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And that's where the U.S. military comes in: The army has positioned itself as the bridge across the United States's growing class chasm: money for tuition in exchange for military service. Call it the NAFTA draft.
It worked for Lynndie England, the most infamous of the Abu Ghraib accused.
She joined the 372 Military Police Company to pay for college, hoping to replace her job at the chicken-processing plant with a career in meteorology. Her colleague Sabrina Harman told The Washington Post, "I knew nothing at all about the military, except that they would pay for college. So I signed up."
The poverty of the soldiers at the center of the prison scandal has been used both as evidence of their innocence, and to compound their guilt. On the one hand, Sergeant First Class Paul Shaffer explains that at Abu Ghraib, "you're a person who works at McDonald's one day; the next day you're standing in front of hundreds of prisoners, and half are saying they're sick and half are saying they're hungry." And Gary Myers, the lawyer defending several of the soldiers, asked The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, "Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own?"
On the other side, the British Sun tabloid has dubbed Lynndie England the "Trailer trash torturer," while Boris Johnson wrote in The Daily Telegraph that Americans were being shamed by "smirking jezebels from the Appalachians."
The truth is that the poverty of the soldiers involved in prison torture makes them neither more guilty, nor less.
But the more we learn about them, the clearer it becomes that the lack of good jobs and social equality in the United States is precisely what brought them to Iraq in the first place. Despite his attempts to use the economy to distract attention from Iraq, and his efforts to isolate the soldiers as un-American deviants, these are the children George Bush left behind, fleeing dead-end McJobs, abusive prisons, unaffordable education and closed factories.
They are his children in another way, too: It's in the ubiquitous thumbs-up sign that they flash, seemingly oblivious to the disaster at their feet. This is the quintessential George Bush pose. Convinced that U.S. voters want a positive president, the Bush team has learned to use optimism as an offensive weapon: No matter how devastating the crisis, no matter how many lives have been destroyed, they have insistently given the world the thumbs-up.
Donald Rumsfeld? "Doing a superb job," according to the optimist-in-chief.
The mission in Iraq? "We're making progress, you bet," Mr. Bush told reporters one year after his disastrous "mission accomplished" speech. And the U.S. job market, which has driven so many into poverty? "Yes, America can!"
We don't yet know who taught these young soldiers how to torture their prisoners effectively. But we do know who taught them how to stay happy-go-lucky in the face of tremendous suffering; that lesson came straight from the top.
Naomi Klein is the author of 'No Logo' and 'Fences and Windows'
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