Those pictures, and America's mission

The evidence of physical and mental torture, and even murder, of Iraqi prisoners is chilling. The best that can be said is that these outrages have not been covered up by the Pentagon, and that there is at present no convincing evidence that they are systematic rather than isolated abuses.

Beyond that evidence, comment at the moment would be otiose - but it’s difficult to overstate the damaging implications of what is acknowledged, never mind alleged, to have happened. It is a severe blow to the just and necessary cause of the overthrow of Baathist totalitarianism in Iraq, for it’s right and reasonable that our side, the democratic side that liberated Iraq from genocidal despotism, be required to observe a higher standard of conduct than other nations. In wartime our forces did that. When contending with opposing forces that can only aptly be termed terrorists – those that hid among civilians in order to forestall effective counterinsurgency – British and American troops displayed an exemplary regard for the principle of non-combatant immunity. By doing so, they deliberately put themselves in greater danger in order to minimise the risk of civilian casualties. That was noble and selfless, as well as politically prudent, and I doubt that I should have been able to display such qualities so munificently had I been in the same position.

The reason it is important that such standards be held as our side’s benchmark is hinted at in a hostile article by Matthew Parris in The Times, entitled with heavy irony 'Why I will be rooting for a George Bush election victory'.

Parris, a former Conservative MP, is the most articulate and thoughtful critic in the British press of the foreign policies of President Bush. The reason he claims to be supporting the President’s bid for re-election is that he considers those polices to be so misguided and certain of failure that they need to be thoroughly discredited in practice lest they be a recurrent theme of American politics:

What the President and his advisers are trying to do will be a colossal failure. But failure takes time to show itself beyond contradiction. The theory that liberal values and a capitalist economic system can be spread across the world by force of arms, and that the United States of America is competent to undertake this task, is the first big idea of the 21st Century. It should be tested to destruction. The opening American presidency of the new millennium — George W. Bush, 2001-2009 — should serve as an object lesson to the world for the decades to come. There must be no room left for argument. The President and his neoconservative court should be offered all the rope they need to hang themselves. When they do, when they fail, when America's dream of becoming the new Rome dies, there should be no possible excuse, no straw at which Republican apologists can clutch.

I consider Parris to be almost entirely in error. President Bush’s security policies since 9/11 have been broadly right, even admirable. His continuation in office is desirably precisely because of the moral certaintly he has displayed against actual and potential state sponsors of terrorism.

Yet Parris makes an excellent point. His aversion to what has come to be known as neoconservatism is philosophically consistent and acute, and derives from his own conservative aversion to the notion of malleability of the international order.

Neoconservatism is a term I never use if I can help it, and do not accept as a description of my own position. Partly that’s because those American public figures most closely associated with the cause of neoconservatism often adopt illiberal positions on social issues, such as gay rights or abortion, that I don’t share. Partly it’s because, while I am a supporter of Israel and of Israel’s war against terror, I do not take the view of, say, Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary magazine that the Oslo accord was bound to fail; given a better Palestinian leadership than the corrupt and squalid autocrat Yasir Arafat, it could have worked and thereby enhanced Israeli security. Partly it’s because I see little virtue in adopting the term ‘neoconservatism’ to denote the more traditional stance known simply as liberal internationalism.

And that final point is the one that Parris, from his own philosophical position, is alluding to. Neoconservatism is a position not of the right, but of the left. Its genesis lies in the aversion of intellectuals and trade unionists in the Democratic Party in the 1970s towards their party’s McGovernite flirtation with neutralism and isolationism. Their hero – and mine – was, and remains, Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, whose campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and 1976 foundered on the brute fact that he believed in an assertive prosecution of the Cold War while his party didn’t. Jackson condemned those on the Left who had “lost faith in America” when “liberalism … [was] under siege around the world”. Some of the most prominent neoconservatives, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, were close associates of Jackson; Richard Perle served as his adviser, and remains a registered Democrat.

To the thoughtful conservative critic, liberal interventionism makes the error of assuming a universal appetite for democracy – a sort of General Will, awaiting the opportunity of self-actualisation - among the peoples of captive nations. Yet, Parris argues:

To the liberal interventionist, the thought never occurs that Saddam Hussein might have been a product of the whole Iraqi people and their history, as well as an imposition upon them. They think that he was only an imposition and in their hearts the people know it. Remove him, thinks the interventionist, and they will love us. If at first they do not rise and hail us then another heave is called for: one last heave.

