Disarmament Diplomacy

Editorial

Banking on Abused Loyalties

Rebecca Johnson

In the recent British elections for local government and the European Parliament, the party of Prime Minister Tony Blair crashed badly, receiving only some 23 percent of the vote, the worse electoral share for Labour since 1918, when the party was still struggling to break into mainstream politics. Although various factors contributed, canvassers and councillors agree that Blair's refusal to listen to reason over Iraq was the main reason why erstwhile loyal Labour supporters could not bear to vote for their party. "I didn't want him to think he'd got away with it," was a common refrain. Or, as one Londoner put it: "I can't forgive Blair for taking us to war on false pretences, for manipulating our fears, and for refusing to admit, even now, that he was wrong." Since millions marching in the streets in 2003 were ignored, most Labour voters either boycotted the election or voted for one of the anti-war parties.

As with so many Labour voters and MPs, I've heard diplomats and officials at the United Nations over the past few months speaking in similar terms about President Bush's belated recognition of the need for international support in Iraq. Painfully aware of the mounting tragedy for the Iraqi people and the risk of further disintegration and violence in the region, many want to help alleviate that suffering. But they recognise that President Bush's new-found internationalism is chiefly prompted by the possibility of electoral defeat in November. Bush needs the UN to take over a large part of the political burden of Iraq's reconstruction and, by association, responsibility and blame when things go wrong.

For the UN, this could be a poisoned chalice in more ways than one. The internationalists' dilemma, most acute in the run-up to adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1546, is that assisting in Iraq now means helping Bush get off the hook with American voters. The risk is that the neocons will pocket the gains but fail to learn the lessons, and that freed from the full consequences of his irresponsible and arrogant policies, Bush could be re-elected in November, with even more disastrous results for international security.

The approach to torture is a case in point. It is hard not to get the impression that the pro-war camp would have considered the torture of Iraqi prisoners justifiable if it hadn't been made public, and if US as well as international public opinion hadn't responded with such horror to those appalling pictures of cruelty and sexual humiliation. Chillingly, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had received advice from selected government lawyers that US national laws prohibiting torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogators undertaken pursuant to [the President of the United States'] commander-in-chief authority". Similarly, "Congress can no more interfere with the president's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategy or tactical decisions on the battlefield." In other words, as Richard Norton Taylor put it in The Guardian: "American interrogators can ignore US domestic law banning torture, because it would restrict the president's powers in his 'war on terror'." From the Geneva Conventions to arms control treaties and the International Criminal Court, the US already ignores international laws when they become inconvenient. This is profoundly dangerous, for US interests as well as the rest of the world.

Torture - the intentional inflicting of pain to punish or persuade - is clearly wrong. Before Abu Ghraib, many thought torture was something consigned to history or carried out by pariahs: Pinochet tortured; Saddam tortured; we (what we like to call the civilised world) don't torture. This was not, regrettably, quite true: stories of torture emerged from Northern Ireland and Vietnam, and we (the civilised world) turned far too many blind eyes to torture carried out by allies or client regimes. Nevertheless, the laws against torture, though they may at times have been violated, still set important standards to aspire to and by which to hold governments accountable.

Justifying torture undermines a valuable norm, and so makes all of us even more vulnerable. Moreover, torture is ineffective: if the purpose is to get information to help the president fight his war on terror, numerous studies - not to mention centuries of history - have shown that to get the torture to stop, people will confess to anything and say whatever they think the torturer wants them to. That doesn't make for reliable intelligence.

Just as being civilised means not extolling the value of torture, being grown up means taking responsibility for your actions. Liberty, justice, democracy and security require some restrictions on freedom of action, especially the actions of those with great power or dominant capabilities. Norms and constraints were developed over centuries to mediate and mitigate the barbarism associated with war and the unbridled exercise of brute power. If our leaders cannot learn the lessons from their botched war and even more badly-managed occupation then it is dangerous to keep them as our leaders.

Back to the top of page

© 2004 The Acronym Institute.