Year: 2005

Well, it’s an argument worth reading. On the other side of the ledger, we have the following story about a record number of increasingly effective insurgent attacks:

The insurgents “certainly appear to be surging right now,” Brig. Gen. Joseph L. Votel, who leads the anti-I.E.D. task force, said in an interview at Fort Irwin. “Time will tell about their ability to sustain this.” American officials also worry that the increase in attacks threatens to disrupt Iraq’s fledgling government further and could threaten the Bush administration’s strategy for maintaining public support for the American presence in Iraq by holding down American casualties. “We’re in a very, very dangerous period,” said a senior military official at the Pentagon. “To be a successful insurgent you need to be able to create spectacular attacks, and they’ve certainly done that in the past several weeks.”

I link. You decide. And the obvious corollary to the fact that U.S. forces are getting one hell of a training in fighting urban terror in Iraq is that … so are the Jihadists in fighting back. It would be a pretty awful historical irony if a war designed to cripple Jihadist terrorism ended up making it leaner, meaner and more lethal. Merely another consequence of too few troops. But, hey, better to risk losing a war than have Rumsfeld admit he was wrong, right?

HOW THEY DISTORT: You’ve got to hand it to the partisan right. Here is what James Taranto did to yours truly yesterday. He cites four different quotes from my blog over the past few years and implies inconsistency or what Glenn Reynolds calls “spin.” The four quotes make the following points: there is no moral equivalence between the widespread, totalitarian barbarism perpetrated by Saddam and the abuse, torture and inhumane treatment of detainees by American forces; at the same time, the dehumanization of detainees by U.S. interrogators, as cited by Durbin, is indeed something that could have happened under totalitarian regimes and is pragmatically and morally indefensible; we should treat the war on terror as a war – not as a police operation – and take the war to the enemy as effectively and as relentlessly as we can; but we should also abide by our historic commitment to fair and humane treatment of prisoners captured in such a war. How is any of this spin? How is any of it illogical or internally incoherent? How is any of it “excitable”, unless it is somehow now unacceptable to be shocked to the core by what we have discovered about the treatment of many detainees by U.S. forces? There is a distinction between how we deal with the enemy in the field of battle and how we deal with prisoners of war captured in such a battle. You can be ruthless in the former and humane in the latter. In fact, this was once the defining characteristic of the Western way of war. Now it is a subject of mockery from the defend-anything-smear-anyone right.

“You’re on the mark about the Durbin comments, although I might wish that he’d phrased it more clearly in order to avoid this entire mess. He was not making a direct analogy between our government and the Nazis, but it ‘sounded like he was’. In any case, although he’s right and you’re right, the Republicans will definitely gain ground riding this issue. The reason is that people don’t want to believe that their government (and, by extension, they themselves) are responsible for heinous torture and meaningless deaths. So they will find that they agree with those who dismiss it, minimize it, or justify it. In order to maintain their mental block, they’ll have to attack those who challenge it all the more fiercely. Many Americans are reading the conservative rebuttals of Durbin with a great deal of relief right now.” I’m reminded of Mayor Daley’s amazing quote: “I think it’s a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military act like that.” Some questions: Is Daley denying the incident Durbin described? And what does he mean by “like that”? We know for a fact that some U.S. interrogators have tortured some detainees to death. We know it because the military has conceded it. Is it now “a disgrace” to report that? Is it “a disgrace” to lament that? And how exactly is torturing innocent people to death via presidential memo utterly different than the behavior in many vile regimes?

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “It occurs to me to note that much of the debate is not (as you know), between Americans and anti-Americans, as the Bush administration and its flacks disingenuously contend. Nor is it primarily between those who believe in American exceptionalism and those who dispute it. Rather, it is between those who espouse it in a narrow, brittle way (“We’re America, we’re special, so don’t ever question our motives or tactics!”) versus those of us who believe it with a deep, abiding faith (“We’re America, we’re special, so we CAN AND MUST win a difficult war even constrained by moral principles that lesser countries flout and ignore!”)”

It’s been a far bigger story abroad – for a long time. Some of this can be attributed to anti-Americanism. But what a gift Gitmo is to the anti-Americans!

With the debate about Durbin, we’ve clearly reached a moment of some clarity. I’m not adding anything to what I’ve already said. But here are a few of your responses:

I’m surprised at your defense of Sen. Durbin. But maybe you’re on to something – I don’t know. We’ll see at the next election. We’ll have some races between those who defend Sen. Durbin’s comments, and those who think his insults were vile and unjustified. And we’ll see who wins. I predict the support-the-troops side will make headway. The left will sink further into oblivion the more they identify with Sen. Durbin and his supporters.

