L istening to the news this week, it would be easy to conclude that American security forces are roaming the Middle East on a campaign of torture, trickery and indiscriminate murder.
This week, we returned to the debate over whether waterboarding is a nasty method of information gathering or outright, indefensible torture.
Listeners to NPR on Tuesday could be forgiven for not knowing there even is a debate: In an afternoon news update, NPR said proposed Attorney General Michael Mukasey had angered legislators by not repudiating “a form of torture known as waterboarding.” So much for the subtler points of the constitutional issue, NPR!
Then there’s the story of American soldiers “baiting” Iraqis by planting ammunition and explosives and then shooting people who picked them up. An Army sniper went on trial in Baghdad this week on charges of killing three Iraqis, allegedly victims of a secret baiting program.
The idea of luring the curious to their death seems repugnant on its face; yet perhaps it’s less morally complicated than it sounds. The enticements were apparently laid in areas known to be used by militants as weapons caches.
It is, of course, proper that Americans should think hard about the tactics we use against our enemies. Yet there’s danger in the way we’re going about it.
Focusing so closely on American misdeeds has the effect of magnifying them — and thus, relatively, of minimizing the savagery of the people our troops are fighting.
When something goes well in Iraq, notice how we pocket it and then go right back to picking at our own entrails. Take, for example, the dramatic shift of Sunni tribal leaders away from al Qaeda and toward the American military. It is the great development of this year; huge swathes of Iraq have become murderously inhospitable to al Qaeda’s fighters.
Yet, lest we take heart from this, the prevailing media narrative immediately became: Yes, yes, but it’s not because the sheiks like us, or that the troop surge is working, it’s because the Sunnis are sick of al Qaeda.
Can you recall why the Sunni leaders turned on the terrorists? No?
Osama bin Laden can.
In an audiotape released last month, bin Laden cautioned Iraqi insurgents that they should change their behavior and avoid divisive “extremism.”
By “extremism,” bin Laden meant bombing civilian “soft targets,” massacring uncooperative rustics, cutting off the fingers of smokers, decapitating young children and putting a man’s head on a stick and parading it around a village.
These incidents have been very thinly reported, partly because of the difficulty in confirming them with eyewitnesses. No wonder some of the finest work coming out of Iraq is from embedded bloggers like Michael Yon (www.michaelyon-online.com).
It was Yon who first reported one of the ghastliest allegations against al Qaeda: That in Baqubah this summer, an 11-year-old boy was killed and baked and served to his own family.
It is right that a civilized society should think hard about the means it deploys to protect itself. But as Americans argue about whether waterboarding constitutes torture and whether American soldiers have wrongly “baited” Iraqi militants, let’s not forget, please, the practices of our enemies.
We know al Qaeda flies airplanes loaded with civilians into American skyscrapers. We know al Qaeda blows up trains, buses and restaurants full of noncombatants. We know al Qaeda cuts off fingers and hands and heads, that it stabs and tortures and drags through the streets the bodies of dead Americans.
And we know that al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed, whose experience of waterboarding induced him to reveal all he knew about the 9/11 plot, sawed off the head of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. You can watch it on videotape.
This is the barbarism of our enemies. As we debate how to contend with them, let us not forget it.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal.
