Now is a particularly good time to check in with Middle East expert Juan Cole. He’s offering a rundown of how bin Laden’s death has gone down in the Arab world. His blog is always an extraordinarily interesting read, but his views and info are especially relevant now.
He ends a recent post with a couple of paragraphs I find incredibly promising (not a sentence I type often), though I think declarations regarding the end of terrorism are always troublesome. I won’t cotton to his “yay Obama” stuff unless Obama suddenly quits embracing Bush-era civil rights abuses, but ignore that part and check out the rest.
I certainly hope he’s right, and he’s usually ahead of most of us in understanding the Islamic world:
The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don’t want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil.
If Obama can get us out of Iraq, and if he can use his good offices to keep the pressure on the Egyptian military to lighten up, and if he can support the likely UN declaration of a Palestinian state in September, the US will be in the most favorable position in the Arab world it has had since 1956. And he would go down in history as one of the great presidents. If he tries to stay in Iraq and he takes a stand against Palestine, he risks provoking further anti-American violence. He can be not just the president who killed Bin Laden, but the president who killed the pretexts for radical violence against the US. He can promote the waving of the American flag in major Arab cities. And that would be a defeat and humiliation for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda more profound than any they could have dreamed.
ALSO: If you look into past postings on this blog, you’ll find some extensive discussion of torture. For reasons of religion, morals and decency, I believe it is categorically wrong. That often gets me flak from people who hold to a consequential view of ethics.
It’s rarely a worthwhile endeavor to follow the tortuous antics–mostly just trollish provocation–that occur below the line here, but when something is relevant and interesting, well, why not, now and then?
Yesterday, members of the GOP and others, including here, touted the efficacy of waterboarding in turning up bin Laden. From the story most of them quoted (along with this shorter one, referred to here):
The revelation that intelligence gleaned from the CIA’s so-called black sites helped kill bin Laden was seen as vindication for many intelligence officials who have been repeatedly investigated and criticized for their involvement in a program that involved the harshest interrogation methods in U.S. history.
“We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day,” said Marty Martin, a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for bin Laden.
However, a longer version of the story puts the finer point on the claims:
Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.
Here’s one of the best articles I’ve ever read on effective interrogation, from The Atlantic.
All that is, however, irrelevant if the basis of your opposition to a practice comes from a moral code that isn’t consequentialist. If yours is, there’s no point in trying to find common ground.
(If you want to check out the torture stuff on this blog, here’s an old post or two that might provide a good place to start.)
LASTLY: Here’s another really interesting take on what was gained in the raid in Pakistan, about the possible motherlode of devastating info they turned up that could truly take down much of the terrorist network if we’re lucky and decoders can work fast. Here’s hoping they pull it off.