This is parody, of course, but it needs to be taken seriously. It is true that liberal internationalists would be unwise to expound democracy as a universal solvent. Democracy may also be the tool of the illiberal (as would be the case if, say, Islamists won elections in Iraq and used their governing position to ensure that none would ever take place again). But liberal internationalism, properly expressed, aims not primarily at democracy, but at - tautologically enough - liberalism.

The distinction is argued at length in an excellent book, published last year, by Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek, entitled The Future of Freedom. Zakaria maintains that the spread of democracy internationally has not corresponded to a spread of liberty. That's because the essence of a free society is not popular control, but liberal institutions: the rule of law, property rights and freedom from arbitrary authority. It’s an important distinction for two reasons. First it identifies some of the limits of democratic organisation (for example, in the advanced industrial economies monetary policy is now typically insulated – through independent central banks – from political control, and thereby serves much better the aims of liberalism). Secondly, it provides a guide to what is most likely to be effective in an interventionist foreign policy.

Conservatives dismiss the notion of what they contemptuously term ‘nation-building’. I was concerned to hear Bush do so in the presidential debates in the 2000 campaign, for I feared he would, if elected, withdraw from important US commitments such as the Balkans. (This was the principal reason I favoured Al Gore for President in 2000 – a position that I was grossly mistaken to hold.) Yet they have a point. Nations are cohesive entities with coherent historical memories, and take generations to evolve. What we can do, however, is build not nations but states – collections of institutions that protect the people from capricious rule and violence. In Iraq that is a limited but essential goal; moreover, contrary to Parris’s insistence, it is a universal principle. Polities may be more or less democratic, or not democratic at all. But there is no society in which Saddam’s tyranny would be anything other than an ‘imposition’, because it was utterly brutal. It wasn’t a polity at all, but a gangster regime.

Whether or not Iraq will become a stable democracy in the Middle East is uncertain (though I am hopeful, even confident, that she will, because there is already a functioning example of a constitutional democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan). But it can be one in which minimal requirements of political order and constitutionalism are respected. What is so damaging about the revelations of the past fortnight is that we have failed to observe our own principles, the principles that animated the Coalition’s campaign in the first place. In the war on terrorism, there are liberties that we value that may on occasion have to be attenuated. There are even occasions when we have to risk civilian life in order to apprehend or destroy our enemies. But there are no occasions in which the humiliation and torture of prisoners will be justified. In the circumstances, the Bush administration has no option but to apologise profusely and properly, even while knowing that few other nations have such high standards as the US and the UK in adhering to civilised values in war or peace.

I’ve left finally the question of why conservatives such as Matthew Parris are wrong to reject liberal interventionism – or, as I prefer to call it, liberal internationalism. There are many reasons for favouring the overthrow of tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq. My own view is that, despite the absence of Saddam’s WMDs, we had no option but to do so on grounds of our own self-defence. Liberal internationalism requires, like conservatism, a primary stress on national security; the experience of 9/11 demonstrated that pre-emption is a strictly necessary recourse when faced with a conjunction of theocratic terrorists and rogue states. Saddam, it appears – perhaps to his own surprise – did not possess WMD stockpiles any longer (which is not to say he lacked the capability to develop them). We were right to overthrow him, because he was in breach of serial UN resolutions to account for his arsenal. No responsible western government ought to have been prepared to live with the uncertainty of whether a bellicose and irrational tyrant might pass weapons of genocide to terrorist groups.

We can’t live with that uncertainty, ever. And there is a prima facie case for concluding that states that exercise arbitrary authority – still more, commit mass murder on their captive population – at home are the least likely to be open and trustworthy on the international stage. When we intervene to overthrow tyranny, we do so in defence of western values. We also do so, however, to protect ourselves and our fellow-citizens from fanatics capable, and already guilty, of demonic acts of terror.

Comments

[Chris Lightfoot]

"The best that can be said is that these outrages have not been covered up by the Pentagon"
-- well, they've been covered up for months, in fact, which is Not Promising.

"there is at present no convincing evidence that they are systematic rather than isolated abuses."
-- well, I hope so, but the evidence so far is also Not Promising.

[Oliver Kamm]

No, they haven't. Peggy Noonan gives the chronology in the Wall Street Journal:

"They came to light through the chain of command in Iraq on January 13. An Army criminal probe began a day later. Two days after that, the U.S. Central Command disclosed in a press release that "an investigation has been initiated into reported incidents of detainee abuse at a Coalition Forces detention facility." By March 20, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt was able to announce in Baghdad that criminal charges had been brought against six soldiers in the probe.

"By the end of January, meanwhile, Major General Antonio Taguba was appointed to conduct his separate "administrative" probe of procedures at Abu Ghraib. It is his report, complete with its incriminating photos, that is the basis for the past week's news reports. The press didn't break this story based on months of sleuthing but was served up the results of the Army's own investigation."

