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It used to be said by security analysts, back in the days of the Cold War, that the Soviet Union, though benighted in so many other ways, managed to maintain a highly sophisticated and realistic view of the balance of power across the various geographies over which it was in contention with the United States. The Soviets looked at something they termed the “correlation of forces”, which was comprised of all things that determined relative power: public opinion, political allegiance, economic prosperity, class struggle, and military might. This holistic concept the analysts contrasted unfavourably with what they saw as a Western view too focused on counting tanks; if you wanted to get the full picture of what was going on in a country, in other words, it was often most useful to look at things through Soviet lenses.
In a not-so-strange parallel, it appears that John Bolton — the recess-appointed former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and permanent advocate of missileboat diplomacy — has emerged as a similarly accurate lens on the true direction of U.S. foreign policy. Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you interested in the rather big question of how concepts like East and West have evolved, and how such abstractions have influenced global history and continue to influence the politics of our day, Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East & West is very much worth reading. Here’s a snippet from my recent review of it in the Spectator:
There is much to admire about Pagden’s book. His breadth of knowledge across two and a half millennia of Western (and to a great extent Eastern) history is impressive, and he introduces the reader to a series of fascinating thinkers and travellers: Herodotus, Aelius Aristides, St. Augustine, Constantin-François Volney, John Stuart Mill. He also displays a clear-eyed awareness of how myths are created and sustained. The battle of Lepanto, in which the Venetians and Spanish defeated the Ottoman navy, ‘was hailed far and wide across Europe as a new Actium, a new Salamis,’ he writes. But ‘the analogies were, of course, entirely empty . . . The Spain of Philip II was hardly less despotic than the Ottoman Empire and in many respects was a good deal more so.’ As an intellectual history of Western views of the East, the book is exemplary.
Which is why it is so surprising to find Pagden’s frequently long stretches of good sense undermined by sweeping simplifications…
As you can tell from that last sentence, I do think that despite its many merits the book is far from flawless. In fact, its flaws are one of its most interesting attributes, as they reflect, I believe, the very mentality that leads inevitably to the division of the world into what we think of as a progressive West and a stagnant East.
Read the whole review and let me know if you agree — particularly if you’ve already read the book itself. And for an additional perspective on Pagden’s book, I’d recommend John Gray’s excellent and elegant analysis of it in the March issue of Literary Review.
This Gallup poll on the identify of America’s “greatest enemy” got fairly good press coverage when it was released in late March, but there’s a lot of food for thought in it that is worth addressing even if we’re a couple of weeks on from the headlines themselves. First, it’s not shocking to see Iran, America’s multi-decade bête noire, at the head of the list. The U.S. government has done a serviceable job of heightening the perceived threat from that country over the past few years, and the dark hand of Iran is increasingly being pointed to as an explanation for continuing stagnation and violence in Iraq (see Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony to Congress on April 8 and 9). Iran was the first choice of 25% of respondents, a proportion which is certainly high, but nowhere near as high as Iraq’s 2001 market share of 38%.
The title sums it up, and in the world we once thought we lived in, nothing more would need to be said. But such is not our world any longer, and a great deal needs to be said, as often as possible. In this cause, the Washington Monthly has performed a great service by devoting a 26-page section (pdf version here) of its latest issue to a simple proposition: that the use of torture by the United States must stop. Its contributors include former congressman Bob Barr, former NSC advisor Rand Beers, terrorism expert Peter Bergen, former president Jimmy Carter, Marine Corps Brig. General (ret.) Steve Cheney, National Association of Evangelicals VP Richard Cizik, former supreme commander of NATO General Wesley Clark, senators Chris Dodd, Carl Levin, Dick Lugar, and Chuck Hagel, former U.S. Navy judge advocate general John Hutson, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former presidential special counsel Ted Sorensen. From the introduction:
In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that practiced torture. Astonishingly-despite the repudiation of torture by experts and the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib-we remain one. As we go to press, President George W. Bush stands poised to veto a measure that would end all use of torture by the United States. His move, we suspect, will provoke only limited outcry. What once was shocking is now ordinary.
On paper, the list of practices declared legal by the Department of Justice for use on detainees in Guantanamo Bay and other locations has a somewhat bloodless quality-sleep deprivation, stress positions, forced standing, sensory deprivation, nudity, extremes of heat or cold. But such bland terms mask great suffering. Sleep deprivation eventually leads to hallucinations and psychosis. (Menachem Begin, former prime minister of Israel, experienced sleep deprivation at the hands of the KGB and would later assert that “anyone who has experienced this desire [to sleep] knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.”) Stress positions entail ordeals such as being shackled by the wrists, suspended from the ceiling, with arms spread out and feet barely touching the ground. Forced standing, a technique often used in North Korean prisons, involves remaining erect and completely still, producing an excruciating combination of physical and psychological pain, as ankles swell, blisters erupt on the skin, and, in time, kidneys break down. Sensory deprivation-being deprived of sight, sound, and touch-can produce psychotic symptoms in as little as twenty-four hours. The agony of severe and prolonged exposure to temperature extremes and the humiliation of forced nudity speak for themselves.
And yes, President George Bush did veto the measure, as predicted.
What are friends for, if not to politely ignore the fact that you’ve become an alcoholic and started beating your children? In such a spirit, Canada proved itself once again a faithful and utterly harmless pal of the United States yesterday when our government fell all over itself to retract a “torture awareness” manual given to its diplomats which listed the United States and Israel as states where prisoners are at risk of torture. Declared foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier, “It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten.” Even Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae, after admitting that torture might indeed be “a live question” in American politics, finally threw his support behind the United States: ”The idea that you would equate the government of the United States with the government of Iran with respect to the treatment of prisoners is a little hard to fathom,” he told the Canadian Press.
