In surveying the public policy carnage left, so far, by the Bush presidency it’s difficult to single out the one course that has inflicted the most damage on our country. The litany of failed, misguided, wrong-headed and disastrous policies pursued by this administration on everything from the environment to the Iraq fiasco surely exceeds anything that even the most pessimistic among us could possibly have imagined in November 2000. That said, however, surely nothing has damaged the image of the United States - and by extension the image of their country held by most Americans - as much as the administration’s decision to fight the darkness of Islamist terrorism, with its own brand of darkness borrowed, it seems, from the playbook of the old Soviet Union.
Examples abound: the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where suspected terrorists are held indefinitely, without trial (and where some of whom have now committed suicide); our disregard of acceptable, civilized standards of behaviour in the torture and abuse of detainees in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and elsewhere; the almost certain existence of secret prison facilities in Eastern Europe and possibly other locations that the administration refuses to acknowledge, where unidentified prisoners are held and subjected to goodness knows what, without the benefit of oversight by the Red Cross much less legal representation; and the practice known as rendition which entails the transfer of prisoners from American custody to that of regimes who practice torture as a matter of routine.
In the aftermath of the shock and trauma of 9/11 most Americans were prepared to give the government considerable leeway in the struggle against al-Qaeda. A shaken nation rallied behind the administration to support the overthrow of the Taliban/al-Qaeda regime in Afghanistan, a near unanimity within the country that has not been repeated. (Despite the best efforts of the administration to conjoin the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the same struggle against Islamist terrorism, Americans have always distinguished between the two; unwavering in their support for the former as a necessary effort, whilst souring on the latter as an avoidable and increasingly chaotic distraction).
However, as the full extent of the administration’s willingness to employ the sort of harsh and ruthless tactics against our enemies that we have, rightly, deemed unacceptable when used by others, our democratic friends and allies in the world have looked on with increasing concern and dismay. Our country, to a degree many of us would have believed unimaginable, has ceded the moral high ground that we have traditionally occupied; thoughtful Americans, accustomed to seeing their country as the one wearing the white hat now sees it in shades of grey.
Understandably, perhaps, most Americans are ambivalent. They see an unrelenting and hostile foe that slits the throats of airline crews, and flies airliners with innocent civilians aboard into office buildings filled with many more. They would surely do anything and everything they could to destroy us. Americans have not exactly trumpeted their outrage about any of the tactics used by the administration. After all it’s not easy to worry about how our government treats such people. Yet we must - not for their sakes but for our own.
Senator John McCain, who knows something about ill-treatment as a prisoner of war, has made the obvious but essential point that this is not about the suspected al-Qaeda terrorists we imprison - and many of the detainees are just suspects. It is about us. It is about who and what we are as Americans. To systematically ill-treat our prisoners, to detain them indefinitely, without hope, without a trial or anything even resembling a fair judicial review, and even in secret in some cases, is so outrageous, so egregious and so shameful that every day it continues is a day on which we are further diminished. It is simply not true that we must sacrifice the principles for which the United States stands in order to keep our children safe from terrorist attack, no matter what this fear-mongering administration says. We must not allow Dick Cheney’s dark soul to cast its shadow over the rest of us. We are better than that.
It is highly unlikely the current administration will change the manner in which detainees are treated. After all, admitting error isn’t in the genes of this president. In 2008, however, we will have an opportunity not merely to elect a new president - but to chart a new course. Let’s make sure that it’s one of which we can all be proud - in this and in all things.
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