Responding to the torrents of psychic despair evoked by the conspicuous lack of a brand new torture thread today, I have bravely stepped into the breach to discuss what (I hope) is a new perspective on this very, very tired subject. In this post, I argue that an unequivocal opposition to torture is logically untenable for all but the most committed pacifists. Here it is.
Premise 1: The pacifism of Gandhi, while useful in limited situations and requiring considerable bravery, is not a universally applicable response to all acts of aggression. Consider Gandhi’s plan to counter the anti-Semetic barbarism of the Nazis: He contended that the Jews should have committed mass suicide because this would have "Aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” Were Gandhi alive today, I would be inclined to ask him what he felt an international community of pacifists should have done once it had grown “aroused”? Committed mass suicide as well?
No, there is no question that absolutist pacifism would ultimately leave those who practise it at the mercy of the world’s thugs. In certain situations, it is necessary to wage defensive war.
Premise 2: The war against Al-Qaeda & the Taliban immediately following 9/11 was just such a war. I am aware that this is a slightly contentious point among some dopers. Nonetheless, I feel I am safely in the majority when I say that, following 9/11, America had good, defensive reasons for rooting out Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and sweeping away the openly hostile and obstructionist Taliban regime in the process. I may not necessarily agree with how this war was waged, but I do feel Bush was right to declare it.
Premise 3: The waging of wars necessarily involves collateral damage. That is to say, whenever we go to war, we do so knowing with absolute certainty that our bombs will kill, maim, widow, and orphan an unknowable number of innocent men, women, and children. While our bombs are becoming ever more sophisticated, they’re not yet smart enough to spread their shrapnel selectively. In the case of the Afghanistan war, the American people rapidly reached a general consensus that a certain amount of collateral damage was a regrettable, but unavoidable consequence of our justifiable decision to destroy Al-Qaeda & the Taliban. By and large, this consensus holds true today.
Conclusion: If we are willing to indiscriminately kill innocents to find Osama Bin Laden, we also ought to be willing to tolerate the torture of those whose guilt may be undetermined but who we have good reason to believe may know Bin Laden’s location. In other words, if we are willing to accept collateral damage in pursuit of a particular foreign policy objective, it is logically inconsistent to object to the selective use of torture in pursuit of that same objective as the former is far worse than the latter.
This is, I’m aware, a contentious statement, and I would like to briefly field some easily foreseeable objections to it.
The first reasonable objection to the idea that selective use of torture may be justified during the conduct of a Just war is that we may torture innocent people by mistake. This is undeniably true, of course, but this objection merely highlights the incongruity I believe I see in so many people’s principled opposition to torture. There were no children at Guantanamo Bay; and it seems ridiculous to oppose the torture of a man on the grounds he may be innocent while tacitly turning a blind eye to the possibility that a stray missile may just as easily kill him and his entire innocent family while they sleep. We cannot logically justify wholesale opposition to torture for fear of ensnaring innocent men while simultaneously condoning, albeit with a heavy heart, the bombing of those same innocent men.
The second reasonable objection is that torture is more objectionable than collateral damage because it is more pre-meditated and more visceral. Some people feel an instinctive revulsion to torture that they simply cannot summon when hearing that a score of innocents were obliterated in a bombing raid. This is understandable, but it is ultimately nothing more than a failure of imagination.
I believe that the human mind is poorly equipped to instinctively appreciate the consequences of large scale violence. Tell a man his uncle flew a bombing mission over Germany WWII and he’d likely feel some measure of pride. Tell him he raped and strangled his wife and daughter and he’d surely feel a very different emotion. This, in spite of the fact that his uncle doubtlessly killed many more people during his mission, and that they surely would have died in equally horrible ways.
Similarly, some people seem ill-equipped to genuinely understand just how much more carnage is caused in the dropping of a single bomb than is caused in a whole slew of torture sessions. Lest I sound superior in any way, I readily admit that I am one of those people. I am making this argument in spite of the instinctive revulsion I feel when I think of torture, a revulsion I cannot summon in as much force when I think about collateral damage. Again, the bottom line remains the same: If you oppose torture on the grounds that it is too brutal, you should also oppose the practise of waging defensive war. If you can live with the idea of collateral damage in the course of waging war, you should also be able to live with torture carried out in the course of that same war.
A third principled objection to torture during warfare is that the confessions elicited are notoriously unreliable. This is true, yet given the foregoing this objection seems to lack its usual oomph. The chance that any particular torture session would yield valuable information need only equal the chances that any one bomb dropped on Kabul would transform the war in Afghanistan. What are the odds that bomb number 258 dropped on Kabul would elicit the immediate capitulation of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? They’d have to be very slim.
Enter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man for whom, judging by his resume, ticking time-bomb scenario’s were invented and the man who, not coincidentally, American interrogators waterboarded over 180 times. Given the carnage caused by our bombs, the convulsions of conscience experienced by our legislators when details of his treatment emerged seem rather incongruous. If collateral damage is acceptable in the conduct of a Just war, then so is the torture of men like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, provided that his torture is carried out in pursuit of the same objectives that we feel gives us license to drop bombs.
Where should we draw the line? It seems to me that if we are unwilling to torture certain criminals in our custody, we should be unwilling to wage war at all. If you believe (as per premise 1), that some wars (and consequently some collateral damage, as per premise 3) are Just and necessary, it is logically inconsistent for you to oppose torture earnestly carried out with the aim of helping win that same conflict, as the former takes a much greater toll than the latter.
