This author suggests that the mistakes with the captured Saddam began almost immediately after he was apprehended. Stanley Weintraub (USA Today 12/15/03) recalls his own experience processing prisoners of war during the Korean War. And he worries that the media treatment of Saddam this past weekend could backfire on the occupation:
Television was not omnipresent in Korea, but there were still some frontiers in decorum practiced by the media as well as the military. We would fumigate and cleanse a POW to inhibit the spread of parasites or disease. But we did not glaringly debase our enemies, as was done Sunday with Saddam. Poking through his matted hair for lice and probing his mouth by flashlight were probably necessary, but showing those acts to the world via a news conference was as much triumphalism as it was pragmatism. ...
[S]uch a disrespectful display in a society that highly values personal dignity may generate sympathy for Saddam and disgust with us, as happened after the grotesque display of the bodies of his sons, Qusay and Uday. (And, in fact, the violence against our troops increased after their deaths.) When contrasted with the end of his sons, who fought overwhelming coalition forces to the death, how could Saddam, ignominiously captured without a struggle, appear any more weakened than he already was?
"No Arab and no Muslim will ever forget these images" shown at Sunday's news conference, Moroccan journalist Khalid Jamai told Reuters. "They touched something very, very deep. It was disgraceful to publish those pictures. It goes against human dignity, to present him like a gorilla that has come out of the forest, with someone checking his head for lice."
At the close of World War II, Nazi war criminals such as Hermann Goering were on the run. After Goering eventually was seized, his military captors duly checked his body for concealed drugs and poison capsules so that he would not cheat interrogation or a tribunal by committing suicide. But the examination was not done with waiting cameras for a worldwide audience.
Is he right? I certainly don't know. But it's a concern worth keeping in mind.
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