The reason why our government wrote such a manual in the first place? Because in 2002 the United States arrested and shipped an innocent Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, off to Syria to be tortured for ten months. According to CTV, it was felt during the inquiry into Arar’s case that Canadian diplomats should be taught to notice signs that prisoners had been tortured, as well to be made aware of countries in which such signs were more likely to appear. Quite rightly, the United States was placed on this list. But now we are expected to accept the Canadian government’s declaration that the United States — despite all of the evidence, all of the memos, despite even the Bush administration’s own clear intention that it be allowed to waterboard and otherwise abuse prisoners — is not such a country.
If friendship means the willingness to allow a powerful neighbouring country to take your people, torture them, hand them back to you grudgingly without apology (or simply detain them indefinitely), and then expect you to pretend that such things do not happen, well then, we are fast friends indeed. Of course, in international politics, we call such a situation “Finlandization”. In prison they’ve got another term for this kind of friendship, and it’s not a polite one.
I wasn’t a terribly frequent visitor to France 24’s website, but as an English-language expression of the French view of the world, I thought it was a timely and useful alternative to the big media outlets of the “Anglosphere” like CNN and the BBC. Unfortunately, it appears that French President Nicolas Sarkozy does not feel the same way, since he announced on Tuesday that he would be cancelling the year-old channel. “With taxpayers’ money, I am not prepared to broadcast a channel that does not speak French,” he told the media.
What a pity.
The map and legend shown above are from Privacy International’s latest report on the state of surveillance and privacy protection in 47 countries. As Scott Horton has pointed out, the United States now ranks with Russia and China (along with camera-on-every-corner Britain) as “endemic surveillance societies”. Canada, by greyish contrast, ranks below “adequate” in its privacy protections, but is thankfully three colour bars above the U.S. level — though as rumours have it, the Canadian government doesn’t have to violate its citizen’s privacy rights directly if it can ask U.S. intelligence to provide the required information via its own monitoring of Canadian communications. The report helpfully provides highlights for each of the countries in the study, so here’s how Canada and the U.S. compare (note that some bullet points are more important than others):
CANADA
- Privacy not mentioned in Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but courts have recognised the right to a reasonable expectation of privacy
- Statutory rules at the federal level (public and private sectors) and provincial laws apply to sectors and governments
- Federal commission is widely recognised as lacking in powers such as order-marking powers, and ability to regulate trans-border data flows
- Variety of provincial privacy commissioners have made privacy-enhancing decisions and taken cases through the courts over the past year (particularly Ontario)
- Court orders required for interception and there is no reasonable alternative method of investigation
- Video surveillance is spreading despite guidelines from privacy commissioners
- Highly controversial no-fly list, lacking legal mandate
- Continues to threaten new policy on online surveillance
- Increased calls for biometric documents to cater for U.S. pressure, while plans are still unclear for biometric passports
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
- No right to privacy in constitution, though search and seizure protections exist in 4th Amendment; case law on government searches has considered new technology
- No comprehensive privacy law, many sectoral laws; though tort of privacy
- FTC continues to give inadequate attention to privacy issues, though issued self-regulating privacy guidelines on advertising in 2007
- State-level data breach legislation has proven to be useful in identifying faults in security
- REAL-ID and biometric identification programs continue to spread without adequate oversight, research, and funding structures
- Extensive data-sharing programs across federal government and with private sector
- Spreading use of CCTV
- Congress approved presidential program of spying on foreign communications over U.S. networks, e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, etc.; and now considering immunity for telephone companies, while government claims secrecy, thus barring any legal action
- No data retention law as yet, but equally no data protection law
- World leading in border surveillance, mandating trans-border data flows
- Weak protections of financial and medical privacy; plans spread for ‘rings of steel’ around cities to monitor movements of individuals
- Democratic safeguards tend to be strong but new Congress and political dynamics show that immigration and terrorism continue to leave politicians scared and without principle
- Lack of action on data breach legislation on the federal level while REAL-ID is still compelled upon states has shown that states can make informed decisions
- Recent news regarding FBI biometric database raises particular concerns as this could lead to the largest database of biometrics around the world that is not protected by strong privacy law
Benazir Bhutto in 2006 (Photo: Reuters/Toby Melville)
As world news organizations fall over themselves to provide broad-brush background and analysis on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, go read Tariq Ali’s recent LRB profile of and full-scale backgrounder on Bhutto; your investment in time will be repaid with greater comprehension. Example: A BBC piece today describes the 1996 murder of Benazir’s brother Murtaza curtly and with inoffensive vagueness. ”He won elections from exile in 1993 and became a provincial legislator, returning home soon afterwards, only to be shot dead under mysterious circumstances…” By comparison, here’s Ali on the same subject:
Some months later, in September 1996, as Murtaza and his entourage were returning home from a political meeting, they were ambushed, just outside their house, by some seventy armed policemen accompanied by four senior officers. A number of snipers were positioned in surrounding trees. The street lights had been switched off. Murtaza clearly understood what was happening and got out of his car with his hands raised; his bodyguards were instructed not to open fire. The police opened fire instead and seven men were killed, Murtaza among them. The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation - false entries in police logbooks, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated, the provincial PPP governor (regarded as untrustworthy) dispatched to a non-event in Egypt, a policeman killed who they feared might talk - made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.
… In an interview on an independent TV station just before the emergency was imposed [by President Pervez Musharraf], Benazir was asked to explain how it happened that her brother had bled to death outside his home while she was prime minister. She walked out of the studio. A sharp op-ed piece by [Murtaza's daughter] Fatima in the LA Times on 14 November elicited the following response: ‘My niece is angry with me.’ Well, yes.
