How Do We Stop This From Winning?
Jason Kuznicki on Jun 26th 2006
Tim Sandefur proposes, below, that some Iraq war critics are really rooting for the other side to win. I think that’s a very difficult proposition to accept. For one thing, I’m not aware of many radical leftist peacenik Islamic theocrats. I just don’t believe that they exist.
Perhaps they wish to see Bush and his cronies lose, and at times I’m sure this obscures their vision of the situation. But you know, I’d like to see Bush lose, too. He deserves it. If only this didn’t mean that America would also lose — and that its enemies would win. In light of my dilemma, I’ve been keeping a low profile lately, not saying much about the war, and hoping for the best. I’ve done my ranting in the past, and I don’t care to go back to it. Not like it would change anything anyway.
There are plenty of reasons, though, why a Bush win — as opposed to an American win — will be bad for us.
Andrew Sullivan recently posted a list of techniques used at Guantanamo Bay, from a forthcoming book by medical ethicist Steven Miles entitled Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror. I do not yet have a copy of the book, but here is the list:
Beating; punching with fists; use of truncheons; kicking; slamming against walls; stretching or suspension (to tear ligaments or muscles to cause asphyxia); external electric shocks; forcing prisoners to abase and to urinate on themselves; forced masturbation; forced renunciation of religion; false confessions or accusations; applying urine and feces to prisoners; making verbal threats to a prisoner and his family; denigration of a prisoner’s religion; force-feeding; induced hypothermia and exposure to extreme heat; dietary manipulation; use of sedatives; extreme sleep deprivation; mock executions; water immersion; “water-boarding”; obstruction of the prisoner’s airway; chest compression; thermal burning; rape; dog bites; sexual abuse; forcing a prisoner to watch the abuse or torture of a loved one.
That’s not all. We’ve also been doing some of this stuff to a man who was not — as commonly reported — a senior al Qaeda operative. Abu Zubaydah appears to have been a low-level functionary. Who was mentally ill. Doesn’t it stand to reason that someone harboring three separate personalities might be a bit more inclined to make stuff up, including alleged terrorist plots?
I won’t compare our actions here to the terrorists’ in Iraq or elsewhere. I’ll certainly compare it to Soviet interrogation techniques — and with good reason; where do you think we learned this stuff? I will aslo say that this kind of behavior is not what I expect of the United States.
If the Bush administration somehow turns our Iraqi adventure into a clear, unambiguous win, then it will also mean — sorry, but politics is dreadfully simple like this — that these tactics are good. These tactics are vindicated, and acceptable, and even praiseworthy. The good guys won, and here’s how we did it. We simply resolved that awfulness was okay, so long as we were less awful than our enemies.
No, we’re certainly not as bad as the other guys were. But guess what? I don’t even want to be this bad. As I’ve written previously,
torturing detainees is not only morally wrong, but [also] it is far more likely to elicit false information than true, and… separating the one from the other is a task that few torturing regimes have ever performed successfully. Indeed… the mere use of torture makes them ill-equipped to do so. It’s not so much that “forceful interrogations” will “never” produce correct information… but rather that any true information is almost certain to be mixed in with and outweighed by a consistent narrative that matches the torturer’s own expectations.
Sadly, not only is our side doing bad things, it’s also doing bad things that won’t even work out well for us in the long term. So while I’d be disappointed if we didn’t end up with a free, peaceful, democratic Iraq, I’m at least consoled in that we won’t have won by using all of the above-mentioned thuggery. A win would put a stamp of approval on this stuff.
This next is from Jim Henley; he’s writing about religious/racial profiling as a way of finding suspects, but every word of it applies to our use of torture as well:
There’s an important lesson here regarding the Bedwetter Right’s mania for “profiling” and it’s insistence that Western governments and media organs shout “Muslims Muslims Muslims!” every time alleged jihadis get arrested.
Leaving aside quaint notions like individual rights for a minute, there are three sub-populations of “Muslims Muslims Muslims!” that matter in the prevention and mitigation of anti-western terror attacks:
1) Muslims sufficiently motivated to kill non-Muslims for reasons of politics or simple bigotry;
2) All the other Muslims living in the West;
3) Muslims sufficiently motivated to inform on the first group when they come into contact with its members.
