And where do you start with the Germans? The Nazi regime killed up to 15 million civilians, including 6 million Jews. The Germans used some American POWs as slave laborers, while ridiculing, intimidating, starving and beating them. Many American captives died of injuries, malnutrition, disease and exhaustion. Guards shot and killed some prisoners for no apparent reason.
The Russians? Mass graves in a forest in western Russia (then the Soviet Union) contained the corpses of 4,443 Polish officers apparently shot from behind. The Russians blamed the Nazis, a ruse that worked for a while. But researchers later determined that the Polish officers came from a Soviet POW camp. In April 1945, at the end of WWII, thousands of women in eastern Germany drowned themselves to avoid rape by the Russian soldiers, then advancing toward Berlin. German soldiers stripped off their uniforms and jumped into the Elbe river, swimming naked to the west side so they could surrender to Americans rather than to the Russians.
What about Saddam Hussein's Iraq? The American-led coalition, thus far, unearthed many mass graves, containing most of the more than 300,000 Iraqis believed murdered by Saddam's regime.
Uday Hussein, one of Saddam Hussein's sons, ran the country's Olympic program. The punishment for losing? Iraqi athletes endured scalded feet, toenails ripped off, beatings and draggings on pavement followed by a dunking in sewage to ensure infection of wounds. Hidden outside the Iraqi national Olympic committee administrative headquarters, reporters found an obviously well-used iron maiden -- a sarcophagus-shaped device with long spikes on the inside door to impale its unwilling resident.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. -- demonstrating yet again why he failed to achieve the Democratic presidential nomination -- sensibly put the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in perspective: " . . . The behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American," said Lieberman. "It deserves the apology you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military. I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, never apologized. . . . And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody."
War is hell. It brings out the best in people -- honor, valor, sacrifice -- and, unfortunately, in others it brings out the worst. So, yes, let's get to the bottom of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and punish those responsible. In the meantime, how about a little perspective?