October 22, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:50 PM EST Alexander Burns writes that we may be talking past each other when addressing the possible loss of our government’s moral compass, particularly in wartime, when compared the values of the World War II generation. Possibly we are, but I am not sure. Mr. Burns was focusing on torture, I responded by broadening the discussion to other cases of moral restraint, or its lack, in American war-making. If torture is the only issue, and what is being discussed is what a government authorizes rather than what its servants actually do, I agree that the compass bearing has altered—but by how much? One relevant consideration may be the conduct of men who became postwar policemen and prosecutors and were veterans of World War II. In the South, a lot of them famously used electric cattle prods on black criminal suspects, and did so for several postwar decades. Elsewhere, American police often beat suspects or people who had otherwise irritated them, sometimes pretty savagely. When I was an adult in New York City, a police precinct in Queens made the papers because it had revived electric torture but used stun guns rather than cattle prods; I doubt that was the only such use in the 1980s. When I was an emergency medical technician in 1971 and 1972, I saw police prisoners who seemed to have been interrogated with some violence and in any case claimed that they had. The use of torture on criminal suspects in peacetime may not seem to address our moral compass in wartime, but my guess is that what men will do when they face a lesser threat is a useful hint about what they will do when they fear a greater one. There is also the possibility that people who will torture suspected criminals will not as freely torture soldiers in uniform, so the American moral compass may point in the same direction more often than one might have thought. The Bush administration does seem to have (mostly) restricted its use of torture to men who did not fight in uniform or observe most of the current laws of war (although I remember one case of an Iraqi general dying under interrogation). If the Bush administration generally restricts the use of torture to “unlawful combatants,” that certainly does not excuse its tortures, but it does make it harder to say with great confidence that it does things the World War II generation would never have considered. We do not know what the World War II generation would have considered if it had faced the threats we feared in the wake of 9/11, or in the face of insurgencies making effective use of terror tactics. At other times, Americans did use torture against such adversaries, and did so on a broad scale—certainly against insurgents in the Philippines, about a century ago. Much has been alleged about what the United States did or advised be done in Southeast Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, and while we might want to discount some of those allegations, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss all of them. The United States did not use much torture in World War II, but it was, after all, fighting under circumstances where torture seemed a less crucial tactic than it may seem in counterinsurgency and anti-terrorist campaigns—and we in any case employed tactics and strategies at least as cruel. Again, this does not in any way excuse current American torture; my point is only that we should not too quickly assume our gross moral inferiority to our fathers and grandfathers. I wrote above, “if torture is the only issue,” but it seems to me it isn’t, and cannot be, if we are assessing moral compasses in wartime, and what Mr. Burns also calls “moral decay.” The extreme restriction of our willingness to attack enemy civilians as our primary targets, and the significant restriction of our willingness to kill great numbers of enemy civilians as collateral damage, seem to me to be evidence that our moral compass has also altered in a direction opposite to the one indicated by our government’s new tolerance of torture. An example: we often hear that the United States has no military option against the Iranian nuclear program, because Iran can reply by ramping up terrorism against Americans, in Iraq and elsewhere. It is pretty easy to work out what Franklin Roosevelt or Truman would have done to the vulnerable cities of an Iranian enemy who launched significant terror attacks against American civilians; to paraphrase Admiral Halsey, when it was over the Persian language would have been spoken only in Hell. As far as I know, no one at Halsey’s level talks that way today. Here is another example: In 1991, the United States pretty quickly refrained from attacking retreating Iraqi Republican Guard units at Mutla Ridge, because some decades after World War II it seemed under some circumstances unethical to attack armed and uniformed enemies even in wartime. In Serbia, in the wake of genocidal attacks on Bosnian Muslims and later Kossovars, there were significant criticisms of U.S. reprisal attacks on Belgrade’s electrical grid. Some Americans are, it is true, more willing to publicly or covertly countenance torture than was once the case, and that is certainly relevant when assessing moral compasses, but there are other kinds of evidence we should also consider, and when we do, I find it more difficult to draw a conclusion.
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