It wasn't enough to invade Iraq. As the scandal of detainee torture at the Abu Ghraib prison has shown, Iraqi bodies had to be invaded as well. The Army's own investigation lists sodomization with various objects as one of the many criminal acts that American soldiers have carried out on prisoners; suspicions of out-and-out rape are persistent.

Taking pictures was just another way to humiliate. Americans robbed Iraqis of their privacy, then their dignity, and finally their humanity. Male and female soldiers stripped prisoners naked, gawked at them, paraded them, covered them with graffiti, forced them into sexual acts, and photographed the results — lifting the sinister hoods just enough to force captives to see exactly what was being done to them and by whom.

Prisoners were turned into animals. One photo shows a woman soldier, identified as Pfc. Lynndie England, pulling a naked prisoner on the floor with a dog collar and leash. In another reported case, soldiers called an elderly woman a donkey, then placed a harness on her back and rode her.

Naked, too, was the nonchalance with which the American soldiers documented these blatant violations of the Geneva Conventions and military law. Apparently those who conceived these actions — the soldiers themselves or, far more likely, commanding officers and intelligence agents — were unconcerned that their snapshots might one day become criminal evidence. Taking pictures was just another way to humiliate.

The message of these pictures is clear: Americans feel free to treat Iraqis as less than human. Even standard physical torture, while just as abhorrent, in a way recognizes the victim as a human being, by setting up a physical and mental confrontation between torturer and victim. What Americans have done in Iraq may have caused fewer wounds, but it is much more insulting.

Dehumanizing comes easier, of course, when you feel that your victim is irremediably different from you. How convenient then that these victims are Arabs — the ethnic group that has borne the brunt of discrimination and arbitrary treatment across the Western world ever since September 11th, 2001. And while the outrage now sweeping America is a welcome sign that our society has not lost all its bearings, few voices have been raised to point out how these pictures are saturated with the casual contempt of racism.

It's obvious, but unspoken, that in the pictures we've seen so far, all the soldiers have been white. (Although this could change, with more photos and reports coming out.) It's obvious as well — but also unacknowledged — that the general whose investigative report has been praised for its unflinching honesty, Antonio Taguba, is a person of color — Filipino-American, in fact. Perhaps all this is coincidence. Yet the dots are there, begging to be connected.

President Bush, of course, is impervious to these subtleties. In his view, the real racists are the critics of his Iraq endeavor. He proposed this line of argument in his press conference of April 13th, and reiterated it during a brief question and answer session on April 30th. "There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern," the president opined. "I reject that strongly." He continued: "I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern."

Well, that's a relief! Yet beyond the extreme gall and ignorance of describing "our" skin color as "white" — this from the President of the United States in the year 2004 — Bush exhibits with these statements the other side of racist contempt, which is condescension. Of course the brown people can govern themselves, once we have shown them the way and the meaning of freedom.

This superior attitude — the white man's burden all over again — infested even the president's damage-control interviews with Arab television networks on May 5th, an attempt to stem the fallout from the growing scandal. Bush spun the torture revelations as a chance to demonstrate America's commitment to investigation and accountability. (Hold the snickers.) At times, his tone was didactic: "We believe in transparency because we're a free society. That's what free societies do." And: "People will be held to account. That's what the process does. That's what we do in America."

At other times, Bush was outright patronizing. "I trust the Iraqi people," he said. "I believe the people of Iraq want to be free ...There are normal aspirations in Iraq that give me great confidence in the future of Iraq." And once again, "We believe the Iraqi people can self-govern." At the close of his interview with al-Hurra, the American-sponsored channel which Iraqis watch for the music videos, tuning out the so-called news, Bush leaned across to the interviewer, a soft-spoken, dignified man with keen eyes. "Good work," the president told him. It came off as the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head.

Earlier, Bush had praised his troops, "who are doing great work on behalf of the Iraqi people" — suggesting that the torture incidents are either banal, or rare, or the work of a few errant souls. But the "bad apple" theory is already taking water from all sides.

In fact, the illusion of "great work" and the evidence of torture and humiliation are more consistent than they first appear. The fantasy of a grand civilizing mission and the practice of dehumanization through violence are both symptoms of a colonial mind-set, and fundamental to establishing and maintaining colonial rule. The great thinkers on colonial psychology — Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Aimé Césaire — saw this clearly. The echoes today are only starting to resonate, with just a few observers — Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post stands out — making the connections plain.

But there is more to come, for with all the justifications for the war debunked and discredited, there is less and less left to the US mission in Iraq than an old-fashioned colonial occupation, complete with local puppet regime, exorbitant troop commitments, and a sinkhole for American taxpayer money. No surprise, then, that colonial syndromes are starting to take root. And if the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is any guide (and it is more and more every day), the outrages are not isolated misdeeds, but occur daily.

Add, then, to the perils that American soldiers face in the field — death from an insurgent attack, grievous life-changing injury — the risk of being scapegoated for carrying out instructions, whether overt or vague. And worse, the psychological injury that comes from having been a perpetrator, having been led by events, orders, and conditioning, to brutalize and humiliate helpless victims.

"Colonization can only disfigure the colonizer," wrote Memmi. It "works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word," said Césaire. Frantz Fanon, serving as a psychiatrist in colonial Algeria, observed acute trauma not only in the Algerian victims of torture, but also in its French perpetrators. That trauma now awaits, on top of everything else, the future veterans of this pointless conflict.