Protocols of Machismo

Corey Robin

Arguing about War by Michael Walzer
Yale, 208 pp pp, £16.99, July 2004, ISBN 0 300 10365 4
Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh
Penguin, 394 pp, £17.99, September 2004, ISBN 0 7139 9845 8
Torture: A Collection edited by Sanford Levinson
Oxford, 319 pp, £18.50, November 2004, ISBN 0 19 517289 2

The 20th century, it’s said, taught us a simple lesson about politics: of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard.

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Vol. 27 No. 10 · 19 May 2005 » Corey Robin » Protocols of Machismo (print version)
Pages 11-14 | 5552 words

Letters

From Daniel Caola

Corey Robin makes the point that as far as we know, none of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo was tortured in order to defuse a ticking bomb (LRB, 19 May). This is hardly surprising: most (non-suicide) car bombs are set on as short a fuse as possible, to minimise the chance of discovery – a very few hours at most. The chances of being able to pick up a terrorist who knows about the bomb, in the time between its being planted and its going off, are minuscule. And most dedicated tough guys will be able to hold out for a couple of hours no matter what you do to them (bear in mind that if they know about the bomb, they’ll know how long they have to hold out for, which gives them an important psychological advantage). It is a scenario that exists only in philosophy textbooks and the neo-con imagination, not on the streets of Belfast or Baghdad. Current British SAS training for ‘resistance to interrogation’ requires recruits to hold out for only 24 hours, the time it usually takes for a soldier’s HQ to realise that he has been captured, and alter any plans that he knows about, on the assumption that he will eventually be made to tell all. Assuming that al-Qaida operatives are not so stupid as not to adopt a similar policy, any information gained from prisoners months or years after their arrest fades into irrelevance.

Daniel Caola
London E10