"Everything Within His Power..."
Before I disagree with Damon Linker again, let me say how much I’ve enjoyed his blogging lately. Were I given a magazine to run and a stable of bloggers to fill I’d try to steal him from The New Republic immediately. Indeed I find myself scarcely able to let one of his posts pass without comment.
So here we go again. Damon writes:
Imagine, for example, that the slaughter of 9/11 had been followed not by an absence of terrorist strikes but by a string of spectacular attacks with conventional explosives. Imagine a dozen suicide bombers blowing themselves up in the food courts of the nation’s 12 largest malls at precisely 1:30 pm, eastern time on a Saturday in mid-October 2001. Several hundred would have died, and the economy would have been dealt an enormous blow as Americans decide en masse to stay away from public places. Then imagine a half-dozen bombers blowing themselves up in coordinated attacks at Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, Washington’s Union Station, Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, and a handful of other major train stations at the same moment during evening rush hour on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 2001.
I submit that any president — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, anyone — who under these circumstances (let alone one involving attacks with weapons of mass destruction) did not do everything within his power to determine the location and timing of future attacks, including (if there was reason to believe it would be effective) torturing captured members of active terrorist cells, would be acting irresponsibly and immorally, even if his refusal to torture was based on the noblest liberal principles.
Wow. Does Damon realize what he is saying? That a moral president must do everything within his power to determine the location and timing of future attacks? I’m going to arbitrarily organize my thoughts such that there are three things wrong with that standard.
1) It is a moral abomination, because it justifies literally any approach that might be effective. Imagine that the president threatens the terrorists, assuring them that various horrific things will happen unless they surrender. Would it be permissible for the president to threaten burning their infant daughters alive? Exploding an atom bomb in Mecca at the height of a pilgrimage? Releasing a genetically engineered pathogen that kills all Arabs?
I very much doubt that Damon Linker is willing to go along with any of those tactics, no matter how effective, let alone to hold them up as moral imperatives in certain situations. So I cannot believe he really thinks that a president is morally obligated to do everything in his power to stop a terrorist attack — he merely thinks that a president is morally obligated to torture. Obviously I’ll concede that torture is much less abhorrent than the tactics I mentioned. But the reasoning that Damon uses is insufficient to justify torture while stopping short of more horrific hypothetical tactics.
2) It is a strategic disaster. Consider that there are actions within the president’s power that might stop the next terrorist attack, but whose long term effect is to put the country in greater danger. Image, for example, that the president finds out a safe house in Pakistan contains a computer on whose hard drive the location of an upcoming attack is stored. But the location is guarded by Taliban sympathizing soldiers, and overthrowing them would require a serious firefight that the Pakistani government has forbade, because of its likely effect of destabilizing the country and endangering the regime. The president, employing Damon’s “if I can prevent another attack I have a moral imperative to do it” standard, sends in the special forces, who kill several hundred fighters, as many innocent civilians, and get the information, stopping an attack that would’ve killed thousands. But the indirect effect is to outrage the Pakistani street, leading to the overthrow of the government, the rise of a radical Islamic regime, and their subterfuges passing of a nuclear weapon to a terrorist, which manages to detonate it six years later in Manhattan. Doing “anything in your power” to stop any single terrorist attack, consequences be damned, might lead one to suffer a far worse fate in the future.
3) It might create an incentive for certain kinds of terrorist attacks. Were I an Al Qaeda strategist, and I knew that a certain kind of choreographed terrorist onslaught would cause the United States to suspend habeus corpus, round up Muslim Americans, and torture a number of innocent citizens, all in the name of stopping the next attack, I’d try to engineer things just that way — even if my attack was thwarted, I’d have done far more damage to the United States than blowing up a few more hundred people.
I don’t see why to try and disprove his logic you have to go overboard yourself. Your entire third point is invalid. Linker says nothing about rounding up Muslims and torturing innocent civilians. He only references members of active terrorist cells.
More to the point, I suspect Linker’s scenario arises out of frustration with the ridiculous moralizing that opponents to waterboarding have engaged in these last few weeks. People keep drawing these overwrought “we’re no better than the terrorists” kinds of lines when most Americans don’t think that something like waterboarding three terrorists makes us the same as Osama bin Laden.
I agree that waterboarding terror suspects as a rule is not right, but too many people have been losing their minds calling us torturers and Nazis (a la Dodd) and it’s gotten out of hand. I would wholeheartedly endorse waterboarding to prevent a scenario like Linker lays out.
— Peter · May 5, 02:10 AM · #
I’m with you on (1) (though as a practical matter I suspect that a president and Congress who refused to do everything possible would find themselves hounded out of office in short order). (2) seems correct, insofar as one can predict these sorts of things (but I could spin out a scenario where acting weak-kneed allowed an Islamist regime to come to power…oh, like Iran) so I don’t know how much that does for the argument. As to (3), that just seems silly. Is there any evidence that Al Qaeda or other such folks give a whit about whether we’ve been upholding our commitments to the Geneva Accords or the Constitution or whatever else? When they say they want to hurt us, they don’t have in mind the suspension of some legal rights – they’d like to inflict material damage and get us out of the Middle East.
— Bryan · May 5, 02:22 AM · #
Bryan,
“The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology,” says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq.
From the Independent
You are almost certainly right about the fanatics running the terrorist organizations (Bin Laden ect.) but the reason young men and women join terrorist groups or global jihads is very much influenced by America’s actions.
Personally, I think going after the underlying causes that lead impressionable youngsters to be brainwashed and commit horrific acts would ultimately prevent more terrorist attacks. Going after already planned attacks is all well and good (I certainly don’t want them to stop) but it is only a temporary fix. In other words, I don’t think we will ever be able to capture or kill all the terrorists, and pursuing a strategy that is primary focused on doing exactly that can never be totally effective.
— LeighH · May 5, 02:53 AM · #
@Bryan
I can’t cite a specific passage, but I think “Looming Tower” makes clear that Bin Laden and Zawahiri do explicitly debate how the U.S. would respond to a 9/11-like provocation. It was part of the dispute over near enemy vs. far enemy approach.
— Aaron · May 5, 04:49 AM · #
Now, I want to like Linker as much as the next guy, but this is really just an example of the same “holier than thou” righteousness that’s been so persistent by torture apologists — that torture is actually the moral response. Linker is simply employing the Ticking Time Bomb Fallacy with more subterfuge, and it’s annoying. What no pundit is honestly saying is whether or not they think torture AS IT OCCURRED IN AND BY THIS COUNTRY was justified. All of these abstractions are besides the point.
— James F. Elliott · May 5, 04:57 AM · #
FYI, I’ve updated my post in response to this one.
And thanks for the kind words.
— Damon Linker · May 5, 01:46 PM · #