In the United States and Canada since the atrocities of September 11, 2001, we’ve learned that the first group is very, very small, the second group constitutes nearly all Muslims, and the third group is sufficiently large to prevent the first group from achieving much.
Any effective antiterror policy needs to concern itself first and foremost with maintaining those ratios. When Antwaan Random-El starts to think that Abu Mujahid down at the mosque is planning something violent, you want his reaction to be the third item on a list of
“You go, Abu!”
“Not my problem.”
“This is weirding me out, man. Hello, is this McGruff the Crime Dog?”
Informants will be a lot more common if they know that the suspect that they’re informing on will get fair treatment. Terrorists will be a lot more common if they can rationalize — however feebly — that we are evil. Sure, there will always be a core of reflexive America-haters who will just hate and hate and hate, no matter what. But on the margin, there will always be some who will choose based on our own actions, filtered, yes, through an awfully distorted lens, but this is never to say that our own actions don’t matter at all. Why should we give them anything to work with in the first place?
If we come out the winners here, even despite the handicap we’ve given ourselves through prisoner abuse, I’d hope that we repudiate this conduct in the future — and not conclude that we won because of it. If any good comes out of the war, it will be through the educational and cultural contacts that became possible as a result, contacts that the U.S. government seems to care very little about: Note for instance the appalling ignorance of Arabic among our troops, which, if we were sincere about teaching American values in the Middle East, would be cause for universal outrage.
Filed in The Barracks
There definitely are people who want the Iraq insurgency to win the war. I have seen some say this explicitly. But these are mostly extreme revolutionary types. No one else really wants this. However I will agree that some people seem irrationally opposed to the war just because it’s the opposite of the Bush position. That’s how the republican/democractic dichotomy seems to work. If the opponent has a passionate position on something, you take the diametric opposite opinion regardless if ideology necessitates it or not. For the life of me, I can not understand the “withdraw” movement at all; either from a tactical or political standpoint. It seems like a mistake for the democrats.
But as to his post, he seems to want a ridiculous kind of consistency. Why does he want people who are opposed to Guantanamo torture to denounce every beheading incident? Everyone already agrees that beheadings are barbaric if done to animals, let alone to people. It doesn’t need to be said. There are no beheading fence-sitters; at least not any worth talking to. There are, however, a significant number of people who agree with Guantanamo style torture techniques. Now, of course the former is incomparable to the latter on a justification scale.
[...] Andrew Sullivan via Positive Liberty. [...]
I think something else Tim is missing is that we are not naïve about our own powers of pursuasion. Critics can shout themselves hoarse denouncing the beheadings and similar atrocities, but the people commiting them aren’t going to stop because some westerner says so.
The same is not true of our own horrors. If we shout loudly enough here, the people responsible will listen. Criticism of our own fellow Americans isn’t going to fall on deaf ears like criticism of Middle-eastern terrorists will. Which means we have a chance of making this thing stop. And if it comes down to a choice between preventing torture and being even-handed in criticising it, I’ll choose the former.
[...] Most of Kuznicki’s post below is stuff I agree with. (Which must be a first.) But he objects that he doesn’t think that there are many Americans who really do wish for our enemies to win the present war, saying “I’m not aware of many radical leftist peacenik Islamic theocrats.” A cute thing to say, but of course, Islamic theocrats are not necessary; all that’s necessary is radically multiculturalist moral relativism, and a radically anti-American view of the meaning of warfare. And we’ve got that in spades. [...]
Springboarding off of Allen’s comment, those who support the war know that American outrage can affect American politicians, even if it can’t affect the terrorists. So why do so many of them consistently downplay U.S. attrocities by comparing them to Saddam, et al.?
What really gets me upset is when people compare rape to murder. Really — how dare they?
I think that a neutral description of what’s been happening lately with regard to American civil liberties should leave anyone who cares about those liberties deeply concerned. Comparisons with other countries are out of place, both because they are usually imprecise — and because we have always set ourselves up to be exceptional. And arguing about whether those comparisons are good, or bad, or arguing what deploying this or that comparison might say about the deployer’s patriotism — is like arguing about whether a rape should be compared to a murder.
