Moral superiority over their American allies in the Iraq war was one of the last threads of dignity left to the British.

Their soldiers had consistently enjoyed a positive image in the press and had been portrayed as gentlemen, smarter and more cosmopolitan than their American counterparts. US troops, for their part, were seen as uncivilized brutes; the British tabloid Daily Mail even referred to them as trailer trash.

And it was an image that fit in well with the self-righteousness that has characterized the way British Prime Minister Tony Blair has sought to portray his island nation in the past seven years. The country, according to Blair, is the leader of a "new" Europe and a morally resolute power, in contrast to its constantly vacillating allies in Brussels, Paris and Berlin.

Sure they had faced minor irritations. Questions as to the legality of the US and British intervention in Iraq have dogged the Blair government. And a highly critical report by Amnesty International was sent to the Ministry of Defense. But the report was conveniently "forgotten" and the minor scandal quickly disappeared.

Now, however, with the publication of the Basra torture photographs, the drastic error of Blair's involvement in Iraq is becoming clear. It is a PR disaster for the British on par with America's Abu Ghraib scandal.

And the image of solemn British gravitas has been utterly destroyed.

Torturing petty criminals

The images depict British soldiers smiling as they abuse Iraqi prisoners. They show forced homosexual acts and fellatio. They show beatings of bound prisoners, torture using forklifts, and prisoners repeatedly being forced to flash the "O.K." sign to the camera.

These prisoners were not terrorists or murderers, people against whom individual soldiers may have held grudges. They were imprisoned for petty crimes, and they were being tortured for no better reason than to amuse their torturers.

These men were looters -- American soldiers had tended to ignore such petty criminals. "These things happen," US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld casually said at the time. In contrast, the British ordered their troops to take a tougher approach to looting in what they dubbed Operation "Ali Baba."

Some British soldiers apparently interpreted this official stance as giving them license to commit torture -- a sort of semi-public form of entertainment on their bases in southern Iraq. On May 28, 2003, one of the soldiers involved took a roll of film home to Britain to be developed, behaving almost as if the photos were little more than vacation snapshots. It was the horrified woman working at the photo lab who notified the police.

"Only did what they were told"

When the perpetrators, all members of the elite "Royal Fusiliers Regiment" (whose motto reads: "For England and St. George"), were called to testify before a military court in the German city of Osnabrueck last week, their attorneys noted that they have all been decorated for bravery in combat with the enemy. They are simply young lads who "only did what they were told."

The incident caused immeasurable damage to the image previously enjoyed by Britain's troops in Iraq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorist group, notorious for its videotaped beheadings of kidnapped prisoners, has already threatened revenge. Prime Minister Tony Blair quickly made an appearance in the House of Commons last week to express his disgust and to emphasize that, aside from these isolated incidents, the 65,000 British soldiers currently stationed in Iraq are above reproach.

Blair's comments were received with half-hearted expressions of support from all parties, from politicians who are clearly developing war fatigue. According to a poll taken two weeks ago, only 29 percent of Britons currently support the Iraq war, a drastic change over what was once a 64 percent approval rating.

Hardly any story in British military history has been told so frequently, in so many different versions and in such a short period of time as that of Britain's involvement in Iraq, and it's a story that is becoming increasingly gloomy, pathetic and now even shameful. An episode that began as a morally confident lightning attack designed to topple a dictator has turned into a questionable, murderous war of occupation with no end in sight.

These days, it's also an episode that is quickly undermining once-fundamental moral certainties, infusing a sense of self-doubt into the collective public debate in the British Isles. In the wake of the catastrophic repercussions of the "Nazi Harry" photos, the British tabloids have now published headlines such as "Shameless" and "Great Britain's Disgrace!" for the second time in just one week.

Ignoring the dark chapters of history

Commentators such as Paul Gilroy of Guardian have referred to the Britons' previous approach to their own history as "self-righteous." Gilroy writes: "This was our mentality: two world wars, one World Cup." In the past, historians such as Niall Ferguson presented whitewashing interpretations of the Britons' "good empire," interpretations that have always gone over well with the public.

But now the British public is being confronted more and more frequently with a darker side of its history. In an article in the Independent, author Caroline Elkins confronted Great Britain with its brutal past as a colonial power, writing about atrocities committed by her countrymen in places such as their own "gulag" in Kenya in the 1950s, where 1.5 million people were imprisoned and more than a hundred thousand were killed.

The British, writes Paul Gilroy, "have never truly processed the loss of their empire." Could this be the key to Blair's interventionism, his missionary-like, self-congratulatory adventure in Iraq, a country that once belonged to the British Empire?