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Crooks and Liars » ‘Torture Betrays Us’

(Quoting a Washington Post Op-Ed):



Donald Rumsfeld once wondered aloud whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. In counterinsurgency doctrine, that is precisely the right question. Victory in this kind of war comes when the enemy loses legitimacy in the society from which it seeks recruits and thus loses its “recuperative power.”



The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

I don't profess to know what the "right" answer is, nor am I advocating a viewpoint in either direction. Let's take this point-by-point instead:



Donald Rumsfeld once wondered aloud whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. In counterinsurgency doctrine, that is precisely the right question.



If you're taking the assertions of the administration at face value, we are fighting "terrorists" and "terrorism" in this war. They are constantly referred to as "insurgents" as well, which is meant to define the group as ideological in nature, as opposed to state-sponsored (if we were fighting the Iraqi army, the enemy would be "troops").



Since we are attempting to quell violence from insurgents/terrorists whose ideology is their motivation, some significant part of any definition of success must be to address the ideology and prevent it from taking further root in the culture. Ostensibly, this is what our installation of "democracy" is/was supposed to do.



Victory in this kind of war comes when the enemy loses legitimacy in the society from which it seeks recruits and thus loses its “recuperative power.”



In other words, you can kill an insurgent with a bullet, but a bullet cannot kill an idea. True victory against an ideology comes when the society which the ideology is trying to infiltrate rejects it outright on its merits. The ideology withers and dies on its own, and society is freed from its poisonous propaganda.



The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy.



Obviously, this is the first arguable point. The GOP debate this week featured a line of candidates falling all over themselves to advocate torture based on a "ticking time bomb" scenario, which I'm not sure is even an opposable policy. Then again, I'd make you a bet that once those guys were on those airplanes on 9/11 that there weren't more than five people worldwide who had all the operational details (roster, assignments, flight numbers) of the total strike. In other words, the scenario where the FBI or CIA yanks some terrorist off the street who knows the specific details of everything that's about to happen is fanciful, at best.



That being said, if beating the ever loving hell out of the guy is going to stop a ticking time bomb, go right ahead.



That's not the kind of torture we're talking about though. The pictures from Abu Ghraib probably did more to recruit for insurgent ideologies than our enforcement of a no-fly zone or bombing of a suspected WMD facility ever did. At a base level, it "proved" to people who were predisposed to dislike us already that Americans saw Arabs as sub-human animals. We can spin and justify that with words all we'd like on our airwaves, but when they've heard chirpings from al Qaeda that speak of the righteous Muslim and the oppressive pagan American occupation forces, then they see those pictures?



Every picture from Abu Ghraib, every fifth-hand story about some guy's cousin's friend's uncle having ribs broken by cruel American military jailers, and every story about the Koran being flushed down a toilet at Gitmo serve to support one side of the story over another.



You can argue all day long about the necessity of shaking down terrorists/insurgents - ticking time bomb or not - but it's indisputable that when an occupying force is perceived to be treating the occupied peoples without respect, there are consequences to that perception.



This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy.



I'm not sure this is an arguable point. It's insane to think we can rid the world of terrorism on a five year plan, especially one in which the military takes the point position. However, even if you do believe that if we seed democracy in places of questionable ideology that freedom will grow, as will an appreciation of Western values? That's going to take some time.



A victory in the so-called Great War on Terror comes when there are no more terrorists, right? There's not a person on the planet who'd tell you that could be accomplished in total in less than a couple generations.



If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy.



I've got a lot of problems with this sentence, starting with the assumption that American values are noble. I'd argue that there's very little in the way of nobility that is brokered through the business end of a bullet, but that's just me. War can be a necessity, however, and that's an ugly truth. Whether the propogation of this one is/was a necessity is an even uglier one.



The second problem with this is that there's a further assumption that the pass/fail on renegotiating our values in a situationally specific way is when we're faced with "grave or imminent danger." Again, I'd like to believe that it is only the "ticking time bomb" situation that causes us to reluctantly torture, but I don't believe that to be true. Nor do I believe the idea that there are "undecideds" in this situation, because that frames the conversation into "people who respect and admire America" versus "people who wish to do us harm." I think it's a lot more grey than that, and there's not a distinct tipping point that casts an "undecided into the arms of the enemy." For some it's likely Israel, for others the installation of a puppet government, others still the pillaging of their natural resources to an occupying force.



Obviously though, the respect that we choose to pay to a citizenry in the name of freedom is probably pretty important to the trust being there when it comes time for that citizenry to choose the ideas that are going to carry them forward. If we want them to agree with our interpretation of freedom and democracy, it helps to set a good example up front.



This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.



"Well, we're only torturing al Qaeda terrorists, and Iraq never supported al Qaeda, right?"



I'm going to say that doesn't matter. It must be difficult for Iraqis to make moral sense of what's going on at times. I think your average Iraqi who owns a shop or works in a mill wants peace and doesn't care if his neighbor is Sunni, Shia or Kurd. That same Iraqi likely abhors a car bomb or suicide bomber disrupting his every day life, no matter who's behind it.



But at the same time, when word spreads through the neighborhood that the Americans are stripping Arab prisoners naked in front of women and treating them like dogs, it likely doesn't matter much to them that it's "the bad guys" who are getting this treatment. Maybe some average Iraqis can and do make this distinction, but if even one person is swayed by this to ally with terrorist ideologies, that's one new terrorist and one more step we are from marginalizing and eliminating the ideology as a whole.



As with anything in this world, it's a more complicated issue than activists, the media and politicians would have you believe. While it absolutely disgusts me to watch a GOP debate audience lustily cheer "enhanced interrogation techniques," I'm not so much of a pacifist to believe in an absolute never either. But even the well intended actions of the righteous, if you'd like to see our world that way, have consequences that may be less than ideal.



I believe it's never an exercise in futility to attempt to make sense of the world around you, even if you're less than comfortable with the conclusions.

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