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OVER THE LINE
By JOHN PODHORETZ
FOR years, Democratic politi cians have reacted with spit ting, consuming rage at the accusation that they are reflexively anti-military. That anger has, at times, been justified, as the charge has been thrown around too cavalierly. But Democratic anger has also been an effective tool because it puts Republicans on the spot, and usually Republicans back off when confronted.
You don't hear Republican politicians throwing around the "anti-military" charge these days with the abandon that, say, Democrats hurl the charge that Republicans are "anti-poor."
Well, as the White House finally recognized yesterday, it's time to take the gloves off. It's time for Republican politicians to put Democratic politicians on the spot.
On Wednesday, the second highest-ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate compared American soldiers engaged in the punishing and difficult task of interrogating known terrorists to Nazis.
Sen. Dick Durbin isn't some loudmouth caller to Air America Radio or some psycho poster on loony-Left Web sites like democraticunderground.com. He is a machine-cog pol from the state of Illinois. And he's a big, big cheese.
After reading an e-mail from an FBI agent who complained that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to extremes of heat and cold and to loud rap music Durbin went on to say: "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime Pol Pot or others that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case."
There was general outrage when Amnesty International made the disgusting comparison of Gitmo to Stalin's gulag. A million of the approximately 26 million incarcerated in the Gulag actually died from it which makes analogizing it to a prison facility holding, at most, 750 people an act of intellectual barbarity.
But being merely intellectually barbarous was evidently small beer for Dick Durbin, whose comfort in using genocides as cheap rhetorical devices earns him the rare position of being intellectually genocidal.
No, Stalin wasn't enough for our Dickie. He had to add on the Nazis (concentration camp death toll: 7 million) and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (total death toll: 2 million). Their victims were innocents. Those incarcerated at Gitmo, it must be said again and again and again, were taken on the battlefield in Afghanistan or in proximity to it.
And who gets the blame from Durbin? "This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners," said Durbin. Yes, it was. Those Americans happen to be enlistees in the U.S. military. They are, in other words, soldiers or sailors or airmen or Marines, under the command of other military officials.
Now, at this point in a column on this subject, it's usually the time for the standard disclaimer that goes something like this: Yes, there can be bad apples in the American military. Yes, our techniques have been controversial and deserve serious debate. Yes, torture is bad. Yes, yes, yes.
No, no, no. Not this time. Dick Durbin has slandered the American military. He has slandered his country. He has defiled truth and he has spat on reason. He has given aid and comfort to all those who seek to use America's tough stance in the War on Terror as a recruiting tool for anti-Americanism.
He is the Senate's Democratic whip: a leader of his party by any stretch of the imagination. If he remains a leader of his party, his party deserves to be judged by his words by his anti-military, anti-American words.
Judged, and held to account.
Durbin Digs In
Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, is refusing to apologize for likening U.S. servicemen to Nazis, comments we noted yesterday. Instead, as the State Journal-Register of Springfield reports, Durbin issued a statement that said, "This administration should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions."
In truth, it isn't the Bush administration that is abandoning the Geneva Conventions. It is the critics, such as Amnesty International, who insist that terrorists should be protected under the conventions as if they were legitimate soldiers or civilians. The purpose of the Geneva Conventions is not to protect combatants' "human rights" but to spell out the rules of war, rules that impose reciprocal obligations on both sides of a conflict.
A central reason for those rules is to protect civilians by declaring that they are not legitimate targets of military action. Combatants who pose as civilians (i.e., do not wear uniforms) or who target civilians are spies and terrorists respectively and are not entitled to protection as prisoners of war. Indeed, Durbin acknowledged in his Senate speech that "the Geneva Conventions do not give POW status to terrorists."
But he went on to insist that the conventions "protect everyone captured during wartime." He bases this on the "official commentary on the convention," which states that "nobody in enemy hands can fall outside the law." Durbin is unclear as to just what protection he thinks al Qaeda terrorists should get. And little wonder, because the implication of his comments is that terrorists are entitled to protection as civilians.
As the Amnesty International report linked above notes, the source of the commentary Durbin quoted is the International Committee on the Red Cross, and it refers to Article 4 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians captured during wartime. Yet the actual text of Article 4 says something quite different:
Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.
This would exclude someone like Mohammed al-Qahtani, the Saudi national whose "torture" at the lungs of Christina Aguilera made the cover of Time this week. As a matter of international law, his fate has nothing to do with the Geneva Conventions but is a matter between Washington and Riyadh.
In any case, if Dick Durbin thinks terrorists are the moral or legal equivalent of civilians, let him say so directly. And even if this is a legitimate point of view, it doesn't excuse his smearing American soldiers as Nazi-like.
