Can You Fight Terror By Torturing People?
One of the strongest criticisms of war is that the causes that lead people into war are often betrayed through the course of war. When I use the word “causes”, I’m not talking about things like an effort to recapture a piece of territory. Those are tactics, not causes.
A cause is referred to in the Republican language about the current constellation of military actions: The War On Terror.
The implied cause in this war is an end to terror.
The obvious irony is that the tactics used by the United States government include the infliction of terror. The strategy for the invasion of Iraq, for example, was called “shock and awe”. The idea was to cause so much fear amongst Iraqis that they would give up hope and end resistance to the American invasion and military occupation almost immediately. Five years later, Iraqi resistance is continuing. The tactics of inflicting terror haven’t worked, but they were the admitted tactics of the United States nonetheless.
Then, of course, there’s torture. The Republicans continue to insist that they need to torture, or as they say “use extreme interrogation methods”, in order to defeat terror. They don’t appear to grasp the irony that the very purpose of torture is to increase terror, not to defeat it.
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