The Debatable Land

Another dismal Dick Cheney speech

Dick Cheney giving the Commencement address at West Point:

The standards of this Academy only highlight the deepest and most fundamental difference between the United States and our sworn enemies. A month ago, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Pace, spoke to this class about each officer's duty to follow a moral compass in all of his or her actions.  In these four years you have learned the rules of warfare and professional military ethics.  You've studied the tenets of morality.  You've reflected on the seven Army values:  of loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage.  You have lived by a code of honor, and internalized that code as West Point men and women always do.

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for.  Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States.  Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.  These are men who glorify murder and suicide.  Their cruelty is not rebuked by human suffering, only fed by it.  They have given themselves to an ideology that rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of society.  The terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds, and they hate nothing more than the country you have volunteered to defend. [Emphasis added].

Is it unfair to detect a note of impatience from the Vice-President here? Damn those pesky Geneva Conventions! Isn't that Constitution thingy inconvenient! Equally, if you think the enemies' behaviour lessens his right to the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions - which does not seem an unfair inference - then the differences between you and the enemy are not so clear as you may care to think. But then we know this to be the case: when you contract out the torture of your enemies you are at least as (and perhaps more) responsible for their torture as are the men who put the thumbscrews on. And that's what Extraordinary Rendition is. Maybe it doesn't happen often and maybe it doesn't end with a video-taped decapitation, but it's part of the same tradition...

For that reason, too, the most depressing moment of the Republican debate in South Carolina was Mitt Romney's desire to "double Guantanamo." Admittedly it's not exactly clear what that means, and it may be but another transparently shameless attempt to pander to the grosser instincts of grass-roots Republicans, but it was a telling moment nonetheless. Now, I happen to believe that some European reaction to Guantanamo has been motivated by bad faith, but the notion that doubling the scale of this disaster is a sensible, let alone popular, proposal is dispiriting to say the least. If you spend all your time proclaiming a moral superiority that is tarnished by obviously observable reality don't be quite so surprised if your credibility is eroded on other issues. It shouldn't be too hard to understand, should it, that this sort of thing has consequences?

Don't approve of torture? Your family deserves to die...

Another great moment in Congressional history. This time from a recent House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on "extraordinary rendition" that heard evidence from members of the European Parliament.

California's Dana Rohrabacher (GOP) dismisses opposition to the US policy of "extraordinary rendition" and says that if you find this policy distasteful "Well, I hope it’s your families, I hope it’s your families that suffer the consequences."

There is, naturally, more:

One person — if we let, if in order to protect the rights of one or two people, or five people or ten people, who are mistakenly abducted because their names were the same or because they went to a mosque that they didn’t know this thing was going on in the back room, if 10 of those people suffer those consequences, but in order for us to take 90 other people off the street who are intent and involved in plans that would slaughter tens of thousands of our citizens, I’m afraid that’s the price we pay in a real world. And the United States, we’re not ghouls. We’re not, we don’t, we’re not, we don’t want to torture somebody because he has a bad name. We want to get information from somebody that we think might want to kill our children and kill your children. And if you doubt our motives, you’re welcome to, I know there’s a lot of people who hate America, but when the pressure’s on, quite frankly, we have known all along that at times America has to go it alone, and people will try to find fault with us rather than trying to at least understand our morality.

Let us leave the morality or seemliness of this argument aside, for one moment. Those who favour despatching suspects to Syrian or Egyptian torture chambers are unlikely to be swayed by  protestations that this brings shame upon the United States. After all, when times are tough a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do...

But the policy isn't just wrong in principle it's wrong in practice too. Though prospects for the liberalisation of the middle east look gloomier now than they did in the heady days of Lebanon's "Cedar Spring" (days which prompted even The Independent to splash with "What if Bush Was Right?") it remains the case that the most - indeed almost the sole remaining - element of the Bush administration's rationale for toppling Saddam was the belief that the long-term causes of resentment and extremism in the middle east could only be solved, or at least tempered, by political and economic liberalisation.

In speech after speech Mr Bush and Dr Rice insisted that the old days of favouring "stability" and propping up tyrants were over. Fine words, indeed, that allowed for the risky but refreshing gamble that though elections might empower extremists in the short-term, the long-term prospects for a safer, less feverish Middle East were enhanced by this process even if, as I say, it might actually lead to an increase in risk for the United States in the short to medium term.

Alas, "extraordinary rendition" reveals that this was just rhetoric. More fool me, I suppose, for hoping it might have amounted to something more substantial. People in the Middle East aren't stupid. They can see that an administration notionally dedicated to advancing opportunity is still asking dictators to do its dirty work for them. That being so, why should they draw anything other than the darkest conclusions from anything the President or Secretary of State says?

Remarkably, then, the "extraordinary rendition" (which has not, mind you, been so very extra-ordinary at all) undermines and refutes stated US policy.  Are you with us or against us? Well, in key instances  we know that the US is still in bed with the very people it argues are a root cause of the problem its other policies are trying to address. Ah yes, joined-up government...

Eliminating "extraordinary rendition" would not change everything overnight, of course. But this policy has been a disaster, in theory and in practice. It has dishonoured Washington while failing to advance US strategic interests an inch; indeed, quite the contrary, it has helped set US ambitions back.

There's plenty to dislike about the attitudes towards the US one sees in many European capitals these days. But this administration has brought much of this upon itself. No wonder it's pretty lonely being an Atlanticist these days.

[Hat tip: Think Progress]