Can’t we just agree that wrong is wrong, and then try to do what’s right?
There’s probably no need to go on at length about the silliness of criticizing people for talking more about abuses perpetrated by Americans than about abuses perpetrated against Americans and their allies, since the comments here have already made that point pretty clearly, but I did anyways, here.
Basically, there are very good reasons to talk a lot about American abuses, and plenty of reasons not to talk too much about the worst abuses committed against Americans, and the two questions have very little to do with each other. As Alan said, you talk about America torturing people because you want America to stop torturing people. And even if you aren’t thinking strategically, if you realize what our government is doing you can feel implicated by the fact that it’s your government doing it, and want to speak up about it. That’s patriotism.
The other side of things is not as simple, but the above pragmatic argument doesn’t apply, and you might even suspect that the strategic thing would be to ignore the beheadings and torturing which are being committed by terrorists who are trying to attract attention. I think the main issue is just a split between the worldviews of supporters and opponents of Bush’s Iraq war, though. If you think that the purpose of the Iraq war was to go after the terrorists, that the central problems there are being caused by evil extremists, that the war is a part of our dramatic struggle to overcome evil, that it’s crucial for us to have the resolve to face our enemies, and that many Americans are slipping up by not recognizing with clarity the evil that we face, then beheadings are going to resonate with your worldview. It’s in sync with the right emotions (anger, vengefulness), suggestive of the right explanations (evil), a perfect segue into the right solutions (get the bastards), and so on. But if you think that the Iraq war was a mistake from the start, that the central problems are ethnic conflict and opposition to the US presence, that winning hearts and minds is critical to our success, that the US has been too prone to lash out violently (and somewhat indiscriminately), and that we need to change course in our approach to Iraq and to terrorism, then there may not be that much to say about the beheadings. They’re a distraction from many of the central claims of this view, liable to distort our understanding of the situation, and even when the fact of the beheadings can fit in to some of these arguments (say, the war has turned Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists and now they’re beheading Americans), they don’t mesh very well with the attitude and emotions behind condemning the beheaders. You might mention them briefly, to mourn another terrible death, but why dwell on these grisly acts of violence, especially when there are so many other things happening in Iraq that are worth talking about?
Let’s accept for a minute as a given that if the U.S. has a clear unambiguous win in Iraq then it justifies torture by the U.S. We should still contrast the result with what happens in the event of a clear, unambiguous Ba’athist win–namely tens to hundreds of thousands of people (basically everyone who worked with the U.S.) get horribly killed. Iraq descends into Rwanda level strife.
So even if we accept that an American win results in a more favorable opinion of torture, the alternative is a sort of suffering that no one would want to see anyone experience.
Of course, I tend to think that this Iraq business is heading for a negotiated settlement. Even though a negotiated settlement may very well be hailed as a U.S. win (the government the U.S. established staying in place definitely means the Ba’athists failed), it’s not going to be seen as the sort of win that vindicates anyone.
“If we follow [policy], then the most powerful military in the world can manage to win a war in six years at the cost of a trillion dollars” is not exactly the most convincing of arguments.
[...] The left, the intellectual elite, and the MSM never miss a beat berating the Administration for it’s decision to use forceful methods of interrogation. Jason Kuznicki at Postive Liberty in fact sites this as one his reasons for (at best) not being enthusiastic over a US victory over the insurgency in Iraq (note the rebuttal from Timothy Sandefur at the same site). But I think that same cadre of non-supporters of the war is also in a large part responsible for those methods being employed in the first place. The groups above (MSM, intellectual elite, et al) have partially if not largely framed the terms on which we have been waging this war. With [...]
[...] I don’t have anything to add. I fear the United States is changing, and decidedly for the worse. I see very little that can be done. I’ve complained in the past — sure. But after a while, the complaints all start to sound the same. And they don’t accomplish anything. What can be done? Trackback URL: http://positiveliberty.com/2006/09/what-we-are-becoming.html/trackback/ [...]