It’s hard to decide whether and how much to blog about the photos exposed on 60 Minutes II about the Iraqi prisoners humiliated and tortured by U.S. troops guarding them. The reason not to would be the fact that the actions taken by the soldiers involved do not reflect on the conduct or behavior of the vast majority of our troops there, and if presented the wrong way, would make people believe that it is representative.

However, the reasons for passing on this information are even more important, the most relevant reasons being the effect the war is having on our troops, and the effect that images like this will have on Iraqis. Not to mention, of course, the moral high ground we may or may not have to be there at all.

First, some of the details of how the prisoners were treated:

Some pictures show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners. There are shots of the prisoners stacked in a pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other.

According to the Army, one Iraqi prisoner was told to stand on a box with his head covered, wires attached to his hands. He was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted.

Another picture shows a detainee with wires attached to his genitals. Another shows a dog attacking an Iraqi prisoner. There is also a picture of an Iraqi man who appears to be dead — and badly beaten. In most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up.

That’s part of the report–the full story is here.

Despite the fact that far greater harm has been done to far greater people in the past year in Iraq, the details of this report may be more damaging to the American occupation of Iraq than anything else so far. The U.S. and British governments are fiercely denouncing the actions, but that may not matter at all in the end. The Arab world is seeing these images, and though there are few reports so far, the expected reaction would be one of outrage. Consider, for example, that “one photo is of a female US soldier standing by a naked prisoner, also hooded. The soldier is pointing at his genitals and grinning at the camera.” That, to put it lightly, will not play well in the Middle East.

The soldiers accused of the crimes seem now to be pointing the finger at the military establishment, blaming it for not training the soldiers how to treat prisoners. Now, I’d be the first to blame the current administration for not seeing to the necessary details, and to stand up for soldiers I thought were being unfairly accused. But on this one, I cannot–I simply can’t accept the idea that the people involved didn’t know, with or without training, that what they were doing was unacceptable.

Nevertheless, there may be one mitigating factor: the war itself, and what effect it has on people. Witness this video aired on CNN of a wounded Iraqi crawling away from American forces, only to have the soldiers patiently take aim and kill the man–at which point the marines cheer. Not exactly the clean fight we usually imagine, nor the behavior we expect from our people fighting there. But then again, we have to remember that these people are living in a world of death, as evidenced by these photos (warning–some are highly graphic and disturbing) posted by an American soldier in Iraq. When this is your daily routine, the word “desensitized” doesn’t seem to do the effect justice. The atmosphere of war thus contributes to the inhumanity. The only reason we see so much more of this is because of the advent of digital photography–cheap and easy to publish–in the hands of the troops there. I’ll give you good odds that by the next war there will be new military regs forbidding soldiers from possessing unauthorized cameras in a war zone.

But the effect is still real, and it is not helping the effort in Iraq. It makes any American attempt to pacify the region into a situation where we take one step forward and two steps back.

Finally, there is the damage to the moral high ground we have occupied only tenuously. And I say this not as one who claimed we had it, but simply as an objective report of what the Bush administration claimed. After all, Saddam tortured all those people for his enjoyment, and that’s what made him bad, right? But now Americans have been doing the same thing–kinda hard to point the finger quite so vociferously.

It’s getting messier. At this time, 143 coalition soldiers (138 American) have been killed in Iraq in April, making this month the bloodiest for Americans in the entire war so far. Nearly five Americans are being killed daily. That number only stands to rise. As time goes by, it becomes more and more clear that the current effort simply cannot work.

What needs to be done, the only action that has even the slightest hope of bringing some order to Iraq, is to start from scratch. We need to be able to go to the U.N. and tell them, “this isn’t working.” We have to work out a plan that can be agreed upon by many nations, especially Arab nations, Egypt and Jordan to be sure, but others as well. And then the majority of U.S. troops need to be pulled out and replaced with a broad–and non-fictional–coalition of forces from dozens of countries. And the U.S. and England must stand back and take only a secondary role at best. I doubt that the Iraqis will ever accept anything else.

It is time for Americans to stop listening to the stream of bullshit that has been coming out of Bush and Cheney, to let go of the lucrative oil industry and reconstruction contracts which we so covetously deny to countries we currently do not like, admit to the failure that is the present in Iraq, and let the world community give its aura of legitimacy to the new Iraq. The fake and pathetic attempts to pretend we are doing this are not fooling anyone. To do this for real is the only chance we have of salvaging the situation.

And we all know that Bush and Cheney would sooner have Iraq burn than to do this. Which, of course, leaves us with only one recourse.