Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Andrew Sullivan argues, in response to Megan McArdle, that the Bush’s administration’s policy of torture, and prolictivity to commit war crimes more generally, is unique in our history:

I’m sorry but this is preposterous, uninformed, ahistorical. The United States has managed to go to war for two centuries without the president authorizing and monitoring the torture of prisoners. The Bush administration’s legalization of torture and withdrawal from Geneva is unique in American history. Yes, wars will lead to individuals committing war crimes in the heat of battle. Yes, it carries a horrifying logic. But an advance, pre-meditated decision by the president to engage in war crimes is new and unprecedented. Bush really is uniquely awful as a president in this respect: an indefensible war criminal, who has permanently stained the country he represents and betrayed the soldiers who expect decency and lawfulness in their commander-in-chief.

Sullivan is right that, when it comes to agreements that mandate certain conduct in war (Geneva), the Bush administration has been egregious, but he ignores that America has committed plenty of war crimes, namely the pointless killing of civilians and waging of agressive war, in its history. And agressive war is, when it comes to war crimes, the most serious one there is. As Glenn Greenwald wrote, at Nuremberg, the main charge against Nazi war criminals was not the abuse of prisoners, torture or any of the things that Sullivan regularly writes about, but instead waging agressive war:

We charge unlawful aggression but we are not trying the motives, hopes or frustrations which may have led Germany to resort to aggressive war as an instrument of policy . . . It merely requires that the status quo not be attacked by violent means and that policies be not advanced by war. . . .

The central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars. The chief reason for international cognizance of these crimes lies in this fact. Have we established the Plan or Conspiracy to make aggressive war?

What’s troubling about our willingnesses to call John Yoo, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld and the like war criminals for their torture policy, is that it ignores the one key war crime: aggressive war itself. And more specifically, killing civilians and the perpetrating generalized horror on an entire country. When you think about it, compared to the hundreds of thousands of Iraq civilians killed and millions displaced, even the horrors of Abu Ghraib seem minor. But it’s rare that the act of war itself, especially among those who once fervently supported it, is called a war crime. This tendency is partially due to it being  hard to blame specific people – Yoo, Addington, Rumsfeld etc- for the perpetration of the war. After all, the war was the culmination of a popular policy that had been set in place since the Clinton administration. But considering that most Americans think that the war hasn’t prevented any attacks on us, made us safer, reduced terrorism, affected Democratic change in the middle east, or even helped out Iraqi civilians especially, we must ask, what did all these innocent Iraqis die for?

But instead of asking that question, we have become fascinated with torture, Abu Ghraib, and obsessively trying to discover if the orders to abuse prisoners came “from the top down” – all of which, often unwittingly, just helps to obscure the primary war crime. If you follow the logic that underlies the undue attention that Sullivan gives to Abu Ghraib and torture, as opposed to the massive war crime that the war itself was, you would think that the chief villains of Nazi Germany were Joesph Mengele and his coterie of sadists, as opposed to the leaders and generals who plotted and executed the wartime aggression.

Another effect of the huge amount of attention we give to torture is that it whitewashes other American wars of aggression, as well as specific war crimes, because we can say “but at least we followed the Geneva Conventions!” So Vietnam, instead of being seen as the pointless destruction of an entire nation in which hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese were killed, where we poisoned a generation or more with the likes of Agent Orange and unleashed wanton devastation on North Vietnam and Cambodia with naplam and bombing campaigns, is a war where the president didn’t authorize torture. There are also the civilian bombings of Japan and Germany, which served little military or strategic purpose, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Even Robert McNamara, who helped plan the assaults on Japanese cities, described the bombings as war crimes. But, in American political discourse, this type of the war crime – the war crime that a) is the impetus for all other war crimes and b) is the offense for which we invented “war crimes” as a legal category – is often ignored, or even accepted as inevitable or laudable.

Just look at Senator Clinton. She talks about how she would restore the Geneva Conventions, shut down Guantanamo, and generally clean up the Bush administration abuses that a broad spectrum of people are worried about. But she also said that she would “totally obliterate” Iran (a country with no nuclear weapons, and according to the NIE, no solid plans to develop them) if they attacked Israel (a country with a second strike nuclear deterrent). Now, the probability of Iran attacking Israel with nuclear weapons is vanishingly low – even David Frum admits that it’s unlikely, and that if you look at the strategic considerations, entirely insane. So why would Clinton feel the need to threaten some 65 million Iranians with nuclear annihilation? And although there is a value to maintaining a credible deterrent and the like, it’s still disturbing to hear Clinton wax rhapsodically in the style of Buck Turgidson about nuclear war. But she would shut down Guantanamo and stop the torture!

What the Iraq War and the entire approach the US takes to foreign policy has taught(or should have just reminded) me that America has little appreciation for the horrors of war. Unlike Europe or Japan, which have had wars devastate their entire countries and populations, the US hasn’t had foreign troops killing civilians or occupying their country since 1812. The US has never had 161,000 men killed in a battle that only reproduced the status quo. As a nation, we are incredibly lucky. Our mass prosperity and preeminence in global affairs following World War II (as well as our victory in it) can largely be attributed to our being able to stay out of large conflicts until we had to get in, and could do so with decisive force. But today, in a world where we are the sole remaining superpower, our naiveté of the horrors of total war makes us all to likely to unleash them on others.

PS – Read Mike Meginnis on “war as a special case of peace.”