Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

OTHER VOICES:

Conversation about torture should be prominent in the 2016 campaign

Two interesting stories appeared in the same edition of my local newspaper last week.

The first involves an awkward problem Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush faces: his brother, former president George W. Bush.

Many Republicans have managed to hold their noses when they consider George W. Bush’s administration, especially his unprovoked and ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Jeb Bush has stumbled over this issue several times, looking for ways to put the best face on a huge foreign policy error.

He has admitted that “mistakes were made” and relied on the dubious proposition that “taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.” But this simplistic notion — Saddam Hussein is easy to demonize — depends on the electorate’s failure to notice the chaos that the Iraq War unleashed.

A sub-element of Jeb Bush’s problem surfaced in a short article under this headline: “Bush won’t rule out use of torture.”

Jeb Bush was asked by Iowa Republicans if he would rescind President Barack Obama’s executive order banning enhanced interrogation. He said that, “in general,” torture is “inappropriate.” And he gave his brother credit for ending — this is debatable — the CIA’s use of torture before he left office.

But, Jeb Bush said, “I don’t want to make a definitive, blanket kind of statement.” He was suggesting that brutal interrogations may sometimes be called for to keep the country safe.

So if Jeb Bush becomes president, torture appears to be back on the table, which isn’t welcome news to those who hold the hopeful progressive idea that humankind’s most backward and savage practices — cannibalism, human sacrifice, slavery, genital mutilation — can be gradually consigned to the past once and for all.

Torture is in this category. Not so long ago torture was an ordinary part of the judicial systems of many countries even as they made slow, fitful progress toward enlightenment. For example, the gruesome punishment of drawing and quartering for the crime of high treason wasn’t officially removed from English statutes until 1870.

Now torture is generally proscribed by international law, and most advanced countries agree that the practice should be left in the past. Of course, a great deal of torture still takes place, but we’re embarrassed enough to try to cover it up or to deny it outright. Thus, George W. Bush asserted in 2007: “This government does not torture people.”

This statement evidently wasn’t true, but at least it reflected the high-minded position that torture is a practice that civilized countries shouldn’t permit.

But the same newspaper that reported Jeb Bush’s position on torture carried this story, as well: a New York Times report on the Islamic State’s “Theology of Rape.”

This isn’t the incidental rape by drunken marauding soldiers that often occurs in war. Last summer ISIS fighters invaded Yazidi villages on the slopes of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. Men and boys old enough to have armpit hair were marched into adjacent fields and executed. Women and girls were inducted into a highly organized system of sexual slavery.

The Yazidis’ idiosyncratic polytheism — neither Christian, Muslim nor Jew — makes them particularly vulnerable to ISIS’s perverse interpretations of the Quran. Column space doesn’t permit an adequate description of the horrors still being endured by several thousand Yazidi women and girls, but clearly it’s in the same category as the Nazi outrages of World War II.

This raises an important philosophical question for all of the presidential candidates, as well as for all Americans: In the face of ISIS’s savagery, what level of brutality are we willing to accept in order to defeat them?

There are two easy answers: The first is that we can’t let ISIS drag us down to their level of savagery without compromising who we are. The second is that people who are capable of the vicious barbarism that ISIS is inflicting on the Yazidis deserve everything we can give them. The pragmatic answer may lie somewhere in between.

Torture? Jeb Bush deserves credit for being more or less honest about this. This question should be a prominent issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.

John Crisp, a columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy