The Enlightened Despot

Jeffrey Toobin, the only remotely sensible person allowed to speak on television about the news on a regular basis, has a crazy idea: we shouldn’t torture Najibullah Zazi. TNR’s Michael Crowley finds this scheme tempting, but he has his reservations:

It’s a well-argued case, and I think I agree. But, let’s play Devil’s Advocate

If it were up to me, I don’t know what I would do; I would need to know more facts. I am not a proponent of torture, which I think has done enormous harm to America’s image abroad and moral fiber at home. But I ride the subways these guys may have been planning to attack and I would like to be quite sure we’ve found all of them. At a minimum, this is a  good opportunity to stress-test* the debate about interrogation techniques, because it may be that life can imitate 24 after all.

I would genuinely like to know: what does “I am not a proponent of torture” even mean here? It seems clear to me that he isn’t using a euphemism screen here (real torture is inexcusable, of course, but what’s a little waterboarding between friends?). But at the same time, he is obviously on the fence about something, and I don’t know how to interpret this such that that something isn’t the question of whether Zazi should be tortured. But if that’s right, why does he so confidently assert that he isn’t a proponent?

The most likely interpretation I can come up with is that Crowley is saying he isn’t enthusiastic about torture, and thinks we’ve done far too much of it in the recent past, but that he isn’t willing to rule it out altogether. This is a much more honest framing of the pro-torture position than one generally sees, but it is the pro-torture position. It’s not as if there are lots of people saying with a straight face “I think we should torture whomever we can, whenever we can.” Willingness to resort to torture in extreme cases to prevent major acts of mass murder is the most pro-torture position that’s on the table.

Now, not being a crazy person, Crowley disagrees with the Dick Cheney about just how often that situation comes up. That speaks well of him. But - whatever some neocons might feel in their hearts - no one* has embraced a more stridently pro-torture philosophy than the one Crowley appears to be leaning toward here.

* No, commenters on Michelle Malkin’s blog don’t count.

Three things that neocons and right-wing hawks in general (though perhaps not the To Hell With Them Hawks) seem to feel pretty strongly about:

1.) They’re all in it together. Phrases like ‘the Global War on Terror’ and ‘the Axis of Evil’ are not just fluff. Sure, there are differences between our enemies, and indeed they have fought against each other in the past, but they represent a single, unified threat. It’s important to use the word ‘proxies’ a lot when talking about Hamas and Hezbullah. Talk of nuance, or of understanding and exploiting the differences between our enemies, is really just a manifestation of a naive refusal to see evil for what it is.

2.) It’s the Muslims, stupid. Whenever people mention the terrorist threat without explicitly mentioning that it is Islamic terrorism that we’re up against, they are obscuring an important fact about the enemy for the sake of craven political correctness. The unified threat we face is inherently an Islamist menace, and that has serious implications for how we should combat it.

3.) North Korea is a sponsor of terrorism and a member of the Axis of Evil. The one doesn’t take much explaining. North Korea’s Muslim population is generally estimated to hover around 0%.

I’m not wild about any of these propositions, but surely one can’t believe all of them. But they do, don’t they?

In response to my post on Harry Reid’s Guantanamo bumbling, commenter Chuck said the following:

It would seem to me that the folks chickening out on closing gitmo have aided the enemy in their main goal.

The goal of a terrorist is ‘terror’ and the the folks who are legitimizing being too afraid of *captured terrorists* to keep them in a *prison* are doing the terrorists work for them.

This is true about hawkish views on terrorism more broadly. It’s an often made, but even more often ignored, point that the utility - such as it is - of terrorist strikes has much more to do with the reaction to them than with the harm they cause directly. Killing a few Americans civilians does not do anything directly to advance, say, the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate. The payoff is always in the reaction - whether by creating pressure to yield to terrorist demands, or more indirectly, by - to take a crazy, purely hypothetical example - goading us into unpopular wars in the Middle-East.

None of which is to say that we shouldn’t try to stop terrorists from killing us. For one thing, letting people get away with mass murder is always a bad precedent. For another, terrorists are crazy people, so even if we had a history of Zen-like calm in reaction to attacks, rendering their efforts futile, there’s little reason to think they wouldn’t give it the old college try anyway.

But, yes, it is certainly worth noting that being too terrified to deal with captive terrorists in the most efficacious manner available is Letting the Terrorists Win 101. This is why worries about WMDs in the hands of terrorists is so central to the terrorist hawk’s view of the issue. If you think of terrorism mainly through the lens of what terrorists have ever actually done, you can’t think of it as anything remotely like an existential threat. I don’t mean to be callous to the victims of terrorism, but in the second week of September, 2001 alone, Al Qaeda killed fewer Americans than tobacco (though, of course, Al Qaeda did a lot more property damage). And we have lost more lives in subsequent wars than in the attacks. I was and am a supporter of invading Afghanistan, but between the strategy we have actually embarked on, including Iraq, GITMO, the Patriot Act, and all the rest, and doing absolutely nothing, the latter would be a more rational response even if we knew we would suffer a 9-11 scale attack every 8 years.

So to the extent that the Neocon position makes any sense at all, it’s justification lies almost entirely on the possibility of terrorists acquiring and using WMDs. Which is to say that it’s not about terror at all. But if that’s what you’re worried about - and the Neocons are right, it’s what you should be worried about - then it makes very little sense to go around fighting terrorists wherever they might be. Rather, we should be securing nuclear weapons and other WMDs wherever they might be. Whoops.

From February of 2005, a bold prediction of the imminent dawn of a neoconservative utopia:

Car bombs are bad news, but in the shadows is the real story: The terrorists are losing, and radical reform, the likes of which millions have never seen, is right on the horizon. So this American gloominess is not new. Yet, if the past is any guide, our present lack of optimism in this struggle presages its ultimate success.

A final prediction: By the end of this year, formerly critical liberal pundits, backsliding conservative columnists, once-fiery politicians, Arab “moderates,” ex-statesmen and generals emeriti, smug stand-up comedians, recently strident Euros — perhaps even Hillary herself — will quietly come to a consensus that what we are witnessing from Afghanistan and the West Bank to Iraq and beyond, with its growing tremors in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and the Gulf, is a moral awakening, a radical break with an ugly past that threatens a corrupt, entrenched, and autocratic elite and is just the sort of thing that they were sort of for, sort of all along — sort of…

Remember when all those liberal pundits and backsliding conservatives were forced to admit to the growing tremors of a moral awakening in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and the West Bank? That sure was embarrassing for them.

P.S. Bonus points for adding Islamophobic undertones purely through the use of quotation marks.