To Arabs, photos confirm brutal US

"It's unbelievable. These are the same old practices of Saddam," says Sateh Noureddine, a columnist with Lebanon's As-Safir newspaper.

The photos could not have come at a worse time for the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government, both facing mounting criticism for their Iraqi policies.

An internal Army report found that Iraqi detainees were subjected to "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to The New Yorker magazine, which said it obtained a copy.

In the US, condemnation was swift and strong against the actions detailed in the photos. The chief of the US Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, said they "go against the grain of everything America's Army stands for," and ordered a study of the training reservists receive in how to treat prisoners. President Bush also expressed his revulsion, saying Friday that "I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated."

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday the actions of "a handful" had tarred all US forces. "There is no evidence of systematic abuse" in the US detention operations in the region," he added. Six US soldiers face courts-martial.

Given the hostility toward the US in the region, analysts are divided on what the Bush administration can do to boost its image among Arabs and Muslims.

Mr. Noureddine says he doubts that Washington will bother to improve its standing. "They act with such arrogance anyway that they don't seem to care what Arabs and Muslims think," he says.

For Chibli Mallat, a professor of international law at Beirut's St. Joseph University, the abuse illustrates why human rights monitors should be deployed throughout the country. "You need an independent watchdog to monitor such abuses," he says. "Otherwise, such horrors are bound to continue, be it Iraqis against Americans or, in this horrifying instance, Americans against Iraqis."

But there is no short-term solution for the US to repair the damage caused by more than 30 years of "bias and predatory and aggressive polices," says Rami Khouri, a Jordanian political analyst and executive editor of Lebanon's English-language Daily Star newspaper.

"They are not going to turn it around in three weeks," he says. "But they should start systematically addressing the reasons why people are so negative about them here and coming up with more consistently fair policies."

Public relations efforts such as Arabic-language TV and radio stations are a waste of funds and lack credibility, Mr. Khouri says. If you want to change opinions, change policies, he says.

"They [the US] have to be more even-handed in the Arab-Israeli issue, be less militaristic in addressing regimes they don't like, be more consistent in promoting democracy everywhere not only in a few places," Khouri says.

"They can turn their image around, but only if they turn their policies into more consistently fair and reasonable ones."

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