THE RESPONSE of the United States' administration to recent reports in the European media on its use of torture and illegal abductions has been garbled, at best. Prior to leaving the U.S. on a trip to Europe, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that while the U.S. did not countenance torture, information yielded by suspects had saved European lives. In effect, she was saying, "We didn't; but if we did, it wasn't wrong."
The volume of evidence pointing to the use of extreme tactics by the U.S. in its war on terror has been accumulating for years. Few can doubt that, along with some of its allies, the U.S. has been engaging in some pretty rough business. That is to be expected, given the intensity of the war and the challenges posed by committed foes.
Nevertheless, the U.S. needs reminding that to the extent it uses the same kind of tactics that it decries in others savagery and terror it will compromise itself in the eyes of its friends, both actual and potential. Extreme measures may be ethically justifiable in specific circumstances. But they can also amount to a slide on to a slippery slope, in which evil gradually becomes banalised.
Perhaps Washington no longer cares about world opinion. After all, Vice-President Dick Cheney has intimated that those who oppose the administration's tactics prefer to offer terrorists therapy. But if the White House continued to insist that all those who are not with it are against it, it will find itself losing friends in a war it cannot fight alone.
It is this same kind of hubris that made them rush headlong into an unnecessary war after failing to bully the United Nations into endorsing false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The tendency for the U.S. to thumb its nose at world opinion may find much endorsement and approval from among the conservatives in the Republican Party. But ultimately they will have to recognise that such attitudes will backfire in an increasingly inter-dependent world.
