Matt Zeitlin

Max Boot says that as long as our local allies in counterinsurgency campaigns do the torturing, we should just turn a blind eye:

West notes that when he was an adviser in South Vietnam in 1966 he saw a village police chief named Thanh using “what is now called waterboarding, rubbing lye soap into a wet cloth and placing it across the face of the prisoner. I never saw a prisoner die or not be able to walk out of that room. But they talked. I reported it and our orders were to keep the Marines in our Combined Action Platoon out of that room.”

Our advisers in Iraq don’t have the same option of turning a blind eye. As West notes: “Today, 40 years later, the order would be for the American adviser to physically stop Thanh and to bring him up on charges.” As West notes, that is a misguided attempt to impose our cultural norms elsewhere—you might even call it “cultural imperialism.”

“Neither our advisers nor our military units are involved in waterboarding or other such techniques, be they labeled ‘torture’, or ‘harsh interrogation’ or whatever the vernacular,” he notes. But we should be more tolerant if our allies, who are fighting for their lives and that of their families, practice a harsher brand of counterinsurgency than we’re comfortable with.

The most obvious objection is that if an American soldier isn’t allowed to torture because it’s immoral and goes against the ethics and norms of American, Military and International Law, than those local soldiers he’s working with damn well shouldn’t be able to do so under American supervision.  I thought one of the hallmarks of neoconservatism was a staunch stand against moral relativism, but I guess when it comes to one of the strongest taboos in the West, neocons think that “cultural imperialism” is bad.

But, in all fairness, Boot isn’t likely to convinced by those type of arguments.  The most important reason for why we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to torture is that when the US is perceived as being enablers of torture — even when done by locals — it makes a counter-insurgency campaign pretty difficult.   It’s worth noting that  the South Vietnamese and the United States lost the Vietnam war in large part because of actions of those like Thahn and a general disrespect for the humanity of the Vietnamese people (not that the NVA were saints or anything).  Remember, we managed to win WWII without any torture, and we lost in Vietnam.