The conflict against radical Islam was not our fault and we did not ask for it. It was brought to us, against our will, with a set of rules for the game that we did not create. You cannot put a tennis team with it's 'Marquess of Queensberry rules' in the rink with those who play by the rules of 'ultimate fighting' and expect the tennis team to survive or prevail. In this conflict, playing by our rules results in a loss. Playing by their rules is a tie, and in this matter a tie is also a loss. We either play rougher or we lose. This is not conservative blather. It is an inherently unpleasant, nasty business, and we cannot judge the actions taken as being legal or immoral, based on whether we find the actions distasteful ... or how they look in the eyes of the world on television.
This conflict is not a war in the sense of it's ultimately having a resolution such as a treaty, surrender, group hug, political agreement between combatants, or the like. For the other side it is based in ideology, not politics, and will likely go on indefinitely for generations. It is not limited to a few dozen well publicized terrorists. There are about 1.2 billion people who read the book which inspires the ideology. Even if a small fraction of one percent of that number are inspired to help, support, participate, (or wish they could participate), in the conflict, that number of people is in the high hundreds of thousands to low millions.
The participants on the other side have been, and are, men, women, children, European, Asian, Latin American, North American, African, Middle Eastern, caucasian, hispanic, African American, blond, blue eyes, brunette, U.S citizens, doctors, surgeons, medical students, and on and on. Most appeared to be model citizens, Many have been home grown in the U.S. The only profile they have in common is the source of their inspiration and ideology and belief.
The conflict is centuries old and has only recently reached our shores because of the more recent accessibility to it's participants of world wide transportation, communication, and immigration and migration patterns. It is not a new conflict. There is no immediate gratification here for North Americans. There are only two ways to deal with the aggression against us: either continue the conflict as a long term management problem, of which we have many (ie: forest fires, crime, disease, famine, economic issues, radical Islam, etc), or, convert to the ideology which they seek to have us embrace ... and they will stop. There are no other options. Believing that altering our behavior will change theirs is naive in the extreme and wrong.
This conflict is new to Americans (and to the world watching America deal with it) and the methods are unfamiliar, new, uncomfortable, and fly in the face of the 'rules' Americans are accustomed to. The conflict is also uncomfortable to the world watching Americans who are equally familiar with our historic 'rules'. Yes, it is against civilians because the combatants are civilians. Yes, it is preemptive and preventative ... or else it will be reactive and after the fact. The degree to which we choose as a society to alter these methods, will be directly related to the losses which we as a society will be willing to accept as a result.
The attacks on us and around the world by the other side are brutal, without rules, without regard to numbers, (the more the better), without regard for 'who', designed for shock and revulsion, grisly, and designed for a willing and compliant media for complete coverage ... all done with a perceived 'reward' for the perpetrators.
Virtually all preventions of these acts occur because of prior knowledge and information gathered from previously detained, or previously monitored detainees or suspected individuals. The need to gather info, and the need to react to it, is often immediate. The portion of that gathering which involves interrogation of detainees has lead to the debate on 'torture' ... a word thrown around with much drama and agenda yet without definition.
What is the threshold at which torture becomes torture, as opposed to an escalation in the intensity of the interrogation? Is 'waterboaring' torture? Is exposure to cold temperature torture? If so, how cold? Standing? How long? How about withholding dinner, calling the detainee's mother names, slapping, screaming, playing him country music, (yes, really), lying to him, or scary looking interrogators. How about uncomfortable positions? How uncomfortable? Any one of these could be viewed as 'torture' by the detainee, or by society. It's a very individual and case by case situation. How about the reader of this essay? Which of those, if done to you, would you consider torture? Would you be happy with any of them? Of course not.
Which of those would you authorize to save lives? Would you only authorize waterboarding (detainee emerges uninjured, scared, upset, and wet), in the possible event of his knowledge of a WMD and the loss of thousands of lives? What if the possible loss of life was only two human beings? Or one? Would you authorize it to save those two lives? What if the life involved was the person you loved the most? What about only one total stranger who was none-the-less someone else's loved one? Would you run the risk of their death for principle? What if we weren't quite sure the detainee had info that could save the life or lives? What if there is a chance the detainee was totally innocent?
These are the decisions and uncertainties that the personnel in the field, and the policy makers and officials, who make the decisions and procedures have to grapple with as a result of the 'rules' of the game imposed on us by those who do not play by our rules. Our 'players' are not evil, have no wish to be cruel, have no wish to be illegal or unconstitutional, and are not deserving of being pawns in political battle within the country they are defending. They have battles enough of their own from our real enemies, without having to deal with a second battle within our own society
*Click here for thoughts on interrogation politics*
