Here’s a link (via Eve Tushnet) to a blog called Bloggers Against Torture, sponsored in part by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They’ve declared June “Torture Awareness Month” as “an effort to respond to the growing evidence that the United States government is engaging systematically in the use of torture and inhuman treatment as part of the Global War on Terror.” It makes me sad to think that such a thing might even be necessary, but the evidence piling up over the last few years is increasingly difficult to deny.

And here’s where I’ve come to think that the “war on terror” has been a big mistake. Not that I oppose going after the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocities and their confederates. Whatever justice there may be in complaints from the Arab and Muslim worlds about U.S. foreign policy (and I think there’s some), the mass murder of thousands of civilians is unjustifiable and calls for a serious response.

But the language of “war” has had some bad consequences. First, it makes us think in terms of conventional-style military conflict and leads us to believe that launching wars along the models of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns is the best way to deal with the problem of terrorism. This may be partly motivated by our government’s wish to be seen as “doing something” about the problem in an obvious and visible way. But also by our view about the proper role of military power. As Andrew Bacevich argues in The New American Militarism, we’ve come to see war as a routine tool of policy rather than as a last resort.

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, for many people “war” defies normal categories of moral evaluation. Despite our public use of the categories of “just war,” many people, I suspect, still think that “war is hell” and anything goes in the name of victory. They see things like torture and the killing of civilians as inevitable, if regrettable, parts of waging war.For example, here’s Mark Steyn, a well-known pro-war columnist, writing about the alleged massacre in Haditha:

I don’t know any more than you do about the precise nature of events triggered in Haditha by Cpl. Terrazas’ death. But assume every dark rumor you’ve heard is true, that this was the murder of civilians by American service personnel. In the run-up to March 2003, there were respectable cases to be made for and against the Iraq war. Nothing that happened at Haditha alters either argument. And, if you’re one of the ever swelling numbers of molting hawks among the media, the political class and the American people for whom Haditha is the final straw, that’s not a sign of your belated moral integrity but of your fundamental unseriousness. Anyone who supports the launching of a war should be clear-sighted enough to know that, when the troops go in, a few of them will kill civilians, bomb schools, torture prisoners. It happens in every war in human history, even the good ones. Individual Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians did bad things in World War II and World War I. These aren’t stunning surprises, they’re inevitable: It might be a bombed mosque or a gunned-down pregnant woman or a slaughtered wedding party, but it will certainly be something. And, in the scales of history, it makes no difference to the justice of the cause and the need for victory.

(Don’t ask me what “the scales of history” bit means. The only sense I can make sense of it is that the slaughtered innocent won’t be remembered by the people who write the history books and that (somehow) proves that it was okay to kill them.)

Steyn’s point seems to be taking the common view that “war” justifies pretty much anything so long as the cause is just. Neeless to say, this is completely at odds with the just war tradition which stresses the necessity of choosing permissible means to achiever one’s goals. As a matter of fact he may be correct that war tends to bring these things in its trail, but that isn’t the same thing as justifying them. If Steyn is right about the nature of war, he’s wrong in concluding that “it makes no difference to the justice of the cause and the need for victory.”

A better perspective is offered here by Matthew Yglesias:

The best way to avoid war crimes and related abuses is to fight fewer wars. Which isn’t to say you should never fight a war, but part of what needs to be in the mix when you think about these decisions is that, in practice, you’re not going to have a perfectly clean war anymore than you’re going to have 100 percent compliance with speeding rules. If you’re considering initiating a military action — or, as is more relevant right now in Iraq, prolonging one — it’s worth being realistic about the fact that you don’t get to have an idealized one, you’re going to get a genuine, flawed one. Thinking about this ought to make one more hesitant about endorsing the application of military force as a means of solving problems.

If something about declaring a “state of war” clouds people’s judgment about what’s right and wrong, then we should be that much more cautious about doing it. This would seem to be especially true in our present circumstances where our leaders have delcared a state of virtual permanent war, with an vaguely-defined enemy (terrorism? terrorist groups “with a global reach”? Islamism? “violent extremism”?) and an equally vague notion of what would count as victory.

What George Washington said about government in general would seem to apply especially to war, a particularly fierce application of government power: “it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” For some reason a lot of conservative skepticism about government power seems to stop at the water’s edge.