Point taken. I think this is a net political gain for the president and Republicans, if they really want to use it. I’m expected to be shocked by what Karl Rove will use in political warfare? What’s relevant is our deployment of cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees, against the law of the land and the most basic principles of Western justice. My email bag has been evenly divided between those appalled by Durbin and others appalled by my defense. Here’s one from a Christian theologian:

I myself am in the midst of a scholarly writing project on torture. As a fellow Christian, I am grieved and appalled at what is going on. It is an ambomination, a desecration of the image of God which no child of God should allow to be undertaken in the name of their self-defense. I am also deeply disturbed at the rhetoric of those who would defend the administration’s ‘dirty hands’ policy. And at the way that, increasingly, criticizing the Administration is equated with anti-Americanism, immoralism and the like. Thank you for refusing to be cowed by these tactics.

Frankly, I’ve been amazed that the Christian right hasn’t been more vocal. But, hey, once faith has been transformed into partisan politics, you end up justifying any number of things. Here’s another point aginst my argument:

“A soldier sat in his barracks, shining his shoes. So go ahead: answer his implied question. If you had been told that soldiers had been found in this state in one of Saddam’s or Stalin’s barracks, would you have believed it? Of course, you would.” This is the fundamental problem with Durbin’s analogy. The are many things that are “encompassed” in the behavior of those regimes. However, we remember those regimes for the worst of their behavior not the behavior slightly below the median. You know this, dude. Don’t play dumb.

I’m not playing dumb. Shining shoes is not the same thing as treating prisoners as animals. It’s not the same thing as smearing them with fake menstrual blood, or tying someone to the ceiling (as in Afghanistan) and beating their legs to a pulp while they scream for mercy until they die. It’s not the same thing as an emailed memo from a military intelligence officer in 2003, saying: “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.” According to the Red Cross, an organization that the U.S. still allows in its facilities, one prisoner in Iraq (where the Geneva Conventions are supposed to be applied)

“alleged that he had been hooded and cuffed with flexicuffs, threatened to be tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days. Interrogators would allegedly take turns ill-treating him. When he said he would complain to the I.C.R.C. he was allegedly beaten more. An I.C.R.C. medical examination revealed hematoma in the lower back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the right hand due to tight handcuffing with flexicuffs, and a broken rib.”

Club Gitmo? Give me a break.

Some fascinating stats on declining infection rates among military personnel. The military stats are often among the best, because they have a very large population and can test those in uniform in ways civilians can avoid. Bottom line from the November 2004 report: “Incidence declined between 1985 and 2003 from 0.46 cases/1,000 person-years [py] to 0.07 cases/1,000 py.” African-Americans are still most at risk. But this is good news in general, which is why you won’t read about it in the New York Times. They prefer to hyper-ventilate over one case, rather than a study based on 1,732,419 servicemembers.

The picture is more complex than I anticipated. Big shout-out to all my poli sci readers who sent me data. At the height of the miscegenation bans, 41 states had them. Something close to that number will probably eventually have bans on marriage of varying degrees of severity for gay couples. The last hold-outs on inter-racial marriages were: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. The first states to pass constitutional amendments preventing gay couples from marrying were: Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Utah. Obviously, there are considerable over-laps, but not the identical pattern I suggested. Part of this is accident: Hawaii and Alaska, for example, had early court decisions that prompted amendments that would not otherwise have passed. Part is because I’m taking constitutional amendments as the boundary (most of the anti-miscegenation states have mere laws banning marriage for gay couples). And part, of course, is simply the history of slavery and the South: a unique pattern that does not simply extend to other social issues, like homosexuality. The rhetorical parallels are striking, however. The most common arguments for banning inter-racial marriage were: they violated God’s design; black-white intercourse was mere sex, not marriage; if you allowed inter-racial marriage, polygamy and bestiality would inevitably follow. The most common arguments against same-sex marriage are: they violate God’s design; gay relationships are merely about sex, not love or commitment; if you allow same-sex marriage, polygamy and bestiality inevitably follow. The big difference is that back then, inter-racial marriage opponents backed states’ rights; today, same-sex marriage opponents want to overturn states’ rights. Here are two quotes worth citing:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races show that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

That was from the Loving vs Virginia debate. Here’s another from the New York Times last Sunday:

“The gay activists are trying to redefine what marriage has been basically since the beginning of time and on every continent. The Hebrew words for male and female are actually the words for the male and female genital parts. The male is the piercer; the female is the pierced. That is the way God designed it.”