Bhutto’s life story is a remarkable one, but it’s also complex and murky, and we should be on our guard against simplistic narratives (suiting Western media and politicians alike) of cosmopolitanism vs. fundamentalism and civilian vs. military rule. As with the hall of mirrors regime that Musharraf has constructed and continues to adapt to his needs, appearances rarely reflect reality.
Professor of theological ethics and director of the Martin Marty Center at U. Chicago’s divinity school, William Schweiker provides more historical background on the practice of waterboarding:
In the Inquisition, the practice was not drowning as such, but the threat of drowning, and the symbolic threat of baptism. The tortura del agua or toca entailed forcing the victim to ingest water poured into a cloth stuffed into the mouth in order to give the impression of drowning. Because of the wide symbolic meaning of “water” in the Christian and Jewish traditions (creation, the great flood, the parting of the Red Sea in the Exodus and drowning of the Egyptians (!), Christ’s walking on the water, and, centrally for Christians, baptism as a symbolic death that gives life), the practice takes on profound religious significance. Torture has many forms, but torture by water as it arose in the Roman Catholic and Protestant reformations seemingly drew some of its power and inspiration from theological convictions about repentance and salvation.
Schweiker’s column is worth reading in full, as he explores the unverbalized but plausible religious implications of the use of waterboarding by the U.S. government.
Having already promoted war against Syria and Iran (American wars #3 and #4, should they take place), the neo-conservative movement continues to add countries to its list of possible targets. Internal conflict seems to be a key criteria here, as the political crisis in Myanmar recently prompted Bill Kristol to advocate “limited military actions” to “avert the disaster that is unfolding” in that country (war #5, and see my post here). Likewise, Pakistan’s latest conflict over governance has moved American right-wing attitudes to that country from passive defensiveness (General Musharraf is our guy and Pakistan is a key strategic ally, but no, America does not especially need an ambassador there) to alarmed aggressiveness (i.e. war #6). Thus the AEI’s Fred Kagan and Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon in Sunday’s New York Times:
AS the government of Pakistan totters, we must face a fact: the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss. Nor would it be strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq to cope with a deteriorating one in Pakistan. We need to think - now - about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that.
Ah yes, the feasible military options. As the authors state above, such options certainly don’t include shutting down the Iraq war to move troops to Pakistan. Meanwhile, another option — full-scale occupation – is immediately ruled out:
The task of stabilizing a collapsed Pakistan is beyond the means of the United States and its allies. Rule-of-thumb estimates suggest that a force of more than a million troops would be required for a country of this size.
Now that’s a refreshing dose of realism, isn’t it? But don’t get your hopes up; it doesn’t last. Of the “feasible” options, the first involves teaming up with pro-American Pakistanis in an attempt to capture, collect, and guard all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and materiel:
[We] would have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops. It is realistic to think that such a mission might be undertaken within days of a decision to act.
Option 2 would use greater numbers of U.S. troops to support the Pakistani military in holding the country together “in the face of an ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership.” But since a million-man occupation force is not in the offing, even this larger engagement (made up of “a sizable combat force” of U.S. and other Western troops) would have limited objectives:
So, if we got a large number of troops into the country, what would they do? The most likely directive would be to help Pakistan’s military and security forces hold the country’s center - primarily the region around the capital, Islamabad, and the populous areas like Punjab Province to its south.
Kagan and O’Hanlon are remarkably optimistic about the capabilities of this limited Western force. Once the centre is stabilized, they suggest, American forces might conceivably go on to win two wars at once:
If a holding operation in the nation’s center was successful, we would probably then seek to establish order in the parts of Pakistan where extremists operate. Beyond propping up the state, this would benefit American efforts in Afghanistan by depriving terrorists of the sanctuaries they have long enjoyed in Pakistan’s tribal and frontier regions.
So that’s their plan. With the U.S. Army and Marine Corps running themselves into the ground trying to cope with stabilizing two nations of 25 to 30 million people each, these pundits think that somehow the United States can cobble together enough spare forces (along with troops from Western powers who have been hard-pressed to find even an extra brigade for Afghanistan) to successfully intervene in a nation of 160 million. And Options 2’s similarity to Iraq’s Fortress Green Zone strategy is merely one outcome of a line of thought that starts with calling the ever-growing catastrophe in Iraq “an improving situation”. If America is achieving victory in Iraq with only 160,000 troops, apparently it’s logical to conclude that victory in a country six times as populous should be possible with a force a fraction of that size.
Given the self-evident absurdity of this idea, why would ostensibly intelligent analysts propose such a thing? One plausible explanation is that they are caught between two beliefs: first, that the United States faces an existential crisis from Islamic terrorism; second, that American national willpower is liable to collapse if a draft is implemented. Forty-year-old memories of burning draft cards and marching students have seemingly so traumatized the American right-wing that they are willing to risk defeat after defeat — and the creation of failed state after failed state — to avoid calling a draft and risking the growth of a wider-scale anti-war movement.
But there is another explanation: that the belief in an existential threat is not a belief at all, but a pose, an attitude, a political weapon. For World War I – which did not involve an existential threat to America – the United States mobilized a 3.5 million man army from a population of only 100 million. For World War II — Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan being a much more serious threat to the country – the United States mobilized an 8 million man army from a population of 140 million. By the last chapter of the Cold War, with its population passing 225 million in 1980, the United States maintained an army of only 781,000 troops — but then again it relied primarily on its massive nuclear deterrent to keep the peace with the Soviet Union.
Now, facing an enemy that represents, Kagan and O’Hanlon claim, “as much a threat to our basic security as Soviet tanks once were”, the United States has elected to maintain an army of barely half a million soldiers out of a population of 300 million people. This is not the army of a nation facing an existential threat. This is the army of a nation that thinks its wars will be small, quick, and cheap.
