Blurring the Battlefield

A while ago I went back and forth with John Schwenkler on torture. Our positions are pretty close together, but an element of the ‘torture problem’ we seem to be experiencing seemed to me to have received too little attention given how central it is to the controversy. That element is the blurring, in time and space, of the battlefield — away from locations and moments proximate to encountering the enemy, and toward distant spots at distant times. When enemy combatants are first seized, something that would look clearly like torture if it happened later in a cool, dark place has a different character. Not necessarily a ‘better’ character, but one that’s intelligible in the context of the heat and passion of war. The trouble with torture, and the reason it revolts us, is that torture takes ‘battlefield behavior’ off the battlefield. Expertly developed torture techniques are designed to elongate moments that go by in an instant immediately after capture into days or weeks or, really, as long as you can keep a poor suffering bastard alive. Torture doesn’t just do violence to persons — it does violence to space and time. Probably the worst thing about torture — the bottomless abyss it can open on the psyche and the soul — is its ability to mutilate simply the experience of being alive beyond all human recognition. This doesn’t happen right after capture, in the heat of the fight, when an enemy combatant is ‘roughed up’, even within an inch of their lives.

That’s how I tried to characterize the problem with torture, the root of its unnaturalness, so to speak. I bring all this up now on account of Daniel’s latest critique of torture’s apologists — who, he writes,

finally [rely on] a justification of the actual inflicting of mental and physical duress on detainees. Mr. Bush’s cheerleaders on blogs and radio are quite explicit about this. Blogger Dean Barnett once wrote, “The torture opponents’ entire premise rests on the erroneous notion that one can successfully wage war without cruelty and savagery. I wish they were right. But they’re not.” Challenged by one of his listeners that he supported torture in recent weeks, radio host Michael Medved unflinchingly agreed that he did. What is first wrapped in euphemisms is then openly defended and even celebrated as necessary.

This is a perfect illustration of the failure to recognize why torture’s problematic in the way I claim. I oppose torture. (Though I conceptualize torture relatively narrowly, I do opposite it fully.) Yet I do think that winning wars very very often requires cruelty and savagery. The erroneous notion here belongs to Barnett and Co., who falsely think that winning this war requires cruelty and savagery far away from the battlefield in space and time. They think that in order to win this war we must extend the battlefield anywhere ‘we’ decide that it must be extended — into dungeons, into windowless rooms, into locations that no civilized people could intelligibly describe as a battlefield. Astonishingly, Barnett and Co. then wish to declare these new battlefields as places where the laws of war do not apply! I expect that in these places the laws of physics are understood not always to apply, and that, on occasion, in order to win the war, two plus two is made to equal five.

You see, even if, as a thought experiment, I adopt the most unsqueamish and even callous attitude about cruelty and savagery in war, I nonetheless can maintain complete opposition to torture, cruel and savage as it is, outside of war. One reason I can do this is because even a heartless, soulless warmonger can recognize the great harms and dangers involved in breaking the legal barriers that put war in a box — the rules that limit the practice of war in space and time, and thus define it according to constraints we are bound to follow. Inevitably, there are gray areas, but this is no excuse and no slippery slope. Finally, the pro-torture argument reduces to this: lily-livered pinko Americans have gone soft, and when the fink news media broadcasts images of troops on the battlefield doing what needs to be done if we don’t torture, the American people will freak out and lose the will to fight. So we’ve got to pull the nasty stuff off the battlefield as much as possible, do the dirty work in the dark. The only way we can win the war is to hide its rawness from our own effete, cheese-weenie citizens. American greatness has made them too decadent and weak-stomached to fight to win in public, so we have to do it for them in private, in our own private person-to-person ‘war’.

I know I’m not alone in thinking this is an extraordinarily fateful and catastrophic concept of war — especially given that it’s not even the consequence of the parody split in civil-mil relations expressed at the climax of A Few Good Men. The great defenders of secret personal war without rules are civilians themselves. They are in the habit of appropriating any term of virtue within reach in order to justify their ideas. If we want to rebut them intelligently, we’ve got to prevent them from abusing terms of vice as well. Torture apologists don’t have a corner on cruelty. War is hell, but torture is worse.

UPDATE: Daniel responds. I did suggest that savagery isn’t always required by definition to win a war. But I’m hard-pressed to think how the victors of World War II could have won without the sort of savagery Daniel is talking about, which is basically war criminality. Technology plays some role — it’s harder to avoid savagery in war when a culture of offense is paired to a world totally dominated (a la World War I) by defensive weapons. But even in ancient times, when war was not total and honorable fighting involved armies finding good places to demonstrate excellence in combat, things fell apart under strain and in came the unimaginable barbarity. (This fragility of culture is the most important lesson in Thucydides.) So I agree that we can avoid repeating major war crimes in war. But I persist in thinking that at least some very savage behaviors that are not war crimes will remain (very often) necessary to the fighting and winning of wars.