The Invariable Degeneration of Non-Conventional Conflicts

By Arnaud de La Grange
Le Figaro

Thursday 19 January 2006

It is undoubtedly, Osama bin Laden's one real victory. If no "apostate" Arab regime has fallen under al-Qaeda's blows, if its attacks wound democracies without really threatening them, it is America that has vacillated in its moral and legal certitudes. Through the apocalyptic dimension of his struggle, the great conductor of international jihadism has succeeded in making George W. Bush lose his cool, in dragging him into a dark and tormented terrain. And the controversy over torture and CIA black sites has inflicted collateral damage in Washington and in the world.

At the same time, the French Army finds itself shaken up by the "Mahé Affair," named after a prisoner sordidly murdered by a patrol in Ivory Coast. Of course, the two subjects are not of similar scale. On the one hand, a repressive system implemented by politico-military actors. On the other, a blunder committed by a few individuals. But in both cases, non-conventional conflicts destabilized those who were supposed to contain them. And awoke the specter - always waiting in ambush - of dirty war.

On the side of the "total war" against terrorism, the terms of the debate are finally rather simple, even trivial: does the end justify the means? "Yes," a phalanx of American strategists has answered without any dithering, shocked by the September 11 massacre. Only victory counts, and the anti-terrorist struggle demands that you rather openly dirty your hands. The Pentagon boss himself, Donald Rumsfeld, asserted then that traditional rules of war were "outmoded." Four years later, American Vice President Dick Cheney seems to continue to hold that opinion, since, during the autumn of 2005, he firmly crossed swords with Senator John McCain to exempt certain American services - notably the CIA - from an amendment proscribing any act of torture. None other than this Vietnam War hero could militate as effectively to prohibit "inhumane, cruel, and degrading treatment" against prisoners. In 2002, in the name of the bitter fight to be conducted against al-Qaeda, certain techniques, such as "water-boarding," which provokes the feeling of being drowned, were officially approved.

Sub-contracting the war doesn't help at all. The privatization of violence, with growing recourse to the new "mercenaries," for exotic conflicts as well as alongside bigger Western armies, sandbags ethical considerations. Geographic out-sourcing, when the CIA moves its presumed terrorists to countries where scruples about torture don't encumber anyone. Technical out-sourcing, when private contractors participate in interrogations alongside CIA agents and American military, as in the sadly famous Abu Ghraib prison. Suddenly, in Iraq, the liberators transform themselves into torturers. Thousands of kilometers away, at Guantánamo, "enemy combatants" are swallowed up in a lawless penumbra. By changing the rules of the game, Washington has taken the risk of leaving its honor behind.

Abu Ghraib, the Mahé Affair, the problems, their scales, are not, therefore, related. Yet one connection allows them to be considered together: the absence of a classic front and classic enemy, which makes it difficult to follow or respect any ethical guideline. In military action, two principles clash: efficiency and mastery. Use of force must be massive enough to win out over the adversary's violence. That's the principle of "efficiency." But, at the same time, that force may not be exercised in contradiction with the values in the name of which it is engaged. That's the principle of "mastery." It pronounces that one will not use any means at all to achieve one's ends. The legitimacy of the action is based on that requirement. It's that legitimacy that is threatened today by the Iraqi prison indignities and the abuses in the hunt for international jihadists. And all the fine discourse about the war for law - for international law and human rights - that Occidental powers have held forth since the end of the Cold War, ends up weakened and discredited. The new situation has not put war out of the game, but must that war be outside of the law?

Alongside these moral aspects, there is also the legitimacy of intervention and consequently the geopolitical balance of power that is in play. To believe that tactical efficiency wins out over morality can, perniciously, undermine all strategic efficiency. The brain of the French military institution, General Jean-René Bachelet, expresses this very well when he writes in Inflexions, the new and remarkable upscale review of the land army, that "the combination of crushing military capacities and humiliation of the demonized closes a vicious circle: it constitutes the very breeding ground for the terrorism we are fighting, this strategy of surprise attacks by the weak on the strong." If we follow the general's reasoning, winning a battle while losing one's soul bears the seeds of future defeats.

Taking into account America's crushing technological and military superiority, the French officer deems that Europeans should be bearers of an alternative, "not in terms of military power, but in the conception of how that power is deployed." Thus neo-conservative thinker Robert Kagan opposed two geopolitical visions in "Power and Weakness:" that of a "Kantian" European world, where we dream of constructing peace by means of law alone, and that of a "Hobbesian" American world, steeped in a culture of international violence, in which each country is a wolf for other countries. This takes us well beyond a simple debate on the meaning of military action toward what seems to be a veritable gamble over civilization.

Arnaud de La Grange is Le Figaro's Foreign Defense correspondent.

Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.