American Torture

Today's Washington Post includes a report of testimony by a former Navy survival instructor that waterboarding is torture with a long history of use by unsavory regimes, including Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, and the Soviet Union. The article marks another salvo in the debate over the definition of torture and whether the US practices it. Some, as a friend of mine recently argued, hold that liberals and Democrats have lowered the torture benchmark to ridiculous levels. Concerns on the other side of the spectrum led to Michael Murkasey receiving the lowest successful confirmation vote in fifty years after he failed to indicate that waterboarding is torture.

While the debate is an important one, from an international relations perspective, it is pointless. By quibbling the fine points of torture, the big picture regarding the impact on US efforts to deal with terrorism, and operate in the international system more generally, is lost. From the outside, poor treatment of prisoners, regardless of whether it is torture or not, is bad enough to stain the image of the United States as the standard bearer of human and civil rights. The counterargument is that the US is engaged in a 'War on Terror' and unpleasant things happen in war. There are a number of objections to this rationalization. The one I want to focus on leads us to the importance of ideas in conflict, and how they are critical to success. While unpleasant things do happen in war, that rationalization is generally applied to events that take place in the heat of battle, not behavior of the field in detention centers. In those circumstances, the fog of war is missing as is the surge of emotion that impairs judgment in battle. Those who see themselves at war with the US, and would seek to convert others to the same perspective, are able to use this distinction to great effect. The poor treatment of prisoners in US custody is a result of policy, not circumstance. What do I mean by poor treatment? Treatment in violation of the rights the US has traditionally espoused: rule of law, habeas corpus, humane treatment, human rights. By treating prisoners in contrast with these values, the US empowers the ideological stand of those who would seek to do it harm.

Critics would argue that this is a war, and our top priority should be killing the enemy, not worrying about whether our treatment of prisoners degrades the idea of the United States. Plainly put, the critics are wrong. Since the end of end of feudalism and the rise of nationalism, ideas have been critically important for success in war. The nation-state that soldiers fight and die for is an idea. Sure, there are physical manifestations of the state, but as Benedict Anderson argues, fundamentally the nation-state is a figment of our collective imagination. It is an idea. The wars that dominated Europe did not die until, confronted by the horrors of modern warfare, political leaders refashioned their national identities in ways that made their mutual existence compatible. Rather than seeing each other as enemies, they came to see each other as part of a larger self, united by a common set of ideas. I will go so far as to argue that no military conflict in the last 100 years, and quite possibly longer, has been resolved by military force alone. The Cold War? Robert English's outstanding work on the collapse of the Cold War shows the power of the idea of the West. It was this idea, not the military force of NATO, that convinced Gorbachev to the implement reforms that would eventually spin out his control. Not surprisingly, George Kennan's anticipated the importance of ideas when he argued for containment, over rollback, in his 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" Vietnam? The US lost not due to military inferiority, but instead its inability to give the South Vietnamese a idea of the world that they could buy into. No doubt this had something to do with US support for oppressive South Vietnamese leaders. The current situation in Iraq is directly attributable to the failure of the United States to demonstrate that the worldview it offered was superior to that presented by sectarian groups. It may very well be that the task was impossible, in no small part due to the power of religious, rather than national, identity, but the chaos and negligence that accompanied the US invasion marred the idea of democracy the US was trying to sell.

Back to terrorism. Killing all the terrorists is impossible. No doubt that military, or at least police action, is a necessary component of the solution to terrorism, but it is at best coequal with ideas. Unless the US can sell the idea of America (not to be confused with selling US policies, which is simply propaganda) the US is bound to fail in its efforts to deal with terrorism. Terrorism is fundamentally grounded in the idea that the world status quo is unfair and oppressive, and the only way to remedy this is violence. To use a popular culture reference, Christian Bale (as Batman) in Batman Begins reminds us that ideas cannot be killed. The poor treatment of prisoners diminishes the power of the American idea, and it is only the American idea that can assault the terrorism idea. In effect, the US is taking its most powerful weapons against terrorists off the battlefield, or even turning them against itself. Sacrificing the ideals that define America on the alter of the 'War of Terrorism' only assures that the battle will be lost.

What to do? The answer is really quite simple: treat prisoners of war as prisoners of war. Afford them their due rights, including an open, fair trial. Return to the ideals of fair, humane treatment and rule of law that the US has championed. There are examples of this approach working. Indonesia, an overwhelmingly Muslim country, has had tremendous success with public trials of terrorists. More importantly, it shows that the the ideals of the US are stronger than the ideals of terrorism. Fair treatment of prisoners in line with existing laws and conventions will serve to enhance the only real weapon we have that can stop terrorism. Debates over what constitutes torture distract us from the bigger picture and undermine the American ideal.