War Crimes

[jose-uno]

Wednesday Dec. 17, 2008 12:04 EST
Committing war crimes for the "right reasons"

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat has a post today -- "Thinking About
Torture" -- which, he acknowledges quite remarkably, is the first time
he has "written anything substantial, ever, about America's treatment
of detainees in the War on Terror." He's abstained until today due
to what he calls "a desire to avoid taking on a fraught and
desperately importantly (sic) subject without feeling extremely
confident about my own views on the subject."

I don't want to purport to summarize what he's written. It's a
somewhat meandering and at times even internally inconsistent
statement. Douthat himself characterizes it as "rambling" --
befitting someone who appears to think that his own lack of moral
certainty and borderline-disorientation on this subject may somehow be
a more intellectually respectable posture than those who
simplistically express "straightforward outrage." In the midst of
what is largely an intellectually honest attempt to describe the
causes for his ambiguity, he actually does express some
"straightforward outrage" of his own. About the widespread abuse, he
writes: "it should be considered impermissible as well as immoral"
and "should involve disgrace for those responsible, the Cheneys and
Rumsfelds as well as the people who actually implemented the
techniques that the Vice President's office promoted and the Secretary
of Defense signed off on."

Nonetheless, Douthat repeatedly explains that he is burdened by
"uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn
those involved," and one of the central reasons for that uncertainty
-- one that is commonly expressed -- is contained in this passage:

But with great power comes a lot of pressures as well, starting with
great fear: The fear that through inaction you'll be responsible for
the deaths of thousands or even millions of the Americans whose lived
you were personally charged to protect. This fear ran wild the
post-9/11 Bush Administration, with often-appalling consequences, but
it wasn't an irrational fear - not then, and now. It doesn't excuse
what was done by our government, and in our name, in prisons and
detention cells around the world. But anyone who felt the way I felt
after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name
was, in some sense, done for us - not with our knowledge, exactly, but
arguably with our blessing. I didn't get what I wanted from this
administration, but I think you could say with some justification that
I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds - to return to
where I began this rambling post - the mix of anger, uncertainty and
guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush
Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should
be judged.

This is the Jack Goldsmith argument: while what Bush officials did
may have been misguided and wrong, they did it out of a true fear of
Islamic enemies, with the intent to protect us, perhaps even
consistent with the citizenry's wishes. And while Douthat presents
this view as some sort of candid and conflicted complexity, it isn't
really anything more than standard American exceptionalism -- more
accurately: blinding American narcissism -- masquerading as a
difficult moral struggle.

The moral ambiguity Douthat thinks he finds is applicable to virtually
every war crime. It's the extremely rare political leader who ends up
engaging in tyrannical acts, or commits war crimes or other
atrocities, simply for the fun of it, or for purely frivolous reasons.
Every tyrant can point to real and legitimate threats that they
feared.

Ask supporters of Fidel Castro why he imprisoned dissidents and
created a police state and they'll tell you -- accurately -- that he
was the head of a small, defenseless island situated 90 miles to the
South of a huge, militaristic superpower that repeatedly tried to
overthrow his government and replace it with something it preferred.
Ask Hugo Chavez why he rails against the U.S. and has shut down
opposition media stations and he'll point out -- truthfully -- that
the U.S. participated to some extent in a coup attempt to overthrow
his democratically elected government and that internal factions
inside Venezuela have done the same.

Iranian mullahs really do face internal, foreign-funded revolutionary
groups that are violent and which seek to overthrow them. Serbian
leaders -- including those ultimately convicted of war crimes -- had
legitimate grievances about the treatment of Serbs outside of Serbia
proper and threats posed to Serbian sovereignty. The complaints of
Islamic terrorists regarding U.S. hegemony and exploitation in the
Middle East are grounded in factual truth, as are those of Gazan
terrorists who point to the four-decades-old Israeli occupation.
Georgia really did and does face external threats from Russia, and
Russia really did have an interest in protecting Russians and South
Ossetians under assault from civilian-attacking Georgian artillery.
The threat of Israeli invasion which Hezbollah cites is real. Some
Muslims really have been persecuted by Hindus.

But none of those facts justify tyranny, terrorism or war crimes.
There are virtually always "good reasons" that can be and are cited to
justify war crimes and acts of aggression. It's often the case that
nationalistic impulses -- or genuine fears -- lead the country's
citizens to support or at least acquiesce to those crimes. War crimes
and other atrocities are typically undertaken in defense against some
real (if exaggerated) threat, or to target actual enemies, or to
redress real grievances.

But we don't accept that justifying reasoning when offered by others.
In fact, those who seek merely to explain -- let alone justify -- the
tyranny, extremism and/or violence of Castro, or Chavez, or Hamas, or
Slobodan Milosevic or Islamic extremists are immediately condemned for
seeking to defend the indefensible, or invoking "root causes" to
justify the unjustifiable, or offering mitigating rationale for pure
evil.

Yet here we have American leaders who now, more openly than ever, are
literally admitting to what has long been known -- that they violated
the laws of war and international treaties which, in the past, we've
led the way in advocating and enforcing. And what do we hear even from
the most well-intentioned commentators such as Douthat? Yes, it was
wrong. True, they shouldn't have done it. But they did it for good
reasons: they believed they had to do it to protect us, to guard
against truly bad people, to discharge their heavy responsibility to
protect the country, because we were at war.

All of the same can be said for virtually every tyrant we righteously
condemn and every war criminal we've pursued and prosecuted. The laws
of war aren't applicable only in times of peace, to be waived away in
times of war or crisis. To the contrary, they exist precisely because
the factors Douthat cites to explain and mitigate what our leaders did
always exist, especially when countries perceive themselves at war.
To cite those factors to explain away war crimes -- or to render them
morally ambiguous -- is to deny the very validity of the concept
itself.

The pressures and allegedly selfless motivations being cited on behalf
of Bush officials who ordered torture and other crimes -- even if
accurate -- aren't unique to American leaders. They are extremely
common. They don't mitigate war crimes. They are what typically
motivate war crimes, and they're the reason such crimes are banned by
international agreement in the first place -- to deter leaders,
through the force of law, from succumbing to those exact temptations.
What determines whether a political leader is good or evil isn't their
nationality. It's their conduct. And leaders who violate the laws of
war and commit war crimes, by definition, aren't good, even if they
are American.

[LESLIE DOYLE]

it's very simple we look louzy to the world. people don't have happy
faces when reading this about us.