Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Over His Head

(Reprinted from the issue of July 1, 2004)

Deeply embarrassed by the Abu Ghraib torture stories, the Bush administration now says it never authorized such practices, favored humane treatment of captives, and respects the standards of the Geneva Convention.

If so, I can only say it has been easy to get the wrong impression. Ever since the Afghan war began, the administration has been arguing that the detainees were “enemy combatants” but not “prisoners of war” under the Geneva rules. Even American citizens arrested on suspicion of belonging to al-Qaeda, it argued, aren’t entitled to ordinary constitutional protections. White House lawyers concocted devious arguments that traditional constraints of both constitutional and international law were “obsolete.” (The question of simple decency didn’t come up.)

Clearly the administration didn’t want its hands tied by what it regarded as mere legal technicalities. It wanted the power to extract information from captives, and it wanted torture defined very narrowly. All this doesn’t suggest solicitude for defendants, especially the innocent.

But terms like “defendants” and “innocent” have little meaning in this very murky legal situation. How does the United States have legal authority in Afghanistan and Iraq? Under what U.S. law are the captives being held? Not one of them, as far as we know, has committed a crime on American soil; many thought they were just defending their own countries against invaders; others, especially in Iraq, have been arrested on the merest suspicions. All have been held indefinitely without charges or trial, and denied access to lawyers.

The whole operation is not only wrong, it’s inefficient, expensive, and self-defeating. It fails to distinguish between enemies and bystanders. And massive arbitrary arrests are an excellent way to turn bystanders — and their families, and the rest of the population — into enemies. It was all bad enough before the Abu Ghraib tortures were exposed.

What makes it all so unnecessary is that few of the prisoners could have had vital information about al-Qaeda, whose leadership is so secretive and whose membership is so diffuse. The most hideous tortures would have elicited few useful facts, and it’s pretty clear from the now-famous photos that our torturers were more intent on amusing themselves than on securing data.

The lofty official reasons for the Iraq war meant nothing to the U.S. interrogators. Whether George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, and the high command were aware of the tortures (which is very doubtful, even if they were culpably ignorant) matters much less than the jaunty cynicism of their soldiers. The argument that these were deviants — “just a few bad apples” — won’t wash; they felt no pressure from either their peers or their superiors to respect the humanity of their prisoners.

Their casual arrogance is even more shocking than their depravity. Whatever they were doing, they expected to get away with it. They even took a giddy delight in recording their crimes. They didn’t expect official approval, of course; but they did expect an official wink. Thanks to them and their absentee supervisors, the U.S. cause is hopelessly discredited.

No wonder the great majority of Iraqis — over 80%, by one poll — simply want the U.S. out of their country. Bush now seems to realize he has gotten in far, far over his head and is looking for an exit that will allow him to save face and pretend the U.S. mission has been a success.

On June 30 the U.S. will formally “transfer sovereignty” to the Iraqi Governing Council of its own creation. The concept of sovereignty has long puzzled philosophers, and the idea of an invading force claiming it and then “transferring” it back to the natives is an odd one. But if it can help extract us from this (I guess we can use the word now) quagmire, it will do.

Still, U.S. forces won’t be coming home any time soon.

One meager consolation of this unhappy experience is that it has discredited the neoconservatives who planned it, demanded it, and assured us that nothing could go wrong (unless our “resolve” failed). In less than six months, “neocon” has ceased being a proud designation and become an insulting epithet.

Maybe traditional conservatives will learn at last that government planning is just as likely to bungle everything in military adventures as in domestic social programs. In the future, the Iraq war may serve as a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences.

It already seems nothing short of fantastic that anyone could have believed that this war would inspire the whole Arab world to emulate American democracy.
 
Postwar Visions

In fairness to Bush, his grandiose hopes for the Iraq war were no more absurd than Woodrow Wilson’s hope that World War I would be “the war to end all wars”; it turned out to be the war that paved the way for World War II, and for Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism. And Franklin Roosevelt thought World War II would lead to universal self-government under the joint leadership of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. He planned to be the first president of the whole wide world, in effect; he would chair the United Nations, as designed by his advisor Alger Hiss.

Both Wilson’s and Roosevelt’s postwar plans quickly unraveled, as is usually the way. To top it off, only a few years after Roosevelt died, Hiss was serving time in prison for perjury after denying under oath that he had been a Soviet agent. Meanwhile, Winston Churchill found that victory over Germany meant the end of the British Empire he had hoped to save. Only Joseph Stalin had much reason to be contented with the postwar world: It added ten new countries to his collection, including Poland, whose violation by the Hitler-Stalin alliance had started the war in the first place.

Hitler also had a glowing vision of the postwar world: his Thousand-Year Reich. Needless to say, this didn’t quite come off, either. But he was the loser. What is more interesting is how consistently the postwar visions of the victors are tragically confounded.

Even our Civil War produced an America very different from the one Lincoln had meant to “save.” He had hoped to get rid not only of slavery, but of the freed black people, whom he wanted to colonize outside the United States, leaving an all-white Union.

Even total victory in war may be profoundly different from total success. As the Greeks told the story, the destruction of Troy precipitated all sorts of tragedies for the Greeks themselves.

Three thousand years later, the lesson still doesn’t seem to be sinking in.


“A corrupt society has many laws,” said the Roman sage. If so, SOBRAN’S, wonders what he’d have thought of America today! If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran