Further on the Newsweek story, it’s also amazing the pissing-match mentality that’s broken out with regard to prisoner abuse in general. It’s like tolerance for animalistic behavior toward prisoners is some sort of stand in for penis size lately. As if insisting on a standard of decency makes one less of a man and less willing to “do whatever it takes” to prosecute the War on Terror.
Now, I have to admit I’m pretty far from Andrew Sullivan’s level of concern with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. I think the abuses were obviously unacceptable, and they were obviously a huge propaganda blow at home and abroad. But I also think such tragedies are the inevitable side-effect of war — things to be corrected when they come to light, but in-and-of-themselves not arguments against the morality of our cause.
But when some people decide to ignore abuses altogether — and even to argue that the press shouldn’t report on abuses out of blind patriotism — then it becomes necessary for other people to become hysterical. Just to counterbalance the indifference.
If Sullivan sounds shrill on the topic these days, it’s because so many other supporters of the War on Terror have chosen to sound blasé.
The one mistake in this — and it’s a big one — is your implication that Sullivan IS “arguing against the morality of our cause”. As Sullivan keeps pointing out, he is NOT doing so — on the contrary, one of his main arguments is precisely that this sort of thing is strategically crippling us in the War Against Megaterrorism. I myself have never for one split-second assumed that we can go home, hide under the bed, and pretend that the continuing spread of nuclear and biological weapons (or even the use of airliners as weapons) will not destroy human civilization if we let it continue. The question is whether defending doing the sorts of things the government is currently doing to prisoners — at least half of whom, in both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, were actually NOT guilty of terrorist actions, to quote the Pentagon’s own reports on the subject — is a valid part of that war, which of course it is not. Not only is it unnecessary brutality; it’s actually seriously counterproductive brutality.
Historical note: considering both the initial action of Imperial Japan in carrying out a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and its hideous abuse of our POWs afterwards, there is no doubt that a majority of the American people would have enthusiastically defended the Roosevelt Administration if it had countenanced the abuse of Japanese POWs in return. But the Administration itself did not do so — because it knew damn well that we could not exterminate the total population of Japan or occupy the place permanently, that its ultimate goal in the war was to convert Japan into a voluntarily non-hostile nation, and that you don’t do that by abusing its POWs. That principle is even more important in this war, in which our enemy is
dispersed among nations comprising over a billion people. So why the hell isn’t this Administration keeping a close eye on the same principle? To raise a point that very often comes up in other connections in the Megaterrorism War: why the hell don’t we have an administration that actually does take its military responsibilities in this war seriously, instead of only pretending to do so?