Tortured relationships

Ignacio Ramonet on torture in Le Monde Diplomatique (excerpted below). Not a whole lot new here. But it's worth reminding ourselves of this final assessment. Take the cliché that "the world changed" on 9-11. Yes, it changed in that the US awoke to the reality of terrorism in a spectacular way. But it also changed for the US and changed the US in the choice of response, from among other choices, to stand apart from law as if a god looking down upon earthly doings. The US is not god. Bush is not god, no matter how much he hears divine voices in his head.

The reality -- and if you're a traveler you know this too well -- is that the US has almost entirely lost its claim to be a country of justice and good and truth, however much this may have ever been a reality or unreality. The officially sanctioned practice of torture has undermined the moral legitimacy of the US. The administration's gamble -- one premised on now-defunct neo-realist international relations theory -- was that American power transcended existing international norms to the extent that the US could reshape them and their interpretive and evaluative framework to its will. Even regarding torture, perhaps the most heinous thing humans do to each other, there is a "public debate," as if torture is somehow an unresolved ethical issue. The very fact of the debate inexorably transforms the US into an international pariah whose international relations continue to exist simply through the global necessity of the American market. The US administration has thus helped to create a further threat to America -- the seeking of economic and political independence on the part of, for example, the South American countries. Such independence is one factor among others that entails a growing irrelevance of the US as a bundle of muscles without a brain or a heart.

Apart from being ethically and legally repugnant, these revelations are also disastrous for America’s moral standing in the world. For the US, as for other democracies confronted with the threat of terrorism, the question of torture has become a crucial political dilemma. In the course of a debate with Vice-President Dick Cheney, who took a hard line on the subject, the Republican senator John McCain said that there are some punishments that a democratic government must never inflict on a human being and that the strength of democracy lies in its ability to forgo the use of certain kinds of force, the first being torture.

UPDATE (18 December, 8:12am):

See also this piece by Gabriel Kolko in Counterpunch.