[Chris Lightfoot]

Hmm. We know that both the US and British governments received warnings much earlier -- last June; we also know that torture had been going on at least since October, at which time the Abu Ghraib jail was apparently in chaos. The WSJ piece correctly points out that an investigation began in January, which is commendable; but that report (by General Taguba) was completed more than two months ago, was not released then and apparently was never intended to be released. We only know its contents because it was leaked to the New Yorker. Until very recently -- after the leak -- the Pentagon's press statements on this topic were a model of blandness and did not reveal the full horror of the situtation. The notion that Donald Rumsfeld "had not realised" the seriousness of the allegations "until pictures were leaked to the media" by itself indicates a cover-up.

[J.L.]

Mr. Kamm:

As usual, I'm in agreement with you on just about every point. But, despite its only marginal relevance to your excellent post, I feel obliged to correct your version of Porhoretz's view of Oslo. Podhoretz's view, as well as the view of most American and Israeli conservatives, was that Oslo would fail precisely because the Palestinian Authority was hopelessly corrupt and because Yasir Arafat, besides being an autocrat, was a brutal opportunist willing to sacrifice anyone -- Israeli civilians, Palestinian Arabs -- at the alter of his personal myth. Certainly few would challenge that view today. But Podhoretz went still farther in the 90s. Not only would Oslo fail, he insisted, but it would unleash a slowly building Palestinian onslaught, driven by the conviction that Israelis could be pushed not only into compromise, but, finally, into total defeat. To be sure, Podhoretz overstates his foresight somewhat when he calls the current intifada The War that Oslo wrought. But the fact is, throughout the 90s, it was transparent that the Palestinian leadership was tainted with terror and corruption. A much clearer illustration came in 2000, when Arafat seized on Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque to mobilize a war he'd been inciting, here and there, for much of the decade. Could negotiations have worked with a better Palestinian leadership? Sure. But given that those never existed, Oslo was, as Podhoretz maintained, doomed from the start.

[Giles]

I think the most glaring ommision in Paris's article was that he never mentioned the Iraqi's. while I can see that his position has much validity, what he seems to be saying is that I hope that the iraqis suffer so that I can say in 5 years time I told you so. If he really thinks that the policy is wrong, he should be campeigning to stop it now.

[Mark T]

If the US military discovered abuses and acted accordingly, both to punish those responsible and to prevent any further instances, is it a cover up if they don't take out full page adverts to announce their actions to the world? Strikes me that the main beneficary of all this is John Kerry, and I can't help feeling that most of the indignation is being whipped up for domestic political purposes rather than out of any real concern for the situation in Iraq. I suspect if the US economy had suddenly got weaker rather than stronnger over the last few months that we would be hearing a lot more about "the worst recession since Hooover" (sic) and a lot less about Iraq.

[maor]

I would DEFINE Oslo as negotiations with Arafat and his gang.
Otherwise, the conditions of the agreement are similar to what Begin offered in Camp David. Remember, Oslo never promised the Palestinians a state. The Camp David accords went nowhere because Arafat rejected them as insufficient and threatened to kill any Palestinian leader who publicly accepted them. That ended negotiations for a decade, until Rabin accepted Arafat as a negotiating partner.
So while it seems true that Oslo would have succeeded with better Palestinian leadership, with all due respect, that doesn't seem like a very meaningful statement.

[GrimReaper]

"No responsible western government ought to have been prepared to live with the uncertainty of whether a bellicose and irrational tyrant might pass weapons of genocide to terrorist groups."

The most perfect summary of the case for war.

There is, I think, a plausible variant of the Parris case to be made: muslims believe they should be ruled by a Caliph (successor to Mohammed) and islam places no limits on the power of the Caliph. Hence, arbitrary authority becomes inevitable. The fact that any mullah can put himself forward as a candidate for the role of Caliph and press his claim by force makes revolution and coup the standard methods of transferring power. In Turkey, the army preserves a secular state; perhaps that is the best solution for Iraq.

[lee]

"When contending with opposing forces that can only aptly be termed terrorists – those that hid among civilians in order to forestall effective counterinsurgency – British and American troops displayed an exemplary regard for the principle of non-combatant immunity. By doing so, they deliberately put themselves in greater danger in order to minimise the risk of civilian casualties. That was noble and selfless, as well as politically prudent, and I doubt that I should have been able to display such qualities so munificently had I been in the same position."

I'm aware that the opening sentence is temporising ("When" exactly?), but it is surely possible to ask a mild question: how can the stated policy of "Shock and Awe" be reconciled with the above paragraph?