'Unilateral Disarmament'
BY JAMES TARANTO
The Best of the Web
Friday, December 16, 2005
President Bush has apparently capitulated on the "torture" issue, agreeing to accept, with only slight modifications, Sen. John McCain's amendment that would ban "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" of terrorists in U.S. custody. CNN quotes McCain: "I think that this will help us enormously in winning the war for the hearts and minds of people throughout the world in the war on terror."
This is fatuous. In September 1999 Norman Podhoretz wrote in The Wall Street Journal about an Israeli Supreme Court decision "to ban certain forms of interrogating suspected terrorists (like forceful shaking)":
It was only a matter of time before that court, being
part of the same intellectual and political culture
pervading the Israeli left as a whole (some have likened
it to the Warren court), would enforce its point of view
on the security services. . . . The Supreme Court's decision
can be interpreted as a form of unilateral disarmament by
Israel in the face of a still intransigent enemy.
More than six years later, one would be hard-pressed to produce evidence that the Israeli Supreme Court decision has helped the Jewish state win "hearts and minds." The Arab world still treats Israel as a pariah; Iran's ruler openly calls for its destruction; and the U.N. actively demonizes it, with at least the complicity of much of the free world. Inasmuch as Israel's position in international politics has improved, it is only because, since Sept. 11, the U.S. has become fully engaged in its own war against Islamist terrorists.
Podhoretz's phrase--"a form of unilateral disarmament . . . in the face of a still intransigent enemy"--is an apt description of the McCain amendment, which will certainly not prompt any reciprocal moves by terrorists to abjure tactics like beheading civilians or flying planes into buildings.
The McCain amendment, along with U.S. Supreme Court decisions in favor of terrorists' rights and the threatened Democratic filibuster of the Patriot Act's renewal, represents, in part, an overcompensation for the excesses of previous wars. In the past, the Supreme Court has upheld genuine outrages against civil liberties during wartime, such as restrictions on free speech during World War I (Schenck v. U.S.) and the internment of innocent Japanese-Americans during World War II (Korematsu v. U.S.)
But nothing remotely like these abuses has occurred during our current conflict. It seems that politicians and judges, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war. One can only hope their efforts will not prove too damaging to American intelligence-gathering and terror-prevention efforts.
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