The War Of The Worlds
The Political Animal brings up a point that I agree should get a full airing before we go any further in our discussion of America's behavior in the GWOT:
Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
This strikes me as an issue that everyone — pro-war and anti-war alike — ought to take a firm stand on: should the Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners captured in the war on terror or not?
Gonzales' reasoning is appealing but misguided, I think. After all, every generation believes at one time or another that the enemies they face are so savage, so fundamentally different from any that have come before that old rules of conduct no longer apply. Every generation also turns out to be wrong. The reality is that the Taliban is not more dangerous than the Cold War Soviets, who in turn were not more dangerous than the Nazis. If we were willing to treat prisoners decently in those conflicts, why not now?
The ability to "quickly obtain information" from captured prisoners has been a critical part of every war, but we nonetheless agreed half a century ago to place this under strict limits. This was not because we felt the wars of that era were unimportant, or because we deluded ourselves into believing that our enemies would always follow suit, but because we wanted to set a standard of simple human decency for ourselves and others.
It was also viewed as counter-productive to our own troops when they, inevitably, get captured. It helps to be able to say 'we don't do this and you'd better not do this either." Just ask members of the military these days how happy they are with the prospect of throwing out the Geneva Conventions.
The larger issue is what's important, though. The 9/11 attacks were extremely dramatic and horrifying spectacles. That was, of course, the point. But, Islamic terrorism, per se, is not a threat to the nation on the scale of WWII or the Cold War. Indeed, its greatest threat to our survival is the extent to which we allow our fear to blind us to the possibility of creeping totalitarianism from within. It does not threaten our sovereignty or our way of life as those earlier wars did, despite our very understandable fear of further attacks.
I have thought since the beginning that stoking our bloodlust, while emotionally satisfying, was exactly the wrong thing to do. I thought that the correct response to 9/11 was to observe the appropriate period of mourning for the victims and then quietly, calmly and systematically set about working the problem from a number of different angles --- particularly using the unprecedented outpouring of international support --- to mitigate the threat and secure our own country. It seemed to me that the most powerful statement would be to quickly and cleanly unseat the Taliban and then be menacingly mysterious about what else we were doing behind the scenes. We should have openly and obviously embraced international institutions and foreign countries and touted their cooperation as a way of marginalizing Islamic fundamentalism as much as possible to keep terrorists wondering who was friend or foe.
We instead reared up on our hind legs like a wounded animal and began thrashing about, enraged and unhinged, stoking bloodlust and fear. Rather then dealing with the problem with seriousness of purpose we responded with vomitous bromides about our superior morality and behaved as if 9/11 was s unique threat to our survival instead of an asymmetrical challenge --- the asymmetry of which accrued to our benefit, not theirs. If we had resisted the impulse to demonstrate our power like a Moscow May Day Parade circa 1965 and engaged the world against what should have been conceived as a common enemy, we might have been able to deal with this threat over time without catastrophic results.
But we did exactly the wrong thing. We inflamed the situation with the "bring it on" and "you're with us or agin' us" macho rhetoric and, stunningly, even went so far as to invade an uninvolved Arab country. The president told our troops they were fighting for the survival of the nation in Iraq and encouraged them to believe they were exacting revenge for the acts of 9/11 even though it wasn't true.
We continue to lose hearts and minds everywhere. As Josh Marshall's Iraq correspondent reports today:
Also it is no secret that ON THE STREET the US Army was and remains openly kicking Iraqi asses whenever and wherever they want to.
About the Army - Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968. I knew we were finished when I had a soldier point his Squad Automatic Weapons at me and my bodyguard detail for driving down the street when he decided he would cross the street in the middle of rush hour traffic (which was moving at about 70 MPH) ... He made it clear to any and all that he was preparing to shoot drivers who did not stop for his jaunt because speeding cars are "threats."
I also once had a soldier from a squad of Florida National Guard reservists raise weapons and kick the door panel of a clearly marked CPA security vehicle (big American flag in the windshield of a $150,000 armored Land Cruiser) because they wanted us to back away from them so they could change a tire ... as far as they were concerned WE (non-soldiers) were equally the enemy as any Iraqi.
Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit. I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.
From the beginning we have behaved as if this was a threat so unprecedented that we didn't have to observe any previous notions of civilized behavior --- as if it were War of The Worlds and aliens were trying to colonize the planet rather than a bunch of clever criminals armed with box-cutters and a suicidal excuse to kill in the name of God. We invaded Iraq with too few trained troops, no help or input from the experts in nation building and peacekeeping and now we find ourselves in the worst possible situation. We are seen as unsympathetic, arrogant, violent and inept. This should be expected when the government and the likes of Rush Limbaugh (who is piped in every day on Armed Forces Radio) encourage our military to act like barbarians by lying to them and the public about the nature of the threat and the identity of the enemy.
We may not be facing aliens from a foreign planet, but we have now sown the seeds of an anti-American backlash that encompasses this planet and may well last for generations. And America is demonstrably weaker in the world than we were before this cock-up. For no good reason, we have boldly demonstrated for all to see that our intelligence operations are virtually useless and that we don't even have enough troops to invade and occupy a third rate dictatorship. I know I feel safer knowing that. And I have no doubt that the rest of the world has made a note of it too.
I have long said that these neocon Bushies have always been wrong about everything. But, they have never been as wrong as this.
Nobody should be surprised. They advertised their intentions quite openly. In their Pax Americana Manifesto, Rebuilding America's Defenses they clearly state that it would probably take a catastrophe on the scale of Pearl Harbor to rally thecountry to their classic comic Imperial wet dream. Despite the fact that they do not understand the concept of terrorism in the least, they nonetheless realized that 9/11 would work very well to advance their plans. All of the breast beating and sabre rattling was ultimately in service of their starry-eyed ivory tower vision of The New American Cakewalk and the triumphant erasure of the asterisk that sits next to George W. Bush's name in the history books.
Since making that first fundamental error, they made every single mistake it is possible to make, starting with pissing off the entire world and ending with Abu Ghraib. Their dream is dead, but we will be paying the price for their arrogance and vanity for decades to come.
If anyone but the airheaded George W. Bush and his terminally incompetent neocon/Team B cabal had been in office, the idea that the threat of Islamic fundamentalism was so unprecedented that it meant America must discard all of its values and morals would have been laughed out of the oval office for the absurdity it is. Sadly for America and the world, bin Laden got lucky.