Seeking relief from the special hideousness of the Abu Ghraib scene, some commentators thought back to My Lai. It could only be said about that black day in Vietnam in 1968, in search of an explanation this side of concluding that American soldiers are mass killers, that some of the men who engaged in the massacre did what they did under the impulse of hot pursuit. You are waging the war, there are snipers and other hidden assailants, and you find yourself authorizing your men to use their machine guns to just mow everybody down -- one way to do it.
In Iraq there seems to have been nothing there in the sense of dodging bullets and returning fire. It seemed sheer sadism, pleasure taken from torture. Psychological torture, we have reason to believe, though there are corpses to be accounted for. But there is no accounting for forcing naked men to enact sexual practices, some apparently perverse, for the gratification of an assembly apparently stripped of any thought of humane behavior.
Yes, the miscreants, or at least those who are identifiable -- the photographers were here useful -- will be tried. It is hard to imagine what their defense will be, though no doubt it will be a plea based on the strain of their assignment and the disorientation of war prison duty. Lt. William Calley, whose infantry company killed the civilians in My Lai, pleaded the fever of the war, but he was convicted to life in prison. A startling thing then happened. What seemed all of America rose up in protest against the sentence. The American people were not saying, clearly, that it was wrong to convict someone who had so crassly violated the rules of war. But they were saying that they thought the sentence inordinate, and the pressure was so immense that President Nixon bowed to it, sharply reducing the sentence.
It is unlikely that a great protest would follow upon the conviction of the Abu Ghraib torturers, but what will not be accomplished simply by trying and convicting them is any sense of national expiation. The American people are so dumbfounded by what happened, they are listening attentively to a cry for the dismissal of Donald Rumsfeld.