Savage
Commenting on my ACLU post, James writes:
This is a perfect illustration of the failure to recognize why torture’s problematic in the way I claim. I oppose torture. (Though I conceptualize torture relatively narrowly, I do opposite it fully.) Yet I do think that winning wars very very often requires cruelty and savagery. The erroneous notion here belongs to Barnett and Co., who falsely think that winning this war requires cruelty and savagery far away from the battlefield in space and time.
What Barnett referred to as “cruelty and savagery” were, in fact, war crimes. He invoked the mass bombing of civilian centers as his “proof” that such things are “necessary,” and then applied this to the use of torture. I suppose cruelty in warfare is unavoidable, if we think of war itself as cruel, but savagery is exactly what is avoidable. The possibility of discriminating between combatant and non-combatant and also between enemy and captive rests on the assumption that there will be acknowledged limits imposed by a civilised code of conduct on how non-combatants and captives are treated. There will be what might be described dramatically as “savage fighting,” but savagery itself is not something that we can or should accept as inevitable. I take James’ point that the defenders of the torture regime deliberately confuse war zones with captivity far away from the battlefield to reduce every situation to the equivalent of combat, which they think allows for a wider range of permissible action, but I think we run the risk of blurring the difference between warfare and war crimes when we allow that savagery is required.
I’m against torture and war, and probably even violence. Were we to apply a consistent standard, we would not do more to anyone “over there” than we do to the abortionists – what is the toll, 50 million now? – over here. We could have done sidewalk counseling or picketing in front of their embassies and residences.
That said, recognize that 4th generation war is not the same. As William Lind points out at http://www.military.com/Opinions/0,,Lind_Index,00.html and occasionally at TAC, we are trying to get to the jugular of a jellyfish.
When you have non-state actors playing war games, it becomes much harder to apply rules. There are methods of fighting, and we are doing EXACTLY THE WRONG THING in each case (read the archives). We would prefer any state – even an oppressive nominal enemy to the lack-of-state we created in Iraq (and was in Afghanistan). We think we can simply not merely reform a state, but create a vassal. We can do neither, but we can help conditions to restore order.
Fire is most often best fought with water, and savagery – including terrorism – is best fought by taking the moral high ground. By descending to their level, we are simply terrorists in military uniform. And wonder when we are treated like terrorists instead of soldiers.
And I didn’t see the old “ticking time bomb” requiring torture. But lets reverse that and if the demand is for one of our citizens to be publicly tortured and executed on live TV else a city gets nuked, should we do it?
I agree with the larger point of the ACLU post, but, how does it move the discussion forward?
Denial of rationality and essential humanity happen in every war…
Well, I suppose it does, but officially authorised torture doesn’t always happen, and I think there is something special in the way terrorists are categorised as less than human. Challenging the logic of dehumanising other people seems to be a beginning. Maybe that isn’t making much of a contribution, but I thought it needed to be stated again.
I didn’t mean that the way it came out, all critical and stuff…
I think it was an excellent description of the mechanism through which war degrades those who engage in it…
I just don’t know why this debate is proceeding as it is… All those who care are aware that the Bush administration is taking a hard line, and most are ok enough with it to have not demanded change via election. Thus, I don’t know why there is all this discussion of why what Bush is doing is so bad… Like I said, everyone who cares has made up their mind and the result was pretty much a giant yawn…
If one is opposed to what Bush is doing, changing tactics seems to be in order…