Keeping up with the Joneses

[pecunium]

A bunch of the Glenn Reynolds types are all up in arms, because people who oppose the U.S. using torture aren't all up in arms that Al Qaeda in Iraq endorses it.

Well, that's not news. Al Qaeda (in Iraq, and everywhere else) is a bunch of terrorists.

I don't think we should be measuring ourselves against them; as if they were the benchmark of civilisation.

Then again, maybe the pearl clutchers of the world did learn everything they needed to know in kindergarten, "but Jimmy hit me too," can be be heard in defense on any playground, anywhere.

The grown-ups, however, tend to dismiss it.

Comments

Re: Um... A couple of points

[izzylobo.livejournal.com]

Apparently, only when we do it.

Because we're supposed to be better than they are. We're supposed to be the good guys. That means we don't get to play with the same set of toys. We don't get to firebomb whole neighborhoods to get one enemy combatant. We don't get to kidnap and hold their relatives hostage so that they surrender. We don't get to detain people just because they're "a fucking Hajji". We don't get to bash in the door of every house in a village just because some informant (whose motives we don't know, because he speaks English and we don't speak Persian or Pashtun) says there were Al Qaeda or Taliban operatives there.

We don't get to torture suspects. We don't even get to torture people we know are guilty.

The other guys are terrorists. We expect them to do fucked up shit. It's not news when some Al Qaeda "operative" whips out a knife and saws some dude's wang off, or nails him out on an anthill, or does some other guro shit, just as we expect them to drive carbombs into souks and detonate them. They aren't primarily trying to impress people with how noble and righteous they are - they're trying to impress on people how far they will go, how committed they are.

If we're the good guys, we should act that way. For a long time, we managed (somehow) to keep a mostly positive image in the world theatre (for the most part) - the Americans were self-absorbed, self-centered, a little greedy, and sometimes bumbling - but they were also honest joes, who would be at your back (and not with a shiv to stick it in) when you needed help, generous to a fault, brilliant scientists, and could be counted on to do the right thing - if, sometimes, only after doing every other thing (thank you, Mr. Churchill). Too bad the last five years or so have pretty much burned that opinion out of the world memeset altogether - all the good done by WWII, and the Marshall Plan, and everything that came after, burned up in one administration - something all our dirty dealings in South and Central America, in Africa, and in the Middle East couldn't do.

Good guys don't torture people. Countries that want to keep a good public relations image (and anyone who does not think this is, in fact, as much a war of public relations and memetic engineering as it is a war of bullets and explosives is a damn fool) don't torture people. Because nobody sees torture as a good act - nobody wants bamboo slivers shoved up their fingernails, nobody wants to be waterboarded, nobody wants to have glass rods shoved up their urethra and then tapped with a hammer, nobody wants to find out how much current a car battery can dump through wet sponges, nobody wants to be beaten, or forced to stay awake for seventy-two hours straight (except maybe medical residents - and I hardly think they want to), or see their holy works shat upon, or be forced to eat unclean goods (whether that's a pork roast, meat on Friday, or something some dude urinated in). Nobody wants to be tortured.

In the end, it wouldn't matter if torture did work - and everyone I know who knows something of the subject states that, in the aggregate, torture is a somewhat useful tool for subjugation and squashing dissent (but not as useful as certain dictators would like it to be - it enrages as much as it terrifies), and a rotten, damn-near useless tool for actually gathering useful, timely intelligence. Because even if it did work - even if we had a magic drug that made lying under torture impossible - that doesn't mean it's right.

The old saying is "crime doesn't pay" - but, realistically, it really does, if you're smart and know how not to get too greedy - there are plenty of drug dealers, counterfeiters, bank robbers, and breaking & entering guys who never go to jail, never get caught. Even murder has only about 50% conviction rate. But just because it works - just because you could make a decent living robbing banks, or breaking into other's homes, or stealing cars or killing people - doesn't mean it would be right to do so.