If Kagan and O’Hanlon seriously believe that a collapsing Pakistan presents such a threat that a U.S. invasion would be morally and strategically justified, they should be arguing strenuously for that million-man force, rather than summarily ruling it out. In fact, if they had used a rule of thumb at all similar to the calculations that Gen. Eric Shinseki used to estimate the requirement for an occupation force of “several hundred thousand troops” in Iraq, they’d have to advocate an occupation force for Pakistan of roughly 3 million troops.
Could the United States mobilize such a force? Of course it could — see World Wars I & II, above. But is it willing to? Not a chance. And until that changes, you should weigh all the scare-mongering warnings about loose nukes and Iranian bombs and smoking guns and mushroom clouds against the fact that they are being made by people who don’t believe in the threat enough to actually prepare their country to meet it.
Go read this important posting at Small Wars Journal, by Malcolm Nance, a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego. “I know the waterboard personally and intimately,” he writes. “SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people.” Nance demolishes the media myth that water boarding is merely “simulated drowning”:
Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.
Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.
Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration - usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.
Nance is outraged at America’s loss of honour in condoning the use of such torture, and warns that President Bush’s policies have validated and legitimized this torture technique for foreign governments and terrorist groups:
There may never again be a chance that Americans will benefit from the shield of outrage and public opinion when our future enemy uses torture. Brutal interrogation, flash murder and extreme humiliation of American citizens, agents and members of the armed forces may now be guaranteed because we have mindlessly, but happily, broken the seal on the Pandora’s box of indignity, cruelty and hatred in the name of protecting America. To defeat Bin Laden many in this administration have openly embraced the methods of Hitler, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Galtieri and Saddam Hussein.
His is a powerful and disturbing article.
Another voice. In an article based in part on Nance’s posting, The Independent quotes journalist Henri Alleg, who was subjected to water boarding by French forces in Algeria in 1957:
Soldiers strapped him over a plank, wrapped his head in cloth and positioned it beneath a running tap. He recalled: “The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. But for a while I could still breathe in some small gulps of air. I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. In spite of myself, all the muscles of my body struggled uselessly to save me from suffocation. In spite of myself, the fingers of both my hands shook uncontrollably. ‘That’s it! He’s going to talk,’ said a voice.
The water stopped running and they took away the rag. I was able to breathe. In the gloom, I saw the lieutenants and the captain, who, with a cigarette between his lips, was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw out the water I had swallowed.”
CIA director Michael Hayden has claimed that interrogation methods inducing the fear of imminent death have been used on only 30 suspects held by the United States. If that is true, then there are, at minimum, 30 war crimes charges waiting to be lodged against the director of the CIA and other high officials of the United States government, including the president himself. America should brook no delay; she has her honour to save.
Apparently U.S. attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey is having trouble figuring out if water boarding is a form of torture. As he recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee:
I don’t think that I can responsibly talk about any technique here because — (pause) — of the very — I’m not going to discuss and I should not — I’m sorry I can’t discuss, and I think it would be irresponsible of me to discuss particular techniques with which I am not familiar when there are people who are using coercive techniques and who are being authorized to use coercive techniques. And for me to say something that is going to put their careers or freedom at risk simply because I want to be congenial, I don’t think it would be responsible of me to do that.
Like the nominee, are you “not familiar with” water boarding as a coercive technique? It’s the sixth of a set of “enhanced interrogation techniques” instituted by the CIA in early 2002. As described to ABC News in 2005 by current and former intelligence officers, these are:
1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.
2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.
3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.
4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.
5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.
6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.
To clarify his thinking, Mukasey should read Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman at Balkinization, who writes:
Waterboarding is a paradigmatic example of torture. It is inconceivable that anyone involved in drafting, negotiating, signing, ratifying or enacting the Torture Act or Common Article 3 would have thought otherwise. Naturally, then, the U.S. itself has long considered waterboarding to be torture and a war crime — there was no dispute about this from at least 1901 until 2002 — and if our enemies used such a technique on U.S. military personnel, no one would, in public debate, deny that such a technique is a form of unlawful torture.
As the U.S. administration and its cabinet nominees retreat into the most hair-splitting forms of legalism and moral relativism in order to preserve the use of these techniques, and thus too the country’s growing international profile as a torture state, both the American news media and consumer television are starting to acknowledge that there is a serious issue to be dealt with here. To focus on TV, the most recent episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, “Harm“, grapples with the issue of U.S. military torture in Iraq, including the long-term psychological and physiological damage caused by ”enhanced interrogation” techniques like hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and hypothermia. A remarkably timely bonus is that the plot also revolves around an ethically-challenged private military company (that’s “mercenary outfit” to you).
For its part, ER last season (in “The Honeymoon is Over“) introduced a patient who suffers badly from post-traumatic stress disorder and is addicted to codeine. It emerges that he was a translator for Army intelligence in Iraq, and that he has witnessed countless acts of torture; he is now haunted by the detainees’ cries of innocence which he was required to translate.
Kyle: “‘Please don’t hurt me. I’ve done nothing wrong. God have mercy.’ I must have translated that a million times in Iraq, man. It didn’t matter. They didn’t listen to me any more than they listened to prisoners.”
There’s something good, something hopeful, in this as yet small trend — an expression of the civilized part of the American soul, perhaps, stirring itself after a long and fevered sleep. I desperately hope it continues to grow, because the more the American public is confronted with the reality of government-administered torture, the less it will be able to avoid choosing sides in the debate.
In a week when President Bush has taken to describing the stakes in his confrontation with Iran as “World War III”, and Vice President Cheney warning Iran of “serious consequences” (one of the key phrases in the march to war against Iraq) if it “stays on its present course”, it’s worth reading Fareed Zakaria’s latest Newsweek column:
The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.
Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
All true, and well said. But something in the construction of Zakaria’s sentences intrigues me. In the second paragraph he sets up a powerful argument based on a structure of parallelism: sentences 2 and 3 tell us about the size of Iran’s economy and its defense budget, and about that country’s propensity to invade others. Likewise, sentence 4 tells us about the size of the U.S. economy and its defense budget, while sentence 5… Oh wait. Sentence 5 talks about alliances against Iran. Zakaria has failed to complete the parallel construction with an observation of the United States’ propensity to invade others. Now, I won’t speculate as to why this might be — I frankly can’t imagine why the readers of Newsweek would find such an observation off-putting — but as a good Samaritan I can at least attempt to complete it for him.
Maybe “attempt” is too humble a word, for it’s really quite easy: “The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. It has not invaded a country since 2003.” Hmmm. It’s structurally perfect, but somehow it fails to help the reader properly compare the records of both the United States and Iran — after all, if in its entire history the United States invaded only Iraq, its score for the time period defined as late-18th-century-to-early 21st-century would be 1, which of course is only 1 worse than Iran’s score of zero. Knowing America’s true score is important, so let’s compare.
Iranian offensive actions against other countries since late 1700s (according to Zakaria):
- None
American offensive actions against other countries since late 1700s (selected examples only, based on data posted by the U.S. Naval Historical Center and Reed & Wright’s U.S. Military Chronology):
- 1806: Invasion of Mexico
- 1810: Invasion of West Florida (Spanish territory)
- 1812: Invasion of East Florida (Spanish territory)
- 1812: Invasion of Canada (British territory)
- 1813: Invasion of West Florida (Spanish territory)
- 1816: Invasion of remainder of the Floridas
- 1818: Seizure of the Oregon territory
- 1854: Bombardment of Nicaragua
- 1857: Seizure of Utah territory
- 1866: Raid into Mexico
- 1866: Punitive attack on China
- 1867: Partial occupation of Nicaragua
- 1867: Punitive attack on Formosa
- 1871: Punitive attack on Korea
- 1893: Invasion of Hawaii
- 1898: War against Spain
- 1899: Invasion of the Philippine Islands
- 1906: Invasion of Cuba
- 1918: Invasion of Russia
- 1926: Invasion of Nicaragua
- 1961: Invasion of Cuba (by proxy)
- 1965: Invasion of Dominican Republic
- 1970: Invasion of Cambodia
- 1983: Invasion of Grenada
- 1986: Bombardment of Libya
- 1989: Invasion of Panama
- 1998: Bombardment of Afghanistan and Sudan
- 1999: Bombardment of Yugoslavia
- 1993-2001: Bombardment of Iraq (various occasions)
- 2001: Invasion of Afghanistan
- 2003: Invasion of Iraq
As of this year, the score stands at United States: 31, Iran: zip. Given this record, the only thing Cheney should be able to accuse the Iranians of is geopolitical lethargy.
Go read Scott Horton on the role of Central Intelligence Agency black sites (particularly the one located on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean) and torture in the ongoing confrontation between CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden and CIA Inspector General John Helgerson. Read this October 11 New York Times article for some useful background, and as further reading, Scott’s post links to a Guardian article on an investigation into Diego Garcia now being initiated by an all-party foreign affairs committee of British MPs. A couple of paragraphs not quoted in Scott’s post give the grim flavour:
One [additional] possibility which the foreign affairs committee may explore is that suspects have been held on a prison ship off the coast of Diego Garcia. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, has said that he has heard from reliable sources that the US has held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean. There have also been second-hand accounts from detainees at Guantánamo of prisoners being held on US naval vessels.
One detainee told a researcher from Reprieve: “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship; they were all closed off in the bottom. The people detained on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”
Reprieve (mentioned above) is a British charity that ”provides frontline investigation and legal representation to prisoners denied justice by powerful governments across the world”. Its submission to the foreign affairs committee on the question of human rights abuses in British overseas territories can be found here.
Also quoted in the Guardian article is “Andrew Tyrie, Tory MP for Chichester and a campaigner against the CIA’s use of detention without trial”. Tyrie established in 2005 the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition; the group’s own submission to the committee can be found on its website.
And if you simply can’t face such depressing reading on a Friday night, by all means schedule it for Saturday evening instead, and in the meantime read Jeet Heer’s analysis of what “meritocracy” means to the Podhoretz household.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made some rather interesting comments in a press roundtable today after concluding meetings with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov and Minister of Defense Anatoliy Serdyukov. Rice is in Moscow with Defense Secretary Robert Gates to discuss Iran, missile defense, and other matters. She also met with eight human rights activists at the U.S. ambassador’s residence this morning, prompting the following exchanges with the press [emphasis added]:
QUESTION: [...] Do you — can you give us any sense of how they respond [to U.S. concerns about human rights] and whether over time you think that they have gotten any more sympathetic to your concerns or whether over time they perhaps, you know, have gotten less sympathetic and have had less of an ear for what they might regard as American interference?
SECRETARY RICE: You know, it never takes that tone or character. I think we’re beyond the time when we’re told to mind our own business. I, frankly, haven’t encountered that tone in any of these conversations. They do talk about their own history. They talk about their own evolution. They talk about the fact that this is 15 years in the making, that it’s not a very old system, trying to find its way toward democracy.
But I’ve continued to make what I think are the essential points. There are issues of human rights and we’ve been concerned and I’ve talked a good deal about the problems of individuals, journalists and others, who have had difficulty. But there are also institutional issues, issues about the — in a presidential system not having strong institutions, countervailing institutions, to the presidency. And I’ve been very open about the concerns that that raises in any country, not just in Russia but in any country. If you don’t have countervailing institutions, then the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.
[...]
QUESTION: Can you talk about your meeting with the Prime Minister, the new Prime Minister, I mean your impression of him? He was a fairly unknown entity in the agency.
