IRAQ on VIDEO by Kevin Alfoldy

One time in high school my parents went away for the weekend and I had a huge party. A couple weeks later I gave my parents a couple of rolls of film to develop, forgetting that in addition to the prom and some skateboarding, the tail end of one of the rolls contained drunken pictures taken on the night of the party. My parents were not too happy when they figured out that it was their house that had been the scene of the keg-tapping, weed smoking, and breast flashing found on the pictures. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is kind of like that. Except way worse. My drunken antics only ruined the trust of my parents, not millions of people. 

Forget the deployment of soldiers and sub-contracting to Haliburton. If American really wants to end the war in Iraq, rebuild the country, and do away with terrorism, Washington needs to dispatch a skilled PR firm to Baghdad immediately. With America’s credibility dipping drastically in the international public forum in the wake of of the Abu Ghraib Prison Spring Break 2004 pictures, the Iraqi rebels fucked up and turned the spotlight back on themselves. A sigh of relief that was heard as far away as Hawaii escaped the White House after it was discovered that there was video footage posted to an Al Quaeda linked website showing an American Citizen being brutally decapitated. 

For a fleeting moment in the American consciousness Iraq finally looked like the victims of a senseless war thrust upon them by an overzealous, Imperialistic country thousands of miles away. With the leak of a grainy video the struggling Iraq was back to being a terrorist harboring, weapons of mass destruction building, rogue state. In fact, the body wasn’t even cold yet when White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters, "this shows the true nature of the enemies of freedom."

Someone better make the color alert a shade darker because once again we are on a crusade against "enemies of freedom." Apparently one of those freedoms is to kill time in a foreign country by posing naked, terrified human beings in explicit sexual acts and then saying cheese! It should be noted that this was an isolated incident and the people responsible for the photos are in no way representative of the American people. Just as the Iraqis who carried out the beheading of Nick Berg do not act on behalf of their nation. 

But wait a minute. Beheaders, the dark-skinned bad guys, are expected to do shit like that. Americans, on the other hand, are the good guys. The images from Abu Ghraib tarnish our image exponentially more than the threats of insurgents could ever make Bush think twice about his stance on terrorism. 

In the never-ending, vicious circle of cause and effect that is the War on Terrorism, when will the terrorists learn that they are only fueling the fire raging against them? Don’t they realize that every time they kill in cold blood to make a point, Dick Cheney actually gets a boner? Don't they realize that, had Bush’s flight suit not been at the cleaners, we would have had to endure another pep-talk from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier? Those labeled Terrorists could kill thousands of innocent bystanders and it would not have the same effect as one leaked photo of a smiling Marine, giving the thumbs up with one hand while holding a leashed Iraqi prisoner like a dog in the other. We all know Bush can go on and on extolling the virtues of Liberty and Freedom, but show him a PR disaster like the photos taken at Abu Ghraib and he'll be hard pressed to stammer out a response; C’mon, y’all weren’t even supposed to see those photos. I mean, worse things happen to prisoners in the first five minutes of Oz. 

Hopefully some terrorists out there reading this will hear my message: Please stop your murderous attacks. Let America publicly humiliate itself out of the war. If you give it enough time, it is bound to happen. President Bush does not appear on Al Jazeera to apologize when you brutally slice open someone’s throat. He goes on Fox News, believes his cause all the more noble, and then sends over more troops. If you want to see Bush bend over and take it in the ass on Islamic TV don’t vengefully take a life, just send some MP’s a bottle of Jack Daniels and a Kodak Instamatic. 

And to the soldiers who took part in the abuses at Abu Ghraib: If you are going to tie people up and pose them in positions of sex acts, make sure that they are consenting adults and that you do it in your own home. In your own country. And if you’re going to take pictures, don’t let your parents, or the press, find them.

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San Franciscan Kevin Alfoldy is disgusted with his country.