The initially stated purpose of going to war in Iraq was to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. As it turned out, there weren't any. Some people say the real reason was to get control of Iraqi oil, but that's a minority view that I'll leave out of consideration for the present. It's now generally agreed by most Americans that the purpose was to get rid of Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to the people of Iraq.
That means the people of Iraq are not the enemy. The enemy is Saddam Hussein and his followers, those who want to restore the autocratic government that Saddam led, or who want for other reasons to prevent the establishment of democracy in Iraq. Our aim is to defend the people of Iraq against these enemies. But we are dehumanizing the people of Iraq as though they were the enemy.
It's not just the atrocities at the Abu Ghraib prison. Many of the Iraqis there don't even belong in a prison. They're not even called prisoners. They're called detainees. But at the same time they're called terrorists. Our president says they aren't entitled to due process of law, or treatment as prisoners of war, because they're terrorists. But they're only suspected terrorists, and a lot of them are not actually terrorists, and they're being held for months or years without trial.
And it's not just Abu Ghraib. We are not even keeping an official count of how many Iraqi civilians have been killed. Literally, they "don't count."
And this is how we teach them democracy.
A basic element of democracy is trust. Democracy doesn't come from elections alone. An election is not supposed to decide which faction is entitled to dominate and suppress the rest. The result of an election is not acceptable unless the voters who backed the losing party can trust the winning party not to violate their rights.
It took three months after the elections in Iraq to form a government, because they had to put together a cabinet they could trust. We in the U.S.A. have a three-part government, with checks and balances among them, because we can't trust a monolithic government that has no internal controls. When our Constitution was written, most of the states wouldn't ratify it until the ten amendments called the Bill of Rights were added to it, because without those written safeguards they couldn't trust the government. And now about half our eligible voters don't even vote, because they trust that whoever is elected will be acceptable.
By dehumanizing the people of Iraq, we have forfeited their trust. Our president wants our troops to stay there until they have established democracy. But without trust, they can't establish democracy, and we could be there forever unless someone else bails us out.