SECRETARY RICE: [...] I found him competent, on top of his brief this morning. We went through a number of issues. He was very focused on prime ministerial kinds of issues. We talked a good deal about the WTO, about economic relations. I raised, and as I said talked at some length, about issues of institutional development in Russia, democratic institutional development in Russia. But you know, I found him –
QUESTION: What was his response to that?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, he — you know, he talked about the fact that this is a young — I mean, it’s not that long since the revolution and — or since — yeah, since the revolution of 1991, and so forth. But again, I talked — I tend with the Russians to talk a lot about what I see as institutional deficiencies because that’s really the issue here is: Is this country going to have countervailing institution to the presidency?
QUESTION: You mean the parliament, the courts?
SECRETARY RICE: Mm-hmm. Parliament, the court, independent media, civil society. I think it’s extremely important, as all of us have done throughout secretaries of state coming here and even presidents, to raise individual cases of people who have been mistreated or cases of unresolved disappearances or murders or whatever. Those are very important to raise.
Ultimately, democratic guarantees come from institutional development. Democratic governance comes from a president who can never be too strong because there will always be a congress or a parliament to check him or her, because there will be an independent media to shed light on what is going on. Now, we did have in one case a kind of interesting discussion of how the Internet will be a source from which people will get their information globally, not — and so one wonders to the degree that you even control the media how well you’ll be able to control information in the long run. [...]
QUESTION: Is the Russian presidency too strong, in your view, as currently constituted?
SECRETARY RICE: I’ve said that I think there’s too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. And I’ve told the Russians that. I’ve said it publicly before. Because it’s just the absence of — I think everybody has doubts about the independence, full independence, of the judiciary, although at certain levels — I think — I can’t remember the numbers now, but Russian citizens almost always win against the government when they go to the judiciary, so it’s not — it’s not widespread, but on a lot of very high-profile cases I think there are questions about the independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are I think questions about the strength of the Duma.
After reading this, I immediately felt a smart-ass comment coalescing in my brain (this is quite normal for me, by the way, so don’t worry), something about a pot and a kettle, I think. But then I thought a bit more about the words she used: “I’ve been very open about the concerns that that raises in any country, not just in Russia but in any country. If you don’t have countervailing institutions, then the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.”
In any country? Dare I speculate, hers included? Could it be (to speculate further) that for this career Sovietologist, Putin’s Kremlin acts as a kind of psychological stand-in for the White House, allowing her to criticize the “unitary executive” theory that drives and legitimizes the Bush administration’s deliberate and aggressive concentration of power, without being forced to confront the fact that she works for the administration and is thus effectively a supporter of this very theory? If so, what demons of cognitive dissonance must she wrestle to the ground every morning before being ready to come to work?
MACBETH
Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?DOCTOR
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.- William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act V, Scene III
Former British prime minister and now Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair, hard at work learning well-known things for the first time:
“Blair was really astonished and angry,” says the UN official who gave him a presentation on the devastating effects of Israel’s “security barrier”, settlements, checkpoints, and closures on the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories. “He asked very smart questions, though I did think that someone who was prime minister for so long should already have known these facts.”
In Myanmar (that’s Burma, you pinko!), William Kristol discovers another evil country to wage war against:
Couldn’t we use other military and intelligence capabilities to put more stress on the regime? As Sen. Joseph Lieberman has suggested, “The junta has tried to cut off the ability of peaceful demonstrators to communicate to the outside world through the Internet and cellphone networks; we should be examining how the junta’s ability to command and control its forces throughout the country might itself be disrupted.” What about limited military actions, overt or covert, against the regime’s infrastructure — its military headquarters, its intelligence apparatus, its rulers’ lavish palaces? Couldn’t such actions have a deterrent effect, or might not they help open up fissures in the regime? Have we really done all we can to avert the disaster that is unfolding?
Well, I suppose it would give U.S. Special Forces something to practice on as they while away the time waiting to attack Iran. Hate to see those guys underemployed.
Arrested by Pakistani police in 2002 and then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for over four years, 26-year-old Mohamed Lemine Ould Sidi has been released without charge and returned to his home country of Mauritania. He told AFP that he and other prisoners were forced to watch U.S. guards urinating on the Koran – ”After that we decided to no longer take it to our cells and only recited from memory” — and that he was subject to force feeding after a hunger strike. “Other prisoners, simple innocent Muslims were also tortured, humiliated in their beliefs and their human dignity,” he said. The AP reports that two other Mauritanian men, Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Ahmed Ould Abdelaziz, remain in Guantanamo Bay.
The Pentagon released at about the same time eight other captives: six Afghans, a Libyan, and a Yemeni. But the U.S. government refuses to concede error in having arrested and imprisoned any of these men. Quite the reverse: Pentagon spokesman Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon told AP last week that ”All detainees at Guantánamo are considered a threat to the United States — to include those transferred yesterday.”
One can’t help but wonder whether, given the ethics-free space in which the U.S. government now conducts itself, this declaration is meant not only as a defense mechanism, but also as a way of signalling that these men remain fair game in future operations. Does being freed from Guantanamo saddle you forever with the status of being one of the “usual suspects”?
Via Laura Rozen, an important NYT article on a 2005 secret opinion issued by Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department which authorized continued use of torture by the CIA. A short sample:
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Read Marty Lederman at Balkinization on this topic:
Between this and Jane Mayer’s explosive article in August about the CIA black sites, I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation’s recent history — not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals — lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers — without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.
Africa can celebrate: the United States now considers it important enough to assign an entire military command to it. With the operationalization of AFRICOM this month, the continent and its national governments will be able to bask in the sustained attention of senior American generals, and, more importantly, will be able to dip their hands in the loot bag of weapons and money that normally comes along with such attention.
