Posted by
Kenneth G. Davenport on Thursday, July 24, 2008 3:02:43 PM
The Liberal Asymmetry of the War on Terror
On Thursday, July 10, 2008, U.S. Army notification teams paid visits to the families of two U.S. soldiers who had been killed in Iraq. Notifying any family of the death of their son, brother or husband is never a routine event, but in this case it was both extraordinary and particularly painful for all involved. The two soldiers, Sgt. Alex Jiminez and 19 year old Pvt. Byron Fouty of the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, had been missing since May of 2007. The two soldiers were captured by Al Qaeda in Iraq in May of 2007 while on patrol south of Baghdad in the area known as the “triangle of death”. Unlike the comfortable, closely supervised conditions that await terrorists captured by U.S. forces on the battlefield, American soldiers captured by Al Qaeda enter what can only be termed a torture zone -- where their fate is almost certain to be a painful and grisly demise. To wit: another soldier, Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr. was also captured along with Jiminez and Fouty; his body was found floating in the Euphrates River a week after the initial attack. During the past year, the families of Jiminez and Fouty continued to hold out hope that the two soldiers were still alive. Sadly, this was wishful thinking.
The fate of Jiminez, Fouty and Anzack – and the threat of similar treatment to the thousands of U.S. troops now in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan -- raises some important issues, particularly in light of the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush that gave habeus corpus rights to the terrorists being held at Guantanamo. In this election year, the Boumediene decision reminds us that we are waging a war against an enemy that is not bound by the same rules that we are. Somewhere in a cave on the Afghan-Pakistan border, where Osama Bin Laden may be hiding, and among a whole host of Islamic terrorist groups from London to Tehran, the Supreme Court has unwittingly reinforced what our enemy has already known about us. It has said, with legal finality, that our desire to be fair can be turned against us, exploited for key advantages in the war on terror.
This war against global terrorism has, of course, always been an asymmetrical struggle. By definition, terrorists who use suicide bombings as a means of carrying out their policies can never be matched by the Judeo-Christian world, with its norms and rules underpinned by morality and law. While we fight these terrorists – both on the actual battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the streets of European and Asian capitals – with tactics defined by rules of engagement, our enemy knows no such limits. While many in the West wring their hands over the detainees at Guantanamo, our soldiers like Jiminez and Fouty captured by Al Qaeda in Iraq have been mutilated and beheaded. It’s the kind of asymmetry that gives nightmares to both our troops and their families.
Unfortunately, it provides no sleepless nights for many on the left, particularly those who have applauded the court’s decision in Boumediene, and who believe that the principles of democracy should never be outweighed by the practical necessities of war. This includes the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama. Though Obama has given the left-wing base of the Democratic party whiplash with his recent tack to the center, he has remained steadfast in his intent to both withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq “beginning immediately” upon taking office, and to continue the left’s unraveling of many of the Bush Administration’s Patriot Act-based intelligence and security reforms. In comments made after the Boumediene decision he said, “I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday”.
Leaving aside the distinct difference between the nature of Islamic terror and the war crimes of the Nazis (not to mention the fact that the Nuremburg trials were not adjudicated in a civilian court but rather before a military commission – of the same type that the Court in Boumediene specifically proscribes), Obama’s statement depicts a troubling but familiar view: that the war on terror cannot (and should not) be waged in a manner consistent with the methods and tactics of our enemies. Now, nobody of a sound mind would suggest that we should resort to suicide bombings or summary executions; but there is a toughness that is missing in our desire to wage war with all the due process of American law. Those like Obama who see the need to give every terrorist their “day in court” have essentially made the war on terror an abstraction -- a political football that pits the ACLU and other leftist organizations against the administration of George W. Bush.
Lone Survivor
Of course, to those on the front lines, the war on terror is no abstraction, but a real war where people get killed. Just ask Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, part of a four-man reconnaissance squad ambushed in Afghanistan in July, 2005. Luttrell, who wrote a best selling book about the ordeal called “Lone Survivor”, was on a covert mission deep inside the Afghan-Kush Mountains when he and his teammates were inadvertently stumbled upon by three goat herders, who immediately put their mission at risk. Luttrell, his commander, Lieutenant Mike Murphy, and the other two members of the team were suddenly put into the kind of real-world predicament that policy-makers and ACLU lawyers could never care – or dare – to imagine. Standing on that hillside in striking distance of a major Taliban village, the four Navy SEALs had to make a battlefield decision as to what to do with the goat herders. Let them go and they were almost certain to report the SEALs position to the Taliban, thereby both endangering the mission and their own safety. Kill them, and they likely would have been able to maintain their position and, if not complete the mission, at least extricate themselves without having been discovered.
