Observations on Iraq. By Brendan O'Neill

If you thought the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib were shocking, you should see what American soldiers are posting on "Now That's Fucked Up". This website has offered US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan free access to its menu of amateur porn, "extreme fetish, death pics, serious injury pics, and anything else deemed disgusting" in return for their photos of death and destruction in war. Many have taken up the offer.

Past the warning that "if you get sick easy or have a problem with dead terrorists please don't look here" and under the heading "Destruction of the Afgans [sic] at the hands of the Marines", for example, is a series of photos showing what appear to be dead Taliban fighters. One man's brains are pouring from a gaping wound in his head.

Beneath the words "Don't fuck with the US Army", another soldier has posted photos of dead insurgents in Iraq, one of them half naked, with his intestines hanging from his side. A message reads: "Killing is never a casual occurrence, but I would kill a thousand to save one American life." Another photo shows some men, said to be marines, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign beside the charred remains of a dead Iraqi.

Christopher Wilson, the Florida-based webmaster of the site, claims it gets 100,000 visitors a day and has 147,124 registered users. Of those, he reckons, roughly 20 per cent are US soldiers. Does that mean 30,000 soldiers use the site? "Yeah, around 30k," Wilson says. He made the offer of free access to soldiers, he says, as a way of thanking them for the work they do. "A lot of the guys send in dead pictures, which is fine with me. I think it's something people should see." But he points out that the pictures are not all gory, and include shots of soldiers posing by their Humvees or holding smiling Iraqi children. He says the soldiers use the site to make a connection with people back home.

Some will see this as proof that there is a thin line between war and porn, but I think it is a sign of something more interesting. At a time when the Iraq venture is getting bogged down and becoming increasingly unpopular at home, some soldiers seem to be turning to the web in an attempt to justify their actions, or simply to make sense of what they are doing there.

One who has posted photographs of dead Iraqi soldiers insisted to me it was an attempt to pay tribute to them. "In a way, that was our memorial to our fallen Iraqi allies . . . or at least it was my memorial to them." Another soldier, currently on leave after losing an eye in battle, says the website is "good for venting steam and letting one another show support". A third who spent almost a year in Iraq says: "These message boards serve as a good way to share with our comrades some of the horrors we have witnessed." He admits the site probably doesn't "help our public image at all".

The site can be seen as a symptom of this particular war, about which there is so much ambivalence. Even George Bush and Tony Blair seem almost ashamed of the sacrifices made by the troops: the Pentagon banned photos of American military coffins returning from Iraq, while Blair refused to hold a victory parade in 2003 for fear that it might appear "arrogant or patronising [towards] the Iraqi people".

In such circumstances soldiers can be forgiven for wondering what they are doing there, and perhaps some have developed a modern way of justifying their presence in Iraq and Afghanistan by posting pictures and information about their day-to-day activities straight to the web for the apparently eager audience that visits "Now That's Fucked Up". Behind some of the gung-ho comments and the gore, there seems to lurk a desperate desire to defend a war that few others are actively defending.

Brendan O'Neill is deputy editor of spiked (www.spiked-online.com)

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