The new command covers territory formerly split up between European Command (EUCOM), Central Command (CENTCOM), and Pacific Command (PACOM); AFRICOM will cover the entire continent except the state of Egypt, which will remain under CENTCOM’s purview. For its first year, the command will operate under EUCOM as responsibilities are transitioned to it, and will reach fully independent status by October 2008. Army Gen. William E. “Kip” Ward, the former deputy commander of EUCOM, has been confirmed by the Senate as AFRICOM’s first commander.
Gen. Ward declared in his confirmation testimony that “I see the establishment of AFRICOM as a wonderful opportunity to efficiently and effectively apply the elements of U.S. national power in ways that help the Africans develop and implement their solutions to African concerns,” which has a nice altruistic ring to it. But what the United States is really concerned with is, first, the “ungoverned spaces” into which some security experts fear terrorists may find refuge; second, the rather large amounts of oil found on the continent, particularly in and around the Gulf of Guinea (said a senior Department of Defense official in 2003, “a key mission for U.S. forces (in Africa) would be to ensure that Nigeria’s oil fields… are secure.”); and third, the growing influence there of potential “peer competitors”, namely China. For more background, here’s a 2004 article I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle on increased U.S. security interest in the continent.
So while some African countries have been keen to accept American involvement, including Ethiopia (now considered America’s strongest African ally in the War on Terror) and Liberia (which has publicly offered to host the future AFRICOM headquarters), others have been more wary. “No foreign troops are welcomed on African soil,” Nigeria’s minister of foreign affairs bluntly stated on Monday, while the South African Development Community (SADC) has emerged as another opponent — in July the US ambassador to South Africa complained publicly of the unwillingness of the South African defense minister to even meet with General Ward. As a recent Congressional Research Service report observed:
There is considerable apprehension over U.S. motivations for creating AFRICOM, and some Africans worry that the move represents a neo-colonial effort to dominate the region militarily. U.S. military efforts on the continent have been seen as episodic, leading some to question a more sustained focus from DOD now. Reports of U.S. air strikes in Somalia in early 2007 and U.S. support for Ethiopia’s military intervention there have added to those concerns.
The case of Somalia in particular shows where U.S. priorities lie. After Islamist forces in 2006 overthrew the clan-based warlords who had dominated the country for years, achieving a tenuous stability where none had been before, the U.S. backed a massive intervention by Ethiopia, shattering the peace and leading to the flight of at least 400,000 people from the now violence-wracked capital. Having effectively refreshed the country’s “failed state” status, the American military has since then felt free to launch air strikes and gunboat attacks whenever terrorist-linked targets have appeared in the country.
General Ward’s objective to “help the Africans develop and implement their solutions to African concerns” looks a little less altruistic in this light, doesn’t it?
There’s a great essay by Daniel Soar in a recent London Review of Books about the NSA’s domestic Internet surveillance program and the complicity of major American telecommunications companies in the same. The highlight for me is Soar’s description of a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals hearing on a class action lawsuit brought against AT&T for warrantless surveillance, which contains a sentence of unsurpassed beauty (in bold):
‘Was a warrant obtained in this case?’ Judge Pregerson asked. ‘That gets into matters that are protected by state secrets,’ the deputy solicitor general replied. The court wanted access to a secret paper one of the lawyers had accidentally been allowed to see. The government refused point blank. ‘Every ampersand, every comma is top secret?’ Judge Hawkins inquired. ‘This document is totally non-redactable and non-segregable and cannot even be meaningfully described,’ said the assistant attorney general, demonstrating a more impressive grasp of obfuscatory rhetoric than his colleague. Towards the end of the afternoon, a tired Judge McKeown said: ‘I feel like I’m in Alice in Wonderland.’ She was right to: the government’s case rests, essentially, on claiming that whether or not there was a secret is itself a secret, presumably in the hope that the prosecuting lawyers might vanish in a puff of logic. A date for the court to submit its findings has yet to be set.
Who would have expected that the War on Terror would become its own religio-logical art form? Did the Inquisition achieve as much?
Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen captured as a fifteen-year-old by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in July of 2002, has been classified an “unlawful enemy combatant” by the Court of Military Commission Review, a status which gives the much-critized military commissions system jurisdiction over his case. Khadr is now 21.
Although Canada’s Conservative government has been content to let a Canadian citizen remain imprisoned indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay, Liberal leader Stephane Dion recently called for Khadr’s release and repatriation after meeting with the young man’s lawyers.
If the U.S. is unwilling to guarantee that Khadr will be fairly tried in a court of law, Canada should demand his repatriation, Dion said, echoing an earlier statement he made in August.
“We won’t know if we don’t ask. We hope they’ll say yes,” Dion said at the news conference. “If the U.S. is not prepared to meet our requirements by transferring Mr. Khadr to American territory and trying him in legit court we will call for Mr. Khadr’s repatriation to Canada where it can be dealt with by our justice system.”
He said Australia, the United Kingdom and France have all had their citizens repatriated after filing such requests.
Dion’s stance adds further weight to an August 12th call by the Canadian Bar Association for the Canadian government to demand the release of Khadr so that his case can be dealt with under Canadian law. “Continuing to hold Omar Khadr in Guantanamo Bay is an affront to the rule of law,” said CBA president J. Parker MacCarthy.
Adding insult to injury, President Bush today criticized the members of the United Nations General Assembly for not upholding the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Bush described these principles as “liberating people from tyranny and violence”, “liberating people from hunger and disease”, “liberating people from the chains of illiteracy and ignorance”, and “liberating people from poverty and despair”. Oddly, he failed to mention the principles enshrined in the following articles, all of which are applicable to Guantanamo Bay and the worldwide regime of secret prisons, torture, and disappearances that his administration has constructed:
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
I’m surprised the President’s tongue did not leap from his mouth for shame.