As Luttrell recounts, it was clear to the SEALs that the right military course of action was to eliminate the threat by killing the goat herders -- a tough, even brutal act, but one that these warriors were clearly capable of. But, the decision on that hillside didn’t hinge on what was best for the mission; rather the decision was based principally on what would happen to the SEALs once they returned to base. Fresh in their minds was what happened at Abu Ghraib and the way the “liberal media” in the U.S. had tarred and feathered the military. Luttrell quotes Lt. Murphy as saying: “When they find the bodies, the…media in the U.S.A. will latch on to it and write stuff about the brutish U.S. Armed Forces. Very shortly after that, we’ll be charged with murder. The murder of innocent Afghan farmers”. To Luttrell, at least, this was pretty compelling: “Was I afraid of these guys? No. Was I afraid of their possible buddies in the Taliban? No. Was I afraid of the liberal media back in the U.S.A.? Yes. And suddenly I flashed on the prospect of many, many years in a U.S. civilian jail alongside murderers and rapists.”
Faced with this prospect, the herders were set free; a decision that the SEALs quickly came to regret. Over the next few hours and, for Luttrell, the next few days, the SEALs were attacked relentlessly by a Taliban force of 150 to 200 fighters. Lt. Murphy and Luttrell’s comrades Petty Officers Mathew Axelson and Danny Deitz were killed after a valiant struggle; Murphy was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism. Eight more SEALs and eight other Special Forces soldiers were later killed when their helicopter was shot down on a rescue mission shortly after the battle began. It was the greatest single loss of life in the history of the SEALs. Luttrell managed to survive almost a week on the run, partly under the protection of a friendly Afghan village that fended off the Taliban in an effort to protect him. He was later awarded, along with Axelson and Dietz, the Navy Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor in combat. The experience of these SEALs in Afghanistan, while extreme, is representative of the conflict between our ideals and the reality of war.
After the Election: Values or Victory?
With the very real prospect of an Obama presidency on the horizon, a central question arises: will the Democrats under his leadership continue to choose the protection of our civil values over tactical success in the war on terror? This very question has been in play over the long-running debate over the use of water-boarding and other coercive interrogation techniques. CIA Diector Michael Hayden admitted earlier this year that the CIA had used such techniques on three captured terrorists, including the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheik Muhammed (who has also admitted to having personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Pearl). The water-boarding occurred in 2002, when the threat of another terrorist attack was high, and the three captives were the only detainees ever to be water-boarded while in U.S. custody. According to Hayden in sworn testimony before the Senate, the water-boarding of one of the detainees, Abu Zubaydah, led directly to the capture of Khalid Sheik Muhammed and the foiling of an “active terrorist plot” against the United States. In short, it worked.
On the issue of interrogation techniques, there is little that seperates John McCain from Barack Obama. McCain is on record as opposing coercive interrogation methods and would ban them, while also moving to close the prison at Guantanamo. In an interview in 2007 with Chris Wallace of Fox News, McCain said this: “any intelligence information we might gain through the use of torture could never, ever counterbalance the image that it does — the damage that it does to our image in the world." In the same interview, McCain went on to claim that coercive interrogation doesn’t work, and shouldn’t be a regular part of our anti-terror arsenal.
It should be said that McCain is one of the only people in Washington who has actually been tortured himself, undergoing years of bone-breaking abuse at the hands of the North Vietnamese during his time as a POW in Hanoi. The real question on this subject is this: Would McCain authorize the use of coercive interrogation techniques (including water-boarding) in the case of the “ticking time bomb” scenario – when intelligence gathered could save the lives of thousands (or millions) of Americans? Here, in a 2005 essay he wrote for Newsweek, McCain is on record as being somewhat more flexible:
“In such an urgent and rare instance, an interrogator might well try extreme measures to extract information that could save lives. Should he do so, and thereby save an American city or prevent another 9/11, authorities and the public would surely take this into account when judging his actions and recognize the extremely dire situation which he confronted.”
