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John Locke, whom even Liberals acknowledge as being one of the primary influences responsible for shaping American liberty, believed there was a legitimate basis for slavery. Locke said the population of an aggressor nation - a nation that unjustly inititates a war - can be enslaved by a nation that successfully defended itself against that aggression.. Where is the justice in this? It lies in a very simple principle. If you fail to respect my human rights, don't come crying to me about your human rights if I catch you and defeat you. The principle helps to prevent war by increasing the costs of using or threatening force unjustly. Modern political analysts recognize this as the "tit-for-tat" principle, the only technique of human social interaction that works to force people to cooperate with each other. In fact, Robert Axelrod wrote a book about this principle called The Evolution of Cooperation. Axelrod discovered the importance of the "tit-for-tat" principle about 40 years ago when he invited scientists and students around the world to submit rules for playing the prisoner's dilemna game. This is a mathematical game that models how people interact, whether they help each other to make everybody better off or behave selfishly to secure a small reward for themselves. Christians - and CS readers - recognize the "tit-for-tat" principle as the basis of God's commandments to government. Government is to bear the sword against evil doers, to use force to punish those who break God's rules. The notion of limited war - including very stringent limits on how prisoners of war could be treated embodied in the Geneva convention and limitations on how conquered aggressor populations should be treated - is a relatively modern development that originated with - and only works between - nations whose belief system condemns war and teaches that warring nations will be better off if they can learn to live as friends. Limited war principles only worked as long as each nation could be trusted on its honor to obey them, because there is no possible enforcement mechanism that can make limited war principles work otherwise. In practice, they only worked between nations whose populations were majority Christian, a condition that has not described any nation for about 100 years, the Geneva convention not withstanding. The Liberals who are trying to bootstrap the misconduct of a few soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison into an argument for curtialing legitimate interrogation techniques used against terrorist prisoners forget that these terrorists do not want to be our friends. They are not interested in a future where Muslims and non-Muslims live side by side in peace. The only real way to defeat the terrorists is to change their belief system, to persuade them that God loves all his creatures - Muslim and non-Muslim - and has given us moral rules to follow - the Ten Commandments - so that we can live in peace. Until we do that, we must be sure that the terrorists know that the costs of initiating aggression will be great, including the use of coercion to extract information from prisoners. Finally, there are two asymmetries in the War on Terror that make it vital for us to use coercion to extract all possible information out of every captured terrorist. First, since the terrorists do not follow Judeo-Christian moral beliefs our prisoners do not have value to them simply because they are human beings. To the terrorists, our prisoners are only valuable to the extent they can be used to extort something out of us or be used to frighten us. For this reason, we can not expect that our prisoners will receive humane treatment. We should expect that most of them will be killed in horrible ways in an attempt to frighten us, which is exactly what has happened. The only way for us to save our prisoners is to rescue them before they can be killed, but that takes information. Second, it is impossible for us to guess how much a captured terrorist might know. Even a disheveled bum caught in a cheap apartment might be a highly-placed terrorist leader. While our side's principles require that we do value captured terrorists as human beings, our respect for life demands that we not fool ourselves into believing that we can afford not to get every scrap of information out of every captured terrorist. The only way to save lives in this situation is to stop those who are bent on taking more lives. If that means using force to coerce information out of terrorist prisoners, they have brought it on themselves. |
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