Do not mistake my comparison for acceptance of torture.
Favorable treatment of most prisoners has served us in good
stead in past wars and the Iraq conflict in particular.
Some prisoners cannot be handled with kid gloves however.
We have been fortunate in that no numbers of Allied troops
have been captured, for beatings and pyramids would be the
least of the horrors inflicted upon infidels. (As we have
already seen with others held captive by the fanatics.)
Some prisoners cannot be handled with kid gloves however.
Over on another board I read there is a series of posts by an Army Lt. who’s getting ready for his second deployment to Iraq. I really like this guy – he enlisted , worked his way up Sgt., decided to make the Army his career, went through OCS (or whatever they call it these days) and got his commission. He’s smart, dedicated, thoughtful and deeply patriotic - *exactly* they sort of soldier I want defending my country and my values. If this man and people like him can't make Iraq work, than it’s broke beyond the ability of a military force to fix it.
But right now he’s incredibly frustrated by the difficulty of getting solid guidance on the question of what sort of behavior is and is not acceptable in Iraq – he wants a bright line at which he can refuse to order, or to carry out orders to engage in, what he believes is illegal “torture” of detainees.
And isn’t a theoretical question: during his previous tour his BDE Commander was relieved over torture for incidents in which he (the BDE Commander) believed he was acting within the guidelines and with proper authority.
This is the practical cost of playing fast and loose with the standards of behavior expected of US troops in Iraq: they must worry not only about being ambushed by the enemy, but about being ambushed by their own chain of command.
And it’s no solution just to decide that we will always decide in favor of out troops whatever their actions, because such an environment some people will step so far over the line that there is no question that they have completely crossed it, and we start reading reports like:
'In two incidents described in the reports, bound detainees were shot and killed by soldiers.'
And how do you spin that?
“The bastards were chewing on our rope."?
So even putting aside the other practical aspects of the use of torture, and not worrying about protecting the rights of Iraqis, it seems to me that the only way we can protect our own people is to abide by the rules of the GC – or something much like them – in all of our dealings with detainees.