But Bush's favorite historian sees this not as a moral imperative, but as a concession to the faint of heart. He writes:
Contrary to popular belief, throughout history, torture has brought results - either to gain critical, sometimes lifesaving, intelligence or more gratuitously to obtain embarrassing confessions from terrified captives.
The great historian and master of the hack historical analogy doesn't offer us any examples of the excellent intelligence results. How many of those famous nuclear bombs that are set to go off within an hour and the Good Guys have to torture and evil terrorist to get the information have actually occurred?
As Jimmy Carter writes in Our Endangered Values (2005), "The primary goal of torture or the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear." At least in that sense, torture has "brought results" like Vic says.
Vic's column is a classic Republican example of trying to sound "moderate" on the surface (which is not really Vic's preferred mode of operation) while justifying something other than "moderate".
Vic also argues:
There is also not much to the argument that our employment of torture will only embolden the enemy to barbarously treat Americans held captive. What a silly idea! Captured Americans have already been filmed being beheaded - or shot or burned - and their mutilated corpses hung up for public ridicule.
Vic goes on to provide additional ridicule for that idea.
Paying attention to the laws of war doesn't seem to count for much in the world of blowhard white guys. But Telford Taylor, US chief counsel at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, took a different view of the matter than Bush's favorite historian does. In Nuremberg and Vietnam (1970), he wrote:
There are at least two reasons [for international laws of war] - or perhaps one basic reason with two formulations—for the preservation and continued enforcement, as even-hand-edly as possible, of the laws of war. The first is strictly pragmatic: They work. Violated or ignored as they often are, enough of the rules are observed enough of the time so that mankind is very much better off with them than without them. The rules for the treatment of civilian populations in occupied countries are not as susceptible to technological change as rules regarding the use of weapons in combat. If it were not regarded as wrong to bomb military hospitals, they would be bombed all of the time instead of some of the time.
It is only necessary to consider the rules on taking prisoners in the setting of the Second World War to realize the enormous saving of life for which they have been responsible. Millions of French, British, German and Italian soldiers captured in Western Europe and Africa were treated in general compliance with The Hague and Geneva requirements, and returned home at the end of the wmr. German and Russian prisoners taken on the eastern front did not fare nearly so well and died in captivity by the millions, but many survived. Today there is surely much to criticize about the handling of prisoners on both sides of the Vietnam war, but at least many of them are alive, and that is because the belligerents are reluctant to flout the laws of war too openly.
Another and, to my mind, even more important basis of the laws of war is that they are necessary to diminish the corrosive effect of mortal combat on the participants. War does not confer a license to kill for personal reasons - to gratify perverse impulses, or to put out of the way anyone who appears obnoxious, or to whose welfare the soldier is indifferent. War is not a license at all, but an obligation to kill for reasons of state; it does not countenance the infliction of suffering for its own sake or for revenge.
Unless troops are trained and required to draw the distinction between military and nonmilitary killings, and to retain such respect for the value of life that unnecessary death and destruction will continue to repel them, they may lose the sense for that distinction for the rest of their lives. The consequence would be that many returning soldiers would be potential murderers.
Ah, but prophets of the grand new world order of American "unipolarity" like our man Vic don't have time for such "quaint" considerations, to use the adjective now-Attorney General Alberto "the Torture Guy" Gonzalez applied to the laws of war.
And, in one of the great scandals of our day, the Pentagon seems to be playing by rules much like Vic's instead of the law - at least when it comes to dealing specifically with the Abu Ghuraib torture crimes.
I knew that disciplinary action had been take against Gen. Janis Karpinski, the reservist who had been in charge of Abu Ghuraib prison when the now-infamous incidents of criminal, sadistic torture and murder by American soldiers occurred.
But I hadn't realized until I read this editorial that Karpinski was not disciplined for her dereliction of duty (or worse) at Abu Ghuraib: In Tampa, answers to Abu Ghraib?St. Petersburg Times 12/03/05.
She was not disciplined for her own dereliction of duty or worse over the criminal, sadistic torture and murders at Abu Ghuraib under her authority. Instead, she was disciplined for an alleged shoplifting incident. In which she was accused of taking a bottle of lotion. In 2002, before the Iraq War even started.
No, I'm not kidding. I wish I were. The Times' editorialists write:
This wouldn't look so blatantly like scapegoating if (a) the Army had not cleared Karpinski of having contributed specifically to the abuse at Abu Ghraib, (b) the underlying theft charge were not so disputed or petty and, (c) the military were not so bent on keeping records in the case from becoming public. Karpinski's military career was ruined after the Army's inspector general upheld charges that she palmed a bottle of lotion from a MacDill store in 2002 and failed to inform the Army about the misdemeanor charge. ...
To clear the record, the St. Petersburg Times' Susan Taylor Martin filed a federal Freedom of Information Act request six months ago. She got the runaround, and finally, last week, this from the Air Force: "We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a record." This is about a disputed misdemeanor complaint, not national security. Karpinski is either telling the truth or not. And her veracity is important, for while Karpinski acknowledged making mistakes, she also said the problems giving rise to the abuses went far up the chain of command. If an incident in Florida can shed some credibility on the person making such a serious allegation, then someone from the state's congressional delegation should pry those records from the Pentagon.
I wonder if this meets Vic's approval as being the way honorable ancient Athenians would have handled things.
Someday soon, I hope we'll be able to look back at the time when the United States was run according to the bizarre notions of people like Victor Davis Hanson and most people will just shake their heads in amazement at how things could have ever come to that.