There’s much more on the parallels – and differences – between these two debates in my anthology, “Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader.”

I’m a little bemused by some of the emails saying that I’ve gone crazy about Dick Durbin. They’re missing an important nuance. If Durbin had said, as Amnesty unfortunately did, that Gitmo was another Gulag, I’d be dismayed and critical, as I was with Amnesty. There’s no comparison in any way between the scale, intent and context of the Soviet gulags and Gitmo. If Durbin had said that what was being done there in the aggregate was comparable to Auschwitz or Siberian death camps, the same would be true. But Durbin said something subtler. Now I know subtlety is not something that plays well on talk radio. But in this case, it matters. Durbin focused on one very credible account of inhumane treatment and abuse of detainees (see below) and asked an important question:

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”

So go ahead: answer his implied question. If you had been told that prisoners had been found in this state in one of Saddam’s or Stalin’s jails, would you have believed it? Of course, you would. In fact, I spent much time and effort before the war documenting the cruel and inhumane conduct of the regime we were trying to destroy – a regime whose cruelty encompassed low-level inhumanity like Gitmos – and, of course, unimaginably worse.

ONE ACT AT A TIME: When you read the account Durbin was citing you notice an important thing: the detainees were thoroughly dehumanized, robbed of any personal dignity, left in extremes of heat and cold, shackled, covered in their own urine and excrement, with one having apparently torn parts of his hair out, and left without food or water for up to 24 sleepless hours. Durbin could have quoted worse incidents – and there are many, far worse cases – but he wanted to ensure that his incident was testified by an FBI official. The moral question that Durbin is absolutely right to raise is a simple one: two years ago, would you have ever believed that the United States would be guilty of such a dehumanized treatment of a prisoner in its care? If the particulars had been changed, would you have believed that such a thing could have happened in a totalitarian regime’s prison? Does the way in which human beings have been completely robbed of dignity, treated cruelly and turned figuratively into “barking dogs” shock your conscience? The moral question is not simply of degree – how widespread and systematic is this kind of inhumanity? It is of kind: is this the kind of behavior more associated with despots than with democracies? Of course it is. When a country starts treating its prisoners like animals, it has lost its moral bearings; and, in the case of the United States, is also breaking its own laws (and, in this case, the president has declared himself above the law). I don’t know about Hugh Hewitt, Bill Kristol or NR, but I supported this war in large part because I wanted to end torture, abuse and cruelty in Iraq. I did not support it in order, two and a half years later, to be finding specious rhetorical justifications for torture, abuse and cruelty by Americans. I’m sick of hearing justifications that the enemy is worse. This is news? This is what now passes for analysis? They are far, far worse, among the most despicable and evil enemies we have ever faced. Our treatment of their prisoners is indeed Club Med compared to their fathomless barbarism. But since when is our moral compass set by them? The West is a civilization built on a very fragile web of law and humanity. We do not treat people in our custody as animals. We do not justify it. We do not change the subject. We do not accuse those highlighting it of aiding the enemy. We do not joke about it. We simply don’t do it. This administration – by design, improvisation, desperation, arrogance, incompetence, and wilfull blindness – has enabled this to occur. They must be held accountable until this cancer is rooted out for good. It has metastasized enough already.

So a Palestinian woman going to an Israeli hospital to get treatment for burns from a kitchen accident tries to bring with her 22 pounds of explosives attached to her body for a suicide attack. I am not making this up.

“Re: Frum. It seems to me that the apt comparison is: interracial marriage after anti-miscegenation laws were discarded. It has been several decades now, but the number of interracial couples, while growing, is still very, very small. Perhaps Frum and his partisans might therefore argue that it wasn’t necessary to repeal those laws. The argument would make no sense to me, and I’m sure to you, but they might make the argument.” No, they wouldn’t make that argument. But their predecessors did – especially in the states that are now banning gay marriage with almost as much enthusiasm as they once banned inter-racial marriage. And they also demeaned those in inter-racial marriages with the usual sexual stereotypes they now deploy against gays. Plus ca change … In fact, it would be very interesting to do a comparison between those states that were the first to ban gay marriage and those that were the last to hold onto miscegenation bans. I bet there’s a correlation. Virginia, of course, springs to mind. Anyone got the data?