This is somewhat consistent with McCain’s oft-stated view that the United States. is in a global struggle with Islamic extremism, and that the real threats posed by this war must be dealt with as a special case, using all available intelligence methods and military power to combat. As such, it was not surprising that McCain came down harshly on the Boumediene v. Bush decision, saying that it was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country”. Though McCain has been critical of Guantanamo, his desire to close it was based principally on the use of military Commissions -- not civilian courts – to gradually dispose of detainee cases. It most certainly did not include the granting of the same habeus corpus rights available to American citizens.
Barack Obama, for his part, supports the conventional liberal view that the fight against terrorism is best done via conventional law-enforcement techniques. This is a stark reminder of the differences between the Clinton administration, which treated the repeated attacks against American interests in the 1990s as a series of criminal acts, and the Bush administration which, since 9/11 has looked at terrorism as a security threat that necessitated coordinated military action to defeat. Obama clearly intends to return to the law enforcement model if elected. Recently he said this:
“What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks -- for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.”
Unfortunately, this statement is wrong -- the bomb-maker in that attack, Abdul Rahman Yasin, escaped to Iraq (yes, Iraq!) after the bombing and remains at large, as did the financier of the first WTC bombing Khalid Sheik Muhammed until he was captured in Pakistan. But the sentiment is clear: Obama seeks to return America’s terror fight back to the courts and the dysfunctional relationship between the FBI and our myriad intelligence agencies. With Obama sure to be leading a Democrat-controlled Congress, there will likely be a roll-back of the coordinated civil-military terror-fighting approach that has successfully protected the U.S. homeland since 9/11/2001.
And where does Obama come down on the use of coercive interrogations? Again, he is squarely in the camp that believes that such techniques run afoul of American values and serve to simply “breed more terrorism”. During the hearings on the nomination of Mike Mukasey for Attorney General, Obama issued this statement:
"I have been consistent in my strong belief that no Administration should allow the use of torture, including so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' like water-boarding, head-slapping, and extreme temperatures. It's time that we had a Department of Justice that upholds the rule of law and American values, instead of finding ways to enable the President to subvert them. No more political parsing or legal loopholes.”
Given this statement, it is reasonable to assume that as president, Obama would place the “rule of law” over the security of the nation. His desire is to permanently outlaw the very form of interrogation that was successful in the case of Abu Zubaydah, and might very well be needed at a future time to gain intelligence about an impending attack. Obama has unilaterally disarmed us from using even the threat of water-boarding, because Osama bin Laden and his cohorts now know that he will outlaw it if and when he becomes president.
This is, of course, standard fare at the base of the Democratic party – the core support that has put Obama in the position to be president. According to a recent article at the liberal HuffingtonPost by R.J. Eskow, (“Blue Alert: Obama And the Dems Need Contingency Plans for Terror and War”, June 24, 2008), this is a clear issue on which “Democrats should explain that torture is un-American, that it breeds terrorists -- and that it doesn't help catch bad guys” (emphasis in original). In fact, Eskow claims that America has tortured “dozens of innocent Iraqis only to send them home with $100 in their pocket. That's like raping a woman and then leaving money on her dresser.” But don’t despair, because Eskow is actually looking out for the American military, who he thinks will somehow be hurt by all this torture going on at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the hundreds of other places where the U.S. is holding detainees. “How many (Americans) know that we won't get better intelligence that way, but that more American soldiers are likely to be tortured as a result? The short version: Torture is un-American, and it hurts our military.”
Try convincing Sgt. Jiminez and Pvt. Fouty that some reciprocity actually exists in the treatment of our soldiers by an enemy that has no sense of humanity. Eskow makes the common claim on the left that somehow our willingness to use tightly controlled methods to extract intelligence information has some symmetry to the kind of brutal tactics used against us; if we stop our “torture” and ascribe to our democratic principles, our enemy will surely do the same.
All of which shows the tremendous disconnect on the left between the virtue of theory and the hard practical realities in this war. While it is aesthetically pleasing to talk about the importance of our values, it remains clear that the terrorists we fight can – and will – use these values to their advantage. As this is being written, hundreds of Guantanamo detainees are petitioning the U.S. courts for hearings that may lead to their release. And unlike Marcus Luttrell’s SEAL comrades who died that day in Afghanistan, they will live to fight another day.