THREE WAYS (OUT OF 100) THAT AMERICA'S SCREWING UP THE WORLD

From the lack of body counts in Iraq, to drug wars to torture, the
United States is making the world a worse place to live in.

The following three subchapters are excerpted from John Tirman's 100
Ways America Is Screwing Up the World (Harper Perennial, 2006). Read
another excerpt here.

Three ways America is screwing up the world:

1. "We Don't Do Body Counts"

When U.S. General Tommy Franks uttered those words in 2003, he was
conveying the new sentiments of the American military and its
civilian leadership, that counting the dead of "the enemy" was not
necessary or useful. Franks, who may be remembered as the only
general in the annals of American history to lose two wars, was
simply repeating what his political handlers told him to say, as all
active duty generals do. In this case, it was an attempt to deflect
the moral consequences of a "war of choice," a lesson Frank's
generation learned from Vietnam. But the "no body counts" policy
reverberates around the Arab and Muslim world, to America's detriment.

The policy is an insult and a mistake for two reasons. First, it
lends the impression -- or is it a fact? -- that the United States
does not care about civilian casualties. In the autumn of 2005, in a
fairly typical sequence, the military announced that a sweep of Anbar
province in Iraq had resulted in the death of 120 "terrorists." No
civilian casualties were reported by the U.S. government, or by the
American press. Al Jazeera, the Arabic news organization, had
firsthand accounts of dozens of casualties. And it is inconceivable
that major military operations of that kind would not result in
casualties of the innocent. This is an embittering legacy of the war:
not merely the fact of large numbers of war dead, but the neglect of
even acknowledging that this could be occurring or is important
enough to investigate.

Second, it is bad for the war effort itself. The American people have
a right to know what is going on in their name. Learning about things
like Abu Ghraib and casualties from foreign news sources or NGOs
makes the revelations all the more troubling, as they think they are
being lied to by their government. (Which they are, of course.) And
military planners themselves should understand what the effect of
operations is on civilian populations. Family ties are strong in
Iraq, with close extended kinship networks; killing of family
members, especially innocent family members, is likely to produce
more resistance -- and more terrorists. It is one of the seemingly
inexplicable things in Iraq -- how could the insurgency grow when
America is so clearly a liberator, where even Sunni Arabs will
ultimately be better off if only they would lay down their weapons?
The answer is not only that they are former Saddamites or jihadists.
The far more probable answer is that the insurgents are driven in
part by acts of defense, in effect, or vengeful honor.

A military officer told me around that same time that "rules of
engagement" for U.S. troops were so broad that civilians even faintly
suspected of being insurgents were routinely "blown away." Men
talking on cell phones, for example, while a U.S. military convoy was
passing were fair game for shooting. Many anecdotes of this kind
circulate, but have stimulated little curiosity on the part of journalists.

Most take at face value the estimates of Iraq Body Count, a noble
effort to count, via press reports, the total number of Iraqi
civilians killed in the war. Their estimate by the end of 2005 was
about thirty thousand, but their method was incomplete, as they
readily acknowledge, since they count only those who are reported
dead in two or more reputable news sources. That's like doing the
census of the United States by counting everyone mentioned in the news media.

A more complete estimate was provided by a team of epidemiologists,
led by American and Iraqi health professionals, and published in the
British medical journal, The Lancet. Using a well-tested method of
random cluster surveys, interviewing more than 7,000 people, their
midrange estimate was 98,000 dead in the first eighteen months of the
war, with 80 percent of those likely to have been killed by U.S. and
U.K. forces.

That report was widely dismissed in the United States as politically
motivated or flawed, though the secretary of state and many others
used the same method to estimate casualties in other wars, such as
the Congo. (The method, by the way, while widely misunderstood, is
perfectly sound.) The violence, by most accounts, increased in the
next eighteen months, and one can safely assume that the actual dead
in Iraq now exceed 100,000 by perhaps tens of thousands more.

The real reason why The Lancet study is ignored, and the whole topic
of civilian deaths downplayed, is because that scale of mayhem is
just too sickening to accept in a news media that largely supported
the invasion, and by politicians who would pay a price for even
indirectly criticizing the conduct of U.S. troops who, after all, do
the killing.

The moral consequences of war are always inconvenient. They are
especially troubling when a war has a veneer of righteousness. This
attitude afflicts the media elite as much as the political
leadership. "We don't do body counts" could have been uttered by the
editor of the Washington Post as easily as the general in charge.
That they are both morally bankrupt on this issue is obvious for all
the world to see.

2. Getting High

Much of my professional time is spent studying armed conflicts around
the world.

One can't help noticing that wars today are often mixed up with
crime, and that crime is often about drugs -- heroin and cocaine, in
particular. The production of opiates is connected to the wars and
instability in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Burma. Cocaine is produced
in the Andean countries of South America, particularly Colombia,
Peru, and Bolivia, and all three have suffered from ongoing civil
wars --Colombia's is almost forty years old -- and social unrest.
Then there are the transit countries, like most of Central America.
You add it up and a lot of countries are involved. Of course, one
country is most involved, not as an exporter, but the consumer: the
United States.

Getting high is an American tradition. Alcohol and tobacco
consumption is as old as the Republic. The use of legal
pharmaceuticals for depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, and the like
increased markedly after the Second World War. The legal drug market
set the stage for illegal drug consumption. Even now, after all the
public service campaigns about these issues, the consumption of
alcohol by American teens and pre-teens is astounding in scale: 20
percent of the alcohol imbibed nationwide goes down the gullets of
kids between twelve and twenty years old, and in that age group, half
of them drink. They account for $22 billion in booze.

So the stage is set for illicit drug consumption. Americans consume
more cocaine than any other country, 300 million metric tons
annually. In the 1990s, about $70 billion was spent in America on
coke by 3 to 4 million "hard-core" users and some 6 million
occasional users. Up to a million Americans were hooked on heroin,
and that cost about $20 billion a year. Trends suggest that use of
cocaine may actually be declining, but statistics in general are a
little dodgy when it comes to these practices. It's still a very big business.

The industry that supplies the habits of Americans gives new meaning
to the word globalization. West African couriers go to Bangkok to
purchase Burmese-made heroin and run it through no-hassle airports in
Africa and take their chances at border crossings in Mexico and
Canada. Cocaine shippers, we know, have their own air fleet. The
transit points for all this stuff reads like a who's who of failed
states (or venues of the Reagan Doctrine): Angola, Cambodia,
Guatemala, Nigeria, Honduras, Mozambique.

The drug money -- a little goes a long way in some of these countries
- -- feeds the corrupt and brutal, rogue cops and dirty politicians,
ready to take the graft in one hand and U.S. "war on drugs" money in
the other. They are often involved with the other contraband that
fuels war and crime: gunrunning, diamonds, or even higher-end goods
like nuclear technology. They sometimes have connections to the likes
of al Qaeda. It all seems to go hand in hand. And drugs are at the
center of it.

The war on drugs is generally considered to be a failed policy, and
an expensive one, though it has its defenders. Our federal and state
governments spend something like $50 billion annually, both at home
and abroad, in the drug war. A million are arrested, many of them
incarcerated, bringing on more billions in costs. In places like
Colombia, the war on drugs is mixed up with the civil war itself.
Local police and military elites use the drug war for other purposes
- -- not only old-fashioned graft, but as a way to settle scores and
dispatch enemies. Eradication of crops only works if the local people
want it and there are alternatives, which are rarely in the mix. Very
few independent analysts regard the war on drugs as a success, mainly
because it is being fought in the wrong places -- the problem is not
abroad, but in ourselves.

Free trade helps the drug trade. The war on terrorism may hinder it
in some places, but help it in others. In Afghanistan, the overthrow
of the Taliban opened the door to new cultivators and exporters of heroin.

It's a very confusing picture. The one remedy that has not been
tried, of course, is legalization. There is a ferocious debate about
the harmful effects of drugs, and what legalization (controlled,
taxed, etc.) might bring. But one thing is certain: the hunger for
illegal drugs in the United States reverberates around the world. It
is violent, corrupting, and enormously costly to millions of people
on every continent.

3. Torture

I will keep this one short, because it is so obvious and hardly any
rational and moral individual would disagree with me. In fact, there
is so much unanimity on this matter among knowledgeable people
worldwide that I thought perhaps this should not be one of the 100
Ways. But then I saw Condi Rice in Europe defending the "renditions"
of "suspects," spirited off to secret prisons where no doubt they
would come in for some serious hands-on interrogations, claiming
these contemptible practices saved European lives -- almost certainly
a complete falsehood -- and I thought, well, yes, torture deserves a few words.

America has overall been quite free of torture as an official state
policy or practice, so it is perhaps a little premature to claim that
the recent reliance on torture prisons for the massive detentions of
fighters from Afghanistan and Iraq and others has "screwed up the
world." Too soon, but not too far fetched. The revelations about the
U.S. torture techniques and the persistence of Bush administration in
defending and using them are a colossal national shame that has
muddied whatever conceivable moral clarity guided the new crusades in
the Middle East.

Apart from it being morally repugnant, a slap at the ideals the
country tends to uphold, and a violation of international law --
often flimsy reasons in the minds of torturers -- the practice of
maximizing pain doesn't work. People who actually know something
valuable (unlike the thousands of low-level prisoners at GuantA!namo
and other prisons) are the least likely to talk. And some will talk
and say anything to stop the beatings, burnings, poisonings and other
methods in the torturer's quiver. Hence, the many false alarms and
"orange alerts" since 9/11 (which, conveniently, also have political
value). "No one has yet offered any validated evidence that torture
produces reliable intelligence," notes General David Irvine, a
specialist on interrogations. "While torture apologists frequently
make the claim that torture saves lives, that assertion is directly
contradicted by many Army, FBI, and CIA professionals who have
actually interrogated al Qaeda captives."

In its Eight Lessons of Torture, the Center for the Victims of
Torture, an experienced, Minneapolis-based NGO, notes in lesson
number one (that torture does not yield reliable information) that
"nearly every client at the Center for Victims of Torture, when
subjected to torture, confessed to a crime they did not commit, gave
up extraneous information, or supplied names of innocent friends or
colleagues to their torturers." And as many people have argued,
including former interrogators, torture has a corrupting influence on
the torturers.

The big "what-if" in the debate is "what if a captured terrorist knew
of a plan to detonate a nuclear weapon in Manhattan, should we use
all means to stop that?" Such what-ifs depend on many implausible
scenarios converging. The simple fact is that suicide bombing has
shown that the most politically violent people will die for their
cause; this is not exactly news. So if in the unlikely case (getting
a nuclear device is an extremely low-probability event) someone did
know of such a thing about to happen, and we're pulling out their
fingernails, we can rest assured they won't talk, because they would
have committed to dying anyway. People who argue otherwise are not
only morally corrupt but naA-ve. We could, however, pose a more
likely what-if: What if a would-be terrorist becomes a deadly fighter
because America is torturing his compatriots? That"what-if is already
under way. Some people -- American torturers -- have blood on their
hands as a result.

Case closed. The torture, the illegal detentions, the unnecessary
killings, the grisly prisons -- not a single benefit has been shown
from this tawdriness and moral depravity. It is likely to outlive its
alleged purposes and brand the perpetrators forever.

John Tirman is executive director of MIT's Center for International Studies.