The United States over the past week has once again managed to temporarily achieve one of its key goals in Iraq, uniting the factionalized Iraqi government — against the United States. “Blackwater Shooting Crisis Rallies Baghdad” (registration req’d) is the title of a Wall Street Journal story on the fatal shooting by Blackwater military contractors of eleven Iraqi bystanders (twelve others were wounded) during a Sept. 16 security incident of a still-disputed nature:
[T]he government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has managed to galvanize broad-based opposition to an order issued in the waning days of direct American rule in Iraq that lays out broad immunity from criminal prosecution for U.S. diplomats, troops and private contractors operating in Iraq.
<snip>
The U.S. Embassy here has released few details of what happened, saying U.S. officials are continuing to investigate. But the shooting has brought together Iraq’s three biggest and mostly hostile factions — Sunni Muslim Arabs, Shiite Muslim Arabs and ethnic Kurds.
“This is a very good point on which everyone agrees,” says Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Iraq’s Parliament.
It appeared, under the circumstances rather agreeable to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses, and often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were charging an enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no check into the face, or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age, that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous manner. But, few cared enough for that to think of it a second time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the common wretches were left to get out of their difficulties as they could.
With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of its way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged…
“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is a child.”
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Scott Horton’s invaluable No Comment blog directs my attention to a pleasing fact: the longstanding opposition of Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican to much of America’s present foreign policy, including its abhorrent use of torture. In a Dec. 13, 2005 address marking the Vatican’s World Day of Peace (held every New Years Day), Pope Benedict stated that “International humanitarian law ought to be considered as one of the finest and most effective expressions of the intrinsic demands of the truth of peace. Precisely for this reason, respect for that law must be considered binding on all peoples.” As Cardinal Renato Martino further explained to reporters at the time, “Torture is a humiliation of the human person, whoever it is. The Church does not allow these means to extract the truth.”
Now, why haven’t otherwise devout U.S. Republicans gotten that message? Isn’t the 11th Commandment “Thou shalt NOT waterboard nor indefinitely imprison thy neighbour”? It isn’t? Maybe God figured he didn’t need to write that one down. Surely we couldn’t be that stupid and cruel.
Visiting London, Rudy Giuliani suggested yesterday to the New York Times that Israel should be invited to join NATO: “They are a democracy,” he said. “They are an ally of the United States. They would have to decide whether that would be in their own national interest.” And in a speech that night to conservative trans-Atlanticists, he added Japan, Australia, and India to his list of prospective allies, all of whom he claims meet the tests of “good governance, military readiness” and “global responsibility”.
Apart from the infeasibility of this proposal — how many European countries will want to find themselves obligated to fight on Israel’s side the next time it gets attacked by terrorists? — it does at least highlight just how odd a creature NATO has become. The alliance was formed to ward off the very specific threat of a Soviet invasion of western Europe. In this, it served its purpose. But instead of being praised and then put respectfully away, since the end of the Cold War it has been re-defined and re-scoped into a global alliance against All Things Bad, whether that be defined as post-Communist instability in eastern Europe or post-Taliban instability in Afghanistan.
Worse, it is increasingly being perceived as a proxy arm of U.S. foreign policy. In a sense, of course, it always has been, inasmuch as it served to cover the European front against Communism while other American allies (less formally) covered the Asian front. But NATO maintained public support in its European base by being clearly aimed at the defense of the territory of the European countries themselves. As the alliance expanded its geographic scope in the 1990s, it managed to carry its public with it in good faith, portraying itself as just another good-deeds organization like the UN or the OECD.
But though the Afghanistan mission started out as a more-or-less peaceful reconstruction project, a way for NATO countries to show good will towards the United States without committing to ground combat operations, it has quickly deteriorated into just that: a full-scale counter-insurgency operation of no fixed duration, in which countries like Canada and Britain are sustaining casualty rates that they haven’t seen in half a century. This, in turn, has led their publics (along with the publics of the other NATO countries, who worry about the same thing happening to their own troops) to reconsider their support for the campaign — a phenomenon that has deeply discomfited the alliance’s military and political elites.
But it is those elites who should reconsider things, including the nature and purpose of the alliance itself. Public support for war cannot be sustained on altruistic motives like the extension of human rights to foreign peoples, nor, even less, on the thin virtue of “supporting” a NATO member who is twenty times more powerful than any of the others and who only requires help in Afghanistan because it chose to deploy the bulk of its army to the invasion of an unrelated country, and because it chooses not to institute a draft or to increase taxes.
If that’s what allies are for, then Giuliani is right: the United States can always use more of them.
As others have already pointed out, being considered a “serious” member of the American foreign policy community has one overwhelming requirement: you must firmly believe, without a shred of doubt, in the right of the United States to use military force to violate the sovereignty of other countries in pursuit of its own national interests (or in pursuit of universal values, if you’re of the liberal hawk subspecies).
But as the German Greens are discovering, the ability to grant or withhold the status of “serious” from political parties or individuals is not unique to America. With their recent grassroots vote against prolonging Germany’s participation in NATO’s Afghanistan mission, the Greens have — at least according to Der Spiegel writer David Crossland — “[abandoned] the pragmatism which former leader Joschka Fischer had stamped on the party to make it electable and fit to govern as junior partner to the Social Democrats”. And not just unfit to govern, but immoral too. Tut-tutted the general secretary of the Christian Democrats, “The Greens are apparently unwilling and unable to take responsibility for the people of Afghanistan.”
So that is what a party must believe if it is to be a serious player in German politics. I wonder if the Afghans are aware that they are considered the “responsibility” of the German government? That will cheer them up, surely.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden”, 1st stanza, 1899
