I don’t want to continue flailing away at this Iraqi prison scandal — I figure the professional journalists will do a more-than-adequate job of that over the next few weeks. Nevertheless, there’s an op-ed that I’d like to bring to the attention of my loyal readers. Its author is Thomas Friedman, the Foreign Affairs correspondant for The New York Times.

Friedman’s politics are difficult to pin down. He drives the true liberals crazy by supporting globalization, but recently he’s also alienated the far-right-wingers by bluntly proclaiming the Bush Administration’s foreign policy a failure. I’d say he’s generally more of a conservative than anything — he was all in favor of the Iraq invasion, although he was more interested in the humanitarian reasons for going than the WMD issue. I respect his views because they appear to be based on solid research of the Middle East’s history, politics, geography and unique problems. He doesn’t simply wave the flag or parrot the party line, and he doesn’t seem to be interested in attacking liberals so much as reasonably discussing the issues. For these reasons, I continue to read his columns even though I frequently disagree with them. I find him to be thought-provoking and challenging without being hostile, overbearing or arrogant.

Here then is Friedman’s take on Abu Ghraib. As a supporter of the war, Friedman approaches the situation from a very different perspective than my own and yet he comes to pretty much the same conclusion I attempted to articulate a couple of days ago. In Friedman’s words, “we are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world.” It’s an interesting piece — if you’re interested at all in this story, check it out.