Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Empire means never having to say you're sorry

The debate over the treatment of detainees will now bump up another notch in fury. US Attorney General Eric Holder has announced the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate allegations that CIA personnel and contractors abused detainees in a variety of ways not covered by law, not even by the infamous Justice Department torture memos that delineated in painstaking detail what could be done to detainees--from placing the detainee in a confinement box together with an insect to waterboarding (some of these memos can be found here; and for a summary of the "litany of C.I.A. tactics," see the NY Times article here).

Republicans predictably oppose this investigation--for a variety of reasons. There's the hyperbolic claim that the administration is walking the fine line between incompetence and treason, with all our lives at stake. According to the Drudge Report, House Republican Peter King exclaimed:
"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on," he said of the attorney general's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

And

"They’ve declared war on the CIA. We should resist and fight back as hard as we can," he said. "It should be a scorched earth policy. ... This isn't just another policy. This goes to the heart of our national defense. We should do whatever we have to do."
A calmer Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, says it will distract from "the CIA's current counterinsurgency efforts." Or, according to nine Republican Senators in a letter to Attorney General Holder, such an investigation would "chill intelligence activities" and subject it to the "political winds" of the day. One of these nine, Kit Bond, considered the investigation a presidential "power grab" according to a CBS source, a bizarre attack on one of administration's own senior appointees, CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Senator Bond's complaint is curious. Evidently he and others can't understand an administration which doesn't staff its intelligence and justice agencies with abject loyalists. Bond also seems to forget all the power the Bush-Cheney administration grabbed in the realms of domestic and foreign security.

The nine GOP Senators are correct in seeing the "political winds" at work in intelligence activities--but that's what elections are about in democracy. They are supposed to lead to substantive changes in policy, even foreign policy, if that's indeed what electoral winners had promised in their campaigns. The GOP lost big-time in '06 and '08. Now some of its members think it's somehow wrong that their minority status means they don't get to dictate policy? And do these particular Republicans really want more European style foreign and intelligence services well-insulated from the public eye, from partisan influence?

As for the contention that this investigation will hamper counterinsurgency efforts--well, that is a stronger claim, but one that rests on contested evidence that torture and all the other extra-legal tactics do mean increased security for the US. It also ignores evidence that there are other effective methods of getting information, not to mention alternatives to a "scorched earth" policy in protecting the US. Nor do the defenders of torture seem to contemplate its costs, such as the diminished standing of the US in world opinion (what some call "soft power"), blowback, the risk to our captured soldiers, as well as the viral creep of organizational practices--if we can do this, maybe we can do that. . . .People, and nations, don't go to hell in one fell swoop, they go there step by step.

The problem is that we have a prosperous democracy, but we are also an empire. That is, we are a state (a country or national government in the US lexicon) that has increased its relative power and wealth in part by subordinating peoples outside our territorial borders. And subordination inevitably means resistance, and ergo violence. As Max Weber tells us, all states depend on monopolizing the legitimate means of violence (though some are more successful than others). Empires are states that dominate people outside their borders because of their preponderant power--rarely a monopoly, though, and even more rarely, legitimate.

But not for want of trying. In his excellent book, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors, Charles Maier notes the importance to imperialists of constructing a rationale for their rule or dominance, whether direct or indirect. The recurring resistance and violence on imperial frontiers require some sort of logic beyond naked national self-interest to convince people at home that empire is worth the cost, and convince subjects in the frontier that empire is really better for them than complete sovereignty (so stop fighting us!). This rationale is usually very principled. Empire brings the peace (Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana). Empire brings modernity. Empire brings democracy. "Imperial ideology," Maier says, "must always be an exercise in lofty denial" (Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 61). Especially in a liberal democracy, we could add.
Liberal imperialists will always deplore killing and beating, imprisoning and humiliating civilians, burning their homes, and torturing suspects as aberrant and counterproductive. But if empire is to be maintained, the soldiers assigned the dirty work know that it is sometimes necessary even at the price of their later disavowal and disgrace. Ultimately a mix of secrecy or "deniability" must be developed if leaders are not prepared to renounce the imperial project. Hypocrisy is the tribute imperialism pays to democracy (p. 64).
We get whiffs of that hypocrisy in the jargon we use for torture, such as the phrase "refined interrogation techniques,' or in the legal hair-splitting in the torture memos that makes waterboarding okay but fracturing a cranium perhaps not.

