James Poulos responds to my earlier post on war and torture, arguing that there are kinds of in bello ruthlessness that can help to alleviate the felt need for “enhanced interrogation”:

… in the details, it strikes me that Bush and his administration quite deliberately avoided — and ruled out from the beginning — a strategy of massive, comprehensive conquest in Iraq. This resulted in an artificial disruption and fragmentation of battle space. The more running around you’re doing, the more times you’re reinvading particular cities and hornets’ nests, the more you’re trying to find terrorist needles in civilian haystacks, the more you have to rely on the kind of ‘inside information’ that, in moments of frustration or anger or bad policy, can turn interrogations into torture.

This is absolutely right, but it seems to me – and I’m not sure that James would disagree with this – that that the real lesson here is a powerful illustration of what’s really the most compelling reason to think that we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq in the first place: namely, that the only way routes to victory in the inevitably chaotic aftermath of the initial invasion were to either (1) make our conquest “massive [and] comprehensive”, or (2) round up less-than-comprehensive groups of baddies and dunk their heads underwater to get them to spill their secrets. And since, as James acknowledges, there were plenty of good reasons not to want to go in for the sort of grand military actions that realizing option (1) would have required, it seems that anyone opposed to torture but committed to the idea that you shouldn’t go to war for something unless you have a reasonable chance of achieving what you’re after should conclude that the best course of action in this situation would have been to stay well enough at home. Or maybe that’s just me.

Unfortunately, as I also tried to argue in that original post, it’s really the very same mindset that makes us inclined go in for all-out preemptive war that also leads us to think that a bit of preemptive waterboarding and testicle-crushing is okay, too. Hence the “if not-A then B, but not-B, so therefore not-A” line of reasoning isn’t going to accomplish a whole lot with people who’ve already bought into the ideology that undergirds the hit-’em-first approach. I’m not sure, though, how we’re supposed to argue with people of this particular sort.

Again, I’m not saying that James disagrees (though he might). I’m just saying …

     Filed under: torture, war