December 13, 2014
A WEIRD SORT OF MORAL CALCULUS:
Torture Is Who We Are : A country, like a person, is what it does. (PETER BEINART, DEC 11 2014, The Atlantic)
Torture, declared President Obama this week, in response to the newly released Senate report on CIA interrogation, is "contrary to who we are." Maine Senator Angus King added that, "This is not America. This is not who we are." According to Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth, "We are better than this."No, actually, we're not. There's something bizarre about responding to a 600-page document detailing systematic U.S. government torture by declaring that the real America--the one with good values--does not torture. It's exoneration masquerading as outrage. Imagine someone beating you up and then, when confronted with the evidence, declaring that "I'm not really like that" or "that wasn't the real me." Your response is likely to be some variant of: "It sure as hell seemed like you when your fist was slamming into my nose." A country, like a person, is what it does.The implication of the statements by Obama, King, and Yarmuth is that there is an essential, virtuous America whose purity the CIA defiled. But that's silly. Aliens did not invade the United States on 9/11. In times of fear, war, and stress, Americans have always done things like this. In the 19th century, American slavery relied on torture. At the turn of the 20th, when America began assembling its empire overseas, the U.S. army waterboarded Filipinos during the Spanish-American War. As part of the Phoenix Program, an effort to gain intelligence during the Vietnam War, CIA-trained interrogators delivered electric shocks to the genitals of some Vietnamese communists, and raped, starved, and beat others.America has tortured throughout its history. And every time it has, some Americans have justified the brutality as necessary to protect the country from a savage enemy. Others have called it counterproductive and immoral. At different moments, the balance of power between these two groups shifts. But neither side in these debates speaks for the "real America." The real America includes them both. Morally, we contain multitudes. [...]After 9/11, while George W. Bush was announcing that God had deputized America to spread liberty around the world, his government was shredding the domestic and international restraints against torture built up over decades, and injecting food into inmates' rectums.
If we accept the numbers of those who oppose water-boarding, it was done to something like four or five people. If we accept the numbers of those who oppose the removal of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq it l;ed to the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis. If we pick a casualty number for WWII, we killed 350,000 Japanese civilians. And in our own Civil War, we may have killed as many as 750,000 of each other.
To define ourselves as the nation that tortured 5, apparently out of pure enjoyment of the act, rather than the nation that has been willing to kill millions over its history in order to extend liberty throughout the world, is farcical. And the hope of the Left, that torture is so horrible that having engaged in it will deter us from future wars of liberation, is simply anti-historical and aAmerican.
After every American war we pause to wring our hands over the brutality with which we won it. And then we fight the next one...
MORE:
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 13, 2014 6:50 AM
Tweet