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Yesterday I suggested that John McCain went on Fox News Sunday and fired serial bulls-eyes at both feet. I stand by that commentary.
McCain defended the salubrious effects of the McCain/Feingold abomination, and then added that the issue doesn’t really matter since no one really cares about free speech outside the Beltway. (I’m paraphrasing, of course.) He also strangely suggested that we close Gitmo and transfer the detainees to Leavenworth, apparently because the Kansas climate will do them good. Chris Wallace’s questioning forced him to implausibly maintain that although he was one of three Republicans who voted against the Bush tax cuts, he would resolutely defend them once in the Oval Office.
But his real misstep was on the matter of torture. Senator McCain addresses this particular topic from a unique vantage-point. Although I’m always wary of the Absolute Moral Authority™ argument, on this subject Senator McCain comes pretty darn close to having just that. But he’s still not right.
BEFORE GETTING TO TORTURE, ALLOW ME TO MAKE a quick digression into abortion. I’m pro-life. I strongly feel that every abortion is the taking of an innocent life. But please note what I didn’t call it – murder.
Murder requires what those in the law refer to as a specific mens rea. That little Latin phrase in this context means you need a precise and knowing intent to kill someone in order to qualify as a murderer. The typical mother who has an abortion and the doctor who provides it have no such intent. They don’t feel they’re taking a life. I feel they’re wrong, and most of the readers of this site probably feel they’re wrong. But because they lack that specific and knowing intent, they’re not murderers.
What drives me crazy about the abortion debate, specifically on our side, is our stridency. There’s little attempt to understand the other side, and little effort to comprehend why a mother-to-be might desperately want an abortion. One of the reasons we toss around terms like “murder” is because they’ll end conversations, not begin them.
Anyone who’s pro-life ought to at least recognize the pain that an unwanted pregnancy can bring to a particular mother. For instance, imagine a woman who has her one-year old child die and then finds herself in an unplanned pregnancy. Assume for the sake of argument that the thought of having another child at such a time is unbearably painful for her. If she wants to have an abortion, I would consider it the wrong thing to do. But you’d have to have a heart of stone not to sympathize with her. Or to call her a murderer.
THE TORTURE DEBATE brings out a similar absolutism from torture opponents. They tend to casually assume that people who support “coercive interrogation techniques” do so because they’re congenital sadists who have just been waiting for this moment in history so they could begin water-boarding Muslims with impunity.
That’s not the case. The people who support coercive interrogation techniques, and I am one of them, do so sadly. Unfortunately, given the nature of the war we’re in, certain moral compromises are a necessity. Using coercive interrogation techniques is one of them.
What’s most infuriating about the anti-torture people is their tacit assumption that you can fight a war without making moral compromises. War is all about moral compromise. It’s not in the normal order of things to kill others. The very aim of war is to do just that. In World War II, we did terrible things like the fire-bombing of Dresden, the massive bombing of Tokyo, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While all these actions were terrible, they were also necessary. And justifiable.
Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, McCain stated that we can reclaim the moral high ground in this war if we close the Gitmo detention center and cease our use of coercive interrogation techniques. This comment makes the ludicrous assumption that we’ve lost the moral high ground because of these things.
The logic here would be akin to saying America lost the moral high ground after bombing the civilian center of Tokyo in World War II. While that bombing cost America any claim to moral perfection, no one was making any such claims in the first place. America still held the moral high ground because it wasn’t us that wanted to establish a global totalitarian dictatorship and exterminate inferior races. Similarly, just because our current struggle causes us to engage in ugly tactics doesn’t mean that we don’t have the moral high ground. It’s not us calling for the annihilation of those who practice a different religion than we do.
And then there’s the persistent intellectual incoherence of the anti-torture voices. They can’t decide whether they’re against torture because it doesn’t work or whether they oppose it solely on moral grounds. This confusion belies their own sense of their argument’s weaknesses. If you add up the consensus of informed opinions, torture sometimes gets you some really useful and actionable information, and sometimes gets you utter rubbish. Torture opponents know this, which is why they cherry-pick experts who argue that torture never works. Because if a consensus formed that torture produced any good information, and the media acknowledged that consensus, torture opponents know their position would become politically untenable.
The great silent majority of America feels that all methods should be used to extract relevant information from the homicidal maniacs who want to murder our innocents. If a terrorist catastrophe occurred and all possible means of preventing it hadn’t been completely explored, the public would be outraged. And justifiably so. What’s more, those individuals responsible for failing to exploit all possible options for avoiding the disaster would earn for themselves a measure of culpability.
The anti-torture argument sits on a fragile branch of moral vanity. 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.
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