What T.S. Eliot said in the famous beginning of his poem The Waste Land, “April is the cruellest month,” could also apply to Iraq. This April is being certainly cruel for the Anglo-American coalition, not to mention for Iraq, more and more of a waste land itself. The successful campaign of kidnappings among Westerners, the collapse of the coalition, the final outbreak of the “Shia issue,” the Falluja setback... all this has come to happen on this very month, precisely a year after President Bush, crammed in his fighter pilot jacket, declared war “finished.” In case this wasn’t enough, now there are pictures: those of the dead American soldiers, aired this week at last (it took forty minutes to do so), and those of their colleagues still alive, torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners in the same Abu Ghraib facilities formerly used by Sadam’s henchmen.

No, things were not going well for the occupiers of Iraq until now, but this month will mark a before and after. This month began with the former Baath members returning to their jobs, and it ends with even Sadam’s army taking care of Falluja, where the Pentagon had to resort to euphemism, describing as “repositioning” what is plainly a retreat (quite a lesson in humility for those who, also this month, condemned the “repositioning” of the Spanish troops out of Iraq ordered by new P.M. Zapatero). This month, which was supposed to see the democratic Iraqi constitution approved, ends with the nasty images of Marines forcing Iraqi prisoners to engage in sodomy. Not quite the idea of teaching tolerance we had in mind. And what about the picture printed yesterday in the English press, in which we can see a British soldier urinating on an Iraqi detainee whose jaw had been previously broken? Not exactly a poster for a “humanitarian mission to help the Iraqi people” either.

“This is not how we do things in America,” protested yesterday the US president. One can choose to look somewhere else and believe that. But the truth is that one of those involved in the abuses, when not in the Army, works as a prison officer in the US. As for the man who has been designated to take charge of the Abu Ghraib prison... well, guess who? General Geoffrey Miller. Currently director of the internment camp at GuantanamoBay, Miller is not precisely a signed member of Amnesty International. So, April might have been the cruellest month so far. But wait and see what comes next.

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia : 2 May 2004