Hanson on Torture
By Callimachus | Related entries in In The News, The War On TerrorismThe pragmatic idealist’s view of the issue. McCain is right, but not for the reasons typically cited.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005 and is filed under In The News, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.So we might as well admit that by foreswearing the use of torture, we will probably be at a disadvantage in obtaining key information and perhaps endanger American lives here at home. (And, ironically, those who now allege that we are too rough will no doubt decry “faulty intelligence” and “incompetence” should there be another terrorist attack on an American city.) Our restraint will not ensure any better treatment for our own captured soldiers. Nor will our allies or the United Nations appreciate American forbearance. The terrorists themselves will probably treat our magnanimity with disdain, as if we were weak rather than good.
But all that is precisely the risk we must take in supporting the McCain amendment â€â€? because it is a public reaffirmation of our country’s ideals. The United States can win this global war without employing torture. That we will not resort to what comes so naturally to Islamic terrorists also defines the nobility of our cause, reminding us that we need not and will not become anything like our enemies.
December 7th, 2005 at 10:50 am
From Vic Hanson’s post:
My only - but significant - problem with the McCain amendment relates to this. It avoids providing a clear definition of what are and are not acceptable practices, evidently precisely because McCain wanted to avoid the kind of “utopian debate” alluded to above. The trouble with this, of course, is that it leaves the door wide open for second-guessing interrogators who are doing their duty in good faith. Better, it seems to me, to have that inevitable debate now and get it over with.
I’ve never subscribed to the “moral high ground” meme for the simple reason that in war, there is no such thing as moral high ground. The object of war is not to convince your enemy or anyone else that your way is morally superior to your enemy’s. The object of war is to convince your enemy that they have no hope of winning, morally superior or not.
Consider WWII. America’s motives in that war can hardly be questioned. But how did we achieve final victory in that war? By leveling several entire German and Japanese cities, including two with atomic bombs. That this was done to avoid even bloodier ground invasions doesn’t change the fact that hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians died by American bombs in the final weeks of the war. Carnage on that scale is morally repugnant under any circumstances, but it says much less about America’s national character than it does about the nature of war.
Needless to say, Abu Ghraib (to the extent that the prisoner abuses there were actually meant to further the war effort) was small potatoes in the annals of U.S. wartime brutality. So is any past or future incident of torture. Indeed, I take it as a given that by the time the war against Islamic supremacism is over many, many years from now, the U.S. will have done things in the course of the war that, if not on a par with destroying whole cities, will at least dwarf the kinds of things over which we’re wringing our collective hands today.
December 7th, 2005 at 4:33 pm
Joshua, I agree, essentially, with what you’re saying. A nation that goes to war with the primary goal of not killing or hurting people is setting itself up for a mistake: If you don’t want people to get killed or hurt, don’t go to war in the first place.
Just so, I’m confused by those who wring their hands because our war is getting ugly. If you want a tidy, clean war, you have to first invent tidy, clean warfare. I won’t be holding my breath waiting.
There must be 20,000 military titles published in the U.S. every year. It seems like a third of the shelves in my local Borders are taken up with books on World War II or the Civil War. Is it possible that a nation so wrapped up in its military history has so little idea what the dogs of war really do?
I suspect the anti-Iraq War people rarely read such books and thus are shocked by what they see in the news. Their only frame of reference is Vietnam — by definition, to them, a “bad war.” So their calculus looks like this: X happened in Vietnam. Vietnam was bad. X is happening in Iraq. Therefore Iraq is bad.
Which is a fallacy unless you also know enough to answer the question, “Did X also happen in World War II and the Civil War and every other war in American history and perhaps human history.” Until you can answer that, you can’t draw any conclusion about the current case.
As for the rest of us, perhaps we spend too much time reading the heroic version of history — the “Greatest Generation” stuff — which is true, but only part of the truth. Books like Max Hastings’ “Armageddon,” or John Dower’s “War Without Mercy” or Stephen Fritz’s “Endkampf” (or Hans Erich Nossack’s “Der Untergang”) ought to put America’s World War II experience into perspective, but is anybody reading those? They’re better-written than Tom Brokaw’s book, I can assure you.
Even in World War II, our motives can be questioned. If it was Japan that jumped us, why did the U.S. then devote 85 percent of its military effort over the next three years to fighting the Germans?
The question is, how can any nation enter into a prolonged and dirty war without losing its soul, without strangling its own virtues for the sake of victory? A national character check ought to be a regular feature of a nation at war.
In this war, it’s going to be particularly difficult. Because the enemy’s tactics include the most brutal intimidation of civilian populations, combined with religious appeals to the Islamic community. They also make extensive use of cities as battlefields and civilians as human shields — precisely because they know we have a moral repugnance for “collateral damage” and they don’t.
And Hanson’s right, if that fact isn’t completely obvious to European media, etc., as something that sets America apart from the jihadis, if they insist on writing that “we” are no better than “them,” nothing we do is going to convince them.
As for our enemies, people who saw the heads off little old lady aid workers from Ireland are not going to be impressed by our virtues if we stop taking naked pictures in Abu Ghraib.
December 7th, 2005 at 5:15 pm
This is by no means a defense of the tactics of Insurgents or terrorists, but whenever a millitary or millitant force has encountered a superior millitary force they often use whatever cover they have available as a devensive position. This includes civilians, and it also includes the United States, historically. Why would the insurgents meet us on the “battlefield”? They are drastically technologically out done by the united states. Calling them cowards because they won’t meet us eye to eye is ridiculous, given this perspective. The terrorist endeavors are definitely inexcusable, however.
This article is absolutely correct in it’s assumptions. And the things that occurred at Abu Ghraib (of which the whole story is not known) give the Jihadist or potential Jihadists reason to want to fight the West, regardless of whether they need them. And I think its use in the Sadam trial is a prime example of this. The enemy always thinks their tactics are for the right reasons and method, regardless of which side you stand on. Your position is the moral stance, as Cal pointed out. So fighting for it by whatever means you have is all one can do. What the United States needs to do is show that we will not sink to the tactics of those we despise.
December 7th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
You know, this is rather tangential, but whenever I think that, yes, the natural way to confront a military enemy who holds superior numbers, resources, and firepower is to become guerrillas, live off the land, use the civilians as a weapon, fight dirty, harrass the enemy till you break the will to fight on his home front — the more I hear that view held up as natural and proper, the more respect I have for Robert E. Lee, and the Southern generals who looked down that path in 1864 and decided not to take it. They chose an honorable defeat over a dirty war, even though they could have done the “logical” thing.
September 25th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
But I don’t think Hanson wants to be moral so we can trumpet it on parade. He means that, in a democracy, civilian morale is an essential part of the war effort. Civilians will simply not back a war that is seen as morally quesionable and Abu Grieb is an excellent example to illustrate the principle.