War Maneuvers

The U.S. now has 15 warships and 100 military aircraft engaged in military maneuvers off the cost of Iran. According to Captain Bradley Johanson, this is in response to Iran "trying to intimidate others" by seizing and holding 15 British sailors who boarded merchant ships in what Iran claims were Iranian waters. Of course, the build-up of U.S. military might began way before Iran seized these sailors. I don't know if the sailors were in Iraqi or Iranian waters, but I have to wonder if their seizure was motivated by Iran's attempt to deter U.S. attacks. Johanson says that "Iran has adopted a very escalatory posture." Really? If the tables were turned and Iran had over 5,000 nuclear weapons, plans to build a new generation of nukes and was engaged in military maneuvers off our coast, wouldn't seizing 15 of their guys just be common sense?

State Torture

I just finished an interesting but disturbing discussion with a class of college juniors about torture. Like most people, they were appalled by the torture photos coming out of Abu Ghraib. Being good students of social psychology, they could apply their knowledge of the Stanford Prison Experiment to understand how good people might get carried away by a bad situation. Despite the power of the situation, they rightly concluded that the perpetrators, Lynndie England and Charles Graner, should be held accountable for their actions. However, when they learned about the Pentagon Special Access Program in which thousands have been rounded up, held without charge in countless prisons across the world, and "interrogated" in ways even more brutal than those we saw in the Abu Ghraib photos, the students searched for justification. Surely our government must have a good reason for keeping people indefinitely in secret prisons without legal recourse and subjecting them to sleep deprivation, waterboarding, electric shock, stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sensory overload, and in some cases even immersing them in boiling water. Sometimes we need to commit evil for the greater good, they argued. I find it sad but somehow understandable that we're so quick to throw a "few bad apples" to the wolves, but reluctant to question our own government and thus our own complicity. We somehow need to believe that we are the "good guys." Admitting that we're not is psychologically threatening. We loose our moorings, and as Ernst Becker's profound analysis teaches, our moorings (in this case, our American pride) are necessary to keep existential terror at bay.