It's interesting how it's often the soldiers who are most acutely aware of the dangers of militarism. It's the soldiers like Colin Powell who are standing up against Bush on this whole torture question. Philosophically conservative but intellectually honest guys like Andrew Bacevich are immune to the grandiosity of the GOP (and Dem) civilian militarists. Add James Webb to the list. Here's a guy who is a former secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration who describes his rejection of mindless militarism in an interesting profile of him in today's NYT:
As he is quick to remind his audiences, Mr. Webb spoke out against an invasion early on, arguing that containment had worked in the cold war and would work, again, against Saddam Hussein. American occupation forces in Iraq would “quickly become 50,000 terrorist targets,” he warned in an op-ed article in The Washington Post in September 2002. He went to see Mr. Allen to voice his concerns, and said Mr. Allen’s position, essentially, was “you’re asking me to be disloyal to my president.”
Mr. Webb, who had voted for Mr. Allen, said he left that meeting thinking, “Boy, did I make a mistake.” Mr. Allen has said he cast his vote for the war out of loyalty to the country, not the president.
The war is not an abstract issue for Mr. Webb. His son, Jimmy, 24, a lance corporal in the Marines, shipped out to Iraq this month. He wears his son’s old combat boots on the campaign trail, in tribute to him and “all the people sent into harm’s way.”
Mr. Webb tells his audiences that the idea came from his son, who noted that Mr. Allen always wore cowboy boots, though “there are no cowboys in Virginia.”
Again, sanity from the soldier, mindless flagwaving from the militarist civilian. To me the Virginia race typifies the dynamics of American politics now. It's a politics on the one side of being skeptical about the conventional wisdom and thinking things through for yourself, of wanting to debate and compromise vs. a thoughtless loyalty that refuses debate and jams policies down the electorate's throat with fear tactics and lies.
Some Republicans fit into the first category, but theirs is not dominant tenor of their party. Nevertheless, give McCain, Warner, and Graham props for standing up to the president on torture last week (although memories of Graham as one of the house managers in the Clinton impeachment idiocy continue to give him an icky quality that's hard to dispel). But the bigger question here is why are we even having this argument about torture?
Why is it considered so noteworthy that these guys have stood up to the president on an issue that should be a no-brainer for every decent American? The soldiers don't want it. Why is the president being taken seriously at all? Is it that his real concern is his vulnerability for war crimes indictments which could very well be coming? He says he just wants to clarify the language of Article 3 in the Geneva Conventions. Fine. Just make sure that waterboarding, dog attacks, sexual abuse, and starvation are on the list. From Krugman:
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. According to an ABC News report from last fall, procedures used by C.I.A. interrogators have included forcing prisoners to “stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours”; the “cold cell,” in which prisoners are forced “to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees,” while being doused with cold water; and, of course, water boarding, in which “the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet,” then “cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him,” inducing “a terrifying fear of drowning.”
And bear in mind that the “few bad apples” excuse doesn’t apply; these were officially approved tactics — and Mr. Bush wants at least some of these tactics to remain in use.
He wants to continue this kind of thing? I'm sorry, but if this is common practice, it is pointless sadism, and it's a disgrace. Or is the real reason he wants a clearer definition so that then Gonzales will go to work to develop new torture techniques that are not on the list or technically evades the definition? At this point it's simply not possible to be too cynical about the way these guys operate.
Does it not matter to these guys that people used to look at the U.S. as the country of laws and fair play and now we're looking like some Latin American police state? Is it no longer possible for Americans to be perceived as tough but fair? Fairness is not what the GOP represents anymore, and its policies on torture and rendition are an outrage that must at some point be formally repudiated.
Maybe conservatives think that if they're not guilty, they don't have anything to worry about. But if we've learned anything about this administration, we've learned how stupendously hamfisted and incompetent it is. How persistently and magnificently it get things wrong. What if you or someone you care about is mistakenly implicated in a crime? It happens all the time. Do you want your fate to be determined by some Bush political appointee?
Update: By the way, if you want a pretty notorious example of how the police mess things up in this guilty-till-proven innoncent environment since 9/11, read up on the Maher Arar case that involves in this case a Canadian citizen:
Arar, who then lived in Ottawa, was travelling back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia in September 2002 when he was pulled off a plane in New York. Within days, he was sent to Syria, where he says government officials detained him, systematically tortured him and kept him in jail for a year.
Turns out he was innocent. Check out The Walrus Said for latest details. The RCMP plays a role in this, but it's mostly an American fiasco.