- "I don't know what effect these men will have upon
the enemy," said the Duke of Wellington of his troops, "but,
by God, they terrify me." I feel much the same way about some of those
who purport to be on our side in the so-called Global War on Terror (GWoT).
-
- It is not just that these people want to drag us into
perpetual war. It is how they want us to wage their war that causes me
alarm. A concerted effort is underway to persuade us to abandon our civil
liberties; to lock up people indefinitely without trial, torture them,
and execute them; and if we can't get who we want, to target their families,
neighbours and other innocents to terrorise them into surrendering. In
short, the call is that in order to defeat terrorism we must become terrorists
ourselves.
-
- Those making these demands can no longer be ignored.
We have to expose them, confront them and defeat them. Already in this
country we have David Blunkett with his plans for 'pre-emptive detention',
secret trials and the indefinite imprisonment of suspects on evidence which
the Home Office has admitted might come from torture in other countries.
The slippery slope from Blunkettism to state terrorism is but a short one,
and if we do not start the fight against it now, we may find we have lost
already.
-
- There is, alas, a seriously psychopathic tendency on
the loose, and its influence is growing, especially in the United States.
Take, for instance, Ralph Peters, author of 'Civilian casualties: no apology
needed' (Wall Street Journal, July 2002). Peters is a highly respected
commentator on security issues in the United States. He writes regularly
for the journals of the US military, and is read widely by both those who
make policy and those who carry it out. The GWoT, in his eyes, is a war
'to exterminate human monsters'. Anybody in any way associated with them,
even if not by their own will, is a legitimate target. If you can't get
the terrorists, Peters argues, get their families. "We Americans",
he writes, "must be willing to pursue the terrorists through their
relatives. ... If you cannot kill your enemy, threaten what he holds dear."
Only 'outdated convention' holds us back from the necessary ruthlessness.
-
- Others take the argument further. Frances Kamm, a professor
of philosophy at Harvard University, has been doing the lecture circuit
in America and England, promoting the view that it may be legitimate to
target non-combatants directly. She argues that if an attack planned against
a military target is likely to kill, say, 50 innocent people in collateral
damage, you might as well just kill 40 of them directly. What's more, if
it will help to terrorise others, you should kill them "in a particularly
horrible way". You can then congratulate yourself on having saved
ten lives! Better yet, you are only allowed to 'terror-kill', as she calls
it, as many innocent people as you could have killed anyway. So if you
are a powerless refugee, you are not allowed to kill any, but if you are
a great power, you can kill hundreds of thousands. Best of all, if their
country is engaged in what you deem to be an unjust war, then they are
merely enjoying "life they could only have had as an ill-gotten gain
from a great injustice", and you are positively urged to kill them
at once and put a stop to it.
-
- Kamm's commendation of legalised state terrorism is mirrored
in numerous other examples. Perhaps the best known is the proposal by the
famous lawyer Alan Dershowitz to legalise judicial questioning under torture.
Dershowitz recommends the insertion of sterilised needles under the fingernails
to produce 'excruciating pain'. "Pain is not the worst thing in the
world," he says. "You get over it."
-
- One might argue that extremists such as Peters, Kamm
and Dershowitz are unimportant, as they exist on the fringes and have no
effect on actual policy. Such complacency would be a mistake. The only
way to prevent their arguments from gaining ground is to fight them. If
they become accepted within the spectrum of normal opinion, they will recruit
more and more adherents. In addition, these people are not in fact without
influence. Methods of warfare once considered unacceptable are now common
practice, 'targeted killings' and 'torture-lite' being the clearest examples.
-
- The more often these views are expressed as normal, the
less opposition they seem to generate. A journalist who attended a meeting
at which Dershowitz suggested legalising torture noted that the really
shocking thing was that not one person in the audience replied that it
might be wrong. Even in this country, some no longer consider such views
unacceptable. Respectable universities would think twice before inviting
someone like David Irving to speak, but Oxford, London and others welcome
Professor Kamm to spread her views that it is fine to 'terror-kill' the
innocent as long as you "have the capacity to harm them as badly in
some other way or for some other reason". The boundaries of respectability
have rarely seemed so fragile.
-
- Bit by bit, these ideas have an effect. Dr Davida Kellogg,
who has taught military ethics to American officer cadets for many years,
told a conference at the Royal Military College of Canada that it was becoming
increasingly difficult to persuade America's future officers to treat the
other side with respect. She confronts, she says, 'intense and sustained
resistance' to expectations that they behave 'chivalrously' towards civilians.
The enemy are seen as beyond the pale; the normal rules do not apply to
them.
-
- The British journalist Oliver Poole, embedded with American
forces during the invasion of Iraq, noted this phenomenon in practice during
last year's invasion of Iraq. In his new book Black Knights, he states
that the Americans he was with considered Iraqis 'barely human'. The protection
of American soldiers, he reports, was always a much higher priority than
the protection of the lives of Iraqi civilians. Faced with gunfire from
an Iraqi building, the response was, "Anyone still in that building
isn't a civilian." The same attitude prevails today. An Iraqi life,
or an Afghan life, or the life of any civilian at the receiving end of
'Coalition' military action, is clearly not worth the same as an American
or British life.
-
- Thus, in a rabid, but sadly not untypical, response to
the murder of four Americans in Fallujah, the journalist Joseph Farah urged
us 'to make an example' out of the Iraqi city. "We may need to flatten
Fallujah," he wrote. "We may need to destroy it. We may need
to grind it, pulverise it and salt the soil. ... Here's an opportunity
to show that it doesn't pay to resort to barbarism and terrorism."
(Irony is not Farah's strong point.)
-
- The American army didn't go quite as far as Farah suggested
- in response to the four murders it has killed a mere 600 people in Fallujah,
and that does, I suppose, show restraint of a sort. But it is hardly an
advertisement for the discriminate and proportionate use of force. Since
today we have the technical means to reduce collateral damage, and since
we justify our wars in terms of protecting the innocent, we have a special
obligation to take every measure to do so. We will not be fulfilling that
obligation if we continue to shed blood on the scale of recent weeks in
Iraq. If we cannot govern the Iraqis without killing them, we should leave
their country immediately.
-
- Actually, withdrawing might be the best thing we could
do for them. Far from provoking civil war, the sight of us running from
a combined Shia-Sunni offensive could provide Iraqis with a unifying myth
of self-liberation to bind the country together and enable them to face
the future with confidence. If we are not willing to leave, though, we
must at least resist the calls to abandon restraint.
-
- Despite Tony Blair's bizarre rantings, terrorism does
not pose an 'existential' threat to our society, as Simon Jenkins rightly
pointed out in these pages a few weeks ago. Our civilisation is under threat,
but not from terrorists, whose power is extremely limited. Only we ourselves
can destroy the values that we cherish and which make us great. We must
hold on to the principles that guarantee our superiority - our respect
for the innocent, for due process and for justice. If we stand firm, we
can never be defeated.
-
- - Paul Robinson is assistant director of the Centre for
Security Studies at the University of Hull.
-
- © 2004 The Spectator.co.uk http://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec279.html
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