But not all our leaders have been liberals, of course, nor are they worried about apologies. Hence the argument that whatever you call torture, it works, even if morally dubious. Former Vice-President Cheney is of course convinced that it does, like he's convinced that all of his decisions were necessary in pushing the country to invade Iraq, and in centralizing authority within the Executive, particularly his office--though he criticizes the Obama administration for doing so:

Along with this bit of hypocrisy, there's another in that Cheney has rested his reputation on an ends-justifies-the-means sort of argument that one would think is inimical to the party of "family values." Together with these situational ethics, there's the familar drumbeat of fear that worked so well for the Bush-Cheney-Rove team until the 2006 elections. "They" will get us unless we resort to brutal methods that contradict domestic and international law, as well as belie our principles.

And the way we can reconcile these contradictions, counteract these hypocrisies, is to hold on to the assertion that what we do in the world is right, because the United States can do nothing but. Go to Townhall.com and you'll see a cute blonde woman selling T-shirts with the logo "I'd rather be waterboarding." What a brave, bold statement! And clearly no embarrassment about selling a thing by mixing sex and violence. That's the attitude needed to get us over all this hand-wringing over nasty things we've done to terrorists, well, suspected terrorists usually, but who cares when 24 Hours TV scenarios are unfolding about us, or even within our borders. In our case, Might is Right, and there's no need to say we're sorry.

Well, I've descended into sarcasm now, a big weakness of mine when I'm upset. I should temper all this that I don't buy the notion that everything the US has done in the world, even as empire, is evil. It's intellectually lazy to turn to this sort Manichean dualism. It's the kind of thing a cynical leader does trying to stir up the crowd. It's the narrative the Bush administration employed, as has Al Qaeda.

I love my country, places (the Oregon coast, the White Mountains, the New York Public Library), people (my family and friends, of course, but also the icons like Madison, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King), and things like NPR, or Scorcese and Coen Brothers films, or the Lutheran church I grew up in, or its tremendous diversity and pluralism, and I'm grateful that the US government created programs such as the Peace Corps and Fulbright fellowships (not to mention Pell Grants) that gave me opportunities to experience a much larger world than the one in which I was born. The US to me is like that person we've all known who is lovable and loving, who is inspirational, with remarkable accomplishments, and who turns out to have some pretty horrific character flaws.

Nor do I romanticize those who resist our empire on its frontiers. I'm no fan of those among the Islamic fundamentalists who yearn for our destruction, who desire to spread regimes inimical to pluralism, who resort to indiscriminate violence to achieve their ends.

Yet I criticize. I criticize because I think we can do better than this. Not because of some crude Calvinistic notion that our great power and wealth prove we know how to do what's best for the world. Not because of some rosy-eyed vision of the past that makes history equal progress. It is this little kernel of hope--we can do better--that has been behind what we now look back on as a good change--expanding suffrage beyond property owners, ending slavery, extending (if not always enforcing) equal political rights to blacks, women, and other marginalized people, signing on to international human rights accords, and so on. These momentous changes also required a great deal of struggle, some of it dramatic, much of it the daily nitty-gritty that comes with organizing collective action. But the hope of doing better mattered throughout.

Wouldn't it be something if the President called on Americans to dedicate their energies to coming up with new ways of life that didn't depend on extending and defending the picket lines of empire? Could we give up on empire without being forced to by defeat, or overreach, or implosion--as has been the fate of past ones? Could we infuse our political system, and our foreign relations, with the axiom that Might inevitably subverts Right, and act with due caution when it comes to the use of violence?

Yep, I'm that oxymoron--a hopeless idealist.