were “disappeared.” The Guatemalan government was responsible for most of the violence. But the commission’s conclusions said U.S. military assistance played a major role in “reinforcing the national intelligence apparatus and for training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation.”