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What Went WrongThe flaw in Seymour Hersh's theory.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Tuesday, May 18, 2004, at 12:52 PM ET

The most surprising thing about Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker essay on the Abu Ghraib depravities is surely its title. It is headed "The Gray Zone." Can that be right? It seems to be generally assumed that the work of the sniggering video-morons is black and white: one of the very few moral absolutes of which we have a firm and decided grasp.

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But Hersh's article wants to argue that the fish rots from the head, as indeed it very often does (even though, metaphorically speaking, one might think that the fish's guts would be the first to decay). And in order to argue this top-down process, he decides to propose that it began with Sept. 11. "In a sense," as he himself cautiously phrases it, this could arguably be true. As he reports:

Almost from the start, the Administration's search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda forces in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7^th,the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammed Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach.

Hersh has reported this tale before, along with the furious reaction that Donald Rumsfeld displayed when he heard the news. And, as he further reminds us, the Washington Post "reported that, as many as ten times since early October [2001], Air Force pilots believed they'd had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles."

These, and many other bureaucratic and butt-covering obstacles, according to Hersh and others, engendered such frustration at the top of the Pentagon that ruthless methods were discreetly ordered and discreetly applied. Thus, from the abysmal failure to erase Mullah Omar comes the howling success in trailer-porn tactics at Abu Ghraib.

More than one kind of non sequitur is involved in this "scenario." And very obviously, the conclusion can exist quite apart from the premises. (There would have been sadistic dolts in the American occupation forces in Iraq, even if there had not been wavering lawyerly fools in the Tampa center that was monitoring Afghanistan.) One needs to stipulate, once again, that the filthy images from Abu Ghraib are not bad because they look bad, but bad because they are bad. Yet is it as obvious as it seems that only the supporters of the war have any questions to answer here?

I ask this because, in the news cycle that preceded the Iraq atrocities, the administration was being arraigned from dawn until dusk for the offense of failing to take timely measures against the Taliban and al-Qaida. I hardly need to recapitulate the indictment here. We had our chance to see it coming, and to see where it was coming from, and the administration comprehensively blew all these chances, from the first warnings of suicide-hijacking to the cosseting of Saudi visa applicants. I might add that I completely agree with all these condemnations and wrote about many of them (including the spiriting of the Bin Laden relatives out of the country during a "no-fly" period imposed upon the rest of us) at the time.

But there is no serious way of having this cake and scarfing it. I remember a debate I had with Michael Moore—the newly crowned king of the Cannes Film Festival—at the more modest location of the Telluride Film Festival in 2002. Ridiculing the Bush administration's policy, he shouted that it had gone into Afghanistan to get Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. "Mission NOT accomplished!" he added, to roars of easy applause. I asked myself then, and I repeat the question now: Would the antiwar camp have approved the measures necessary to ensure those goals? If they will the end, will they will the means? Would they taunt that lawyer in Tampa, as they taunt the supporters of regime change, with living a quiet life at home while others die in the field? Isn't the refusal to take out the leaders of al-Qaida a bit of a distraction from the struggle against al-Qaida?

As it happens, dear reader, I know the answers to those questions as well as you do. And that is partly why the Abu Ghraib nightmare is such a source of demoralization and despair. Thugs and torturers, who are always on tap in limitless supply, do their work in the dark and, when caught, plead exceptional circumstances. It's as if they are on an urgent self-appointed mission. But the battle against Islamic jihad will be going on for a very long time, against a foe that is both ruthless and irrational. This means that infinite patience and scruple and intelligence are required, as well as decisiveness and bravery. Given this necessary assumption, all short-cut artists, let alone rec-room sadists, are to be treated, not as bad apples alone, but as traitors and enemies. If Rumsfeld could bring himself to say that, he could perhaps undo some of the shame, and some of the harm as well.

******

So a Sarin-infected device is exploded in Iraq, and across the border in Jordan the authorities say that nerve and gas weapons have been discovered for use against them by the followers of Zarqawi, who was in Baghdad well before the invasion. Where, one idly inquires, did these toys come from? No, it couldn't be. …

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Hitchens' position seems to be that the overly cumbersome weight of our legal procedures is somehow connected to not only our early failures in the war, but the 'grinning idiots who produced the trailer porn.' Worse—he seems to draw a causal link when he asks (rhetorically of course) if those who were against the war would have castigated the lawyers for failing to bend the rules or hindering the efforts of our troops in the field.

The problem with such thinking is that it doesn't necessarily follow that effective rules of engagement and an effective mission command and control capability stem from "ruthless methods being quietly ordered and quietly applied." You mean like simply abrogating our obligations under the Geneva Conventions, Hitch? Gee, it's so comforting to know that all we have to do to win the war on terror is bend a few rules here and there in the dark and, Jason Bourne like in a Ludlum novel, everything will be just fine.

Here's a thought—how about effective, rather than ruthless, military methods following from a well defined chain of command and well defined rules of engagement that focus on our actual enemies in the areas where they exist using our resources instead of proxies? Why not define those rules instead of quietly, loudly for those seven grinning dolts who don't get it (and does anybody really believe it's just those few scattered low level soldiers?) How about defining those rules so that we don't become the very thing we're trying to hunt down and stop, and keeping that which makes us qualitatively different along with our treaty obligations.

It's not an either/or choice.

--Demosthenes2

(To reply, click here)

Choosing to kill an individual by means of a military sanction opens the door to sanctioning assassination, but it does have its precedents and arguments pro and con.

For example, it is often argued that Admiral Yamomoto, architect of the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, was effectively assassinated by the U.S. in an aeriel "ambush" in 1943.

Torturing incarcerated individuals invites no such equivocation. But Hitchens, by rhetorical flourish, attempts to point this debacle back at liberals with the disengenuous question:

"Would the antiwar camp have approved the measures necessary to ensure those goals?"

The issue is entirely about *both* what the goals are and how they are achieved, because the two are inextricable.

If the goal has been to make the US (and the world) safer from terrorism, I don't know of a single US liberal who isn't fully in line with that objective, and many of us have proposals as to how that might be accomplished. Those proposals don't mesh with Hitchens' idea of how the same objective might be accomplished and is therefore made tantamount to what? Pro-terrorism? Lack of moral fiber? Who is - no matter how indirectly - defending torture here?

Finally, to do as Hitchens so blithely suggests - that is, "taking out" the leaders of al-Qaida - simply creates *martyrs*; martyrs spawn more martyrs. It does not make us safer; it increases anti-Americanism around the world. Rather than address this subtlety, Hitchens falls back on a very lazy, very cynical, and very unsubstantiable and very irrelevant platitude:

"Thugs and torturers, who are always on tap in limitless supply, do their work in the dark and, when caught, plead exceptional circumstances."

Ah, well then. Thanks for the insight. Problem solved.

Which is it anyway, is liberal relativism and lack of will to blame for this atrocity or is individual depravity?

--Kip

(To reply, click here)

(5/19)

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