The same point I made last week, about the moral similarities of arguments for war and arguments for torture, is made here by Jim Manzi. This has set off a round of attempts by other bloggers to explain why war and torture are morally distinct. The problem seems like a large one to me, given how warfare is widely praised (soldiers get medals for it) while torture is regarded as something that at best is secretive, and at worst is an a priori evil on the scale of rape or genocide. It doesn't just suffice to show that torture is somewhat worse than war (less frequently effectual, for example) to maintain this distinction, it needs to belong to a totally different category. None of these attempts is entirely satisfactory in my mind, but I figure it's at least worth review them. (For the record, I think the only moderately persuasive case is the utilitarian one, that torture doesn't work very well while war sometimes does.)
Catholic writers like Andrew Sullivan and David Schaengold (to whom Andrew links) center the distinction on autonomy. An enemy combatant is capable of resistance, but a captive is helpless. Harming a helpless person is evil, but harming a person who is capable of fighting back is appropriate so long as you are in some reciprocal danger. Schaengold cites Aquinas and Kant, but mostly just to say that torture is intrinsically evil so we should never do it, which seems like a circular argument when the point we're trying to unravel is why warfare isn't in the same category (as a pacifist would contend).
This would also rule out execution of captured terrorists, I think, so we ought to be similarly horrified by capital punishment. But we don't usually accuse people who support capital punishment of being "war criminals", even if we disagree with the position. More to the point, I don't see military technology as granting our enemies much autonomy in the first place. If you drop a nuclear device on a city from ten miles up, you aren't really granting anyone in the blast zone much autonomy at all. They're as helpless as if you strapped them to a chair and used them as target practice. The military is constantly searching for technologies (missiles, drones, robots) that remove our troops from harm's way, while being inevitably lethal against enemy targets. At some point, if you had omnipotent technology, you could effective kill someone with a unilateral exercise of pure will, and they'd be helpless to resist. The better our technological advantage, the less this kind of distinction makes sense. Almost all forms of total war (including the burning of enemy cities, when your cities are in no comparable danger) amount to violations of this principle, so if torture makes Bush or Cheney a war criminal, then at least they have company in Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, and possibly even Clinton.
Christopher Orr, at TNR's The Plank, makes a pragmatic case based on torture removing the incentive to surrender. If we torture our enemies, then they'll all fight to the death, and wars will be vastly more bloody and ruthless. That's again a strong case against executing terrorists as well. I think that Al Qaeda is already as motivated to fight as it can get, after seeing the fate of Saddam Hussein. It's not entirely clear to me that there's a logical route to surrender for terrorists to take, at least not organizationally. They'd still need to be tried as criminals by a system that was alien to them. Is Osama Bin Laden going to fly to the Hague and hire a lawyer, right under our noses?
This argument is also a parallel version of the argument used for torture itself. After all, just like an enemy army can surrender in order to avoid death, an individual captive can become an informant in order to avoid torture. If surrender is the way to escape from death, than cooperation is the way to escape from torture. A completely sadistic torturer might not stop even after getting the desired information, but this is really an argument for forcing interrogations to follow the same rules as war. You can hurt people, as long as you stop once you attain your own objectives. It doesn't amount to an absolutist position.
Daniel Larison makes a case for both offensive war and torture being similarly evil, and defensive war belonging to a different category. This makes good sense in my mind, although it's going to indict not just the Bush administration, but almost every pundit who favored intervention in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Larison also seems to commit a recursive fallacy when he says that a "just war" is different because it follows "rules", and one of the rules is that we don't torture prisoners. When the entire point of the debate is to object that the motivation behind the rule is that it swallows the entire rationale for the war itself, this is begging the question. Or to put it another way, we could apply the same principle, recursively, and say that since torture under the Bush administration followed its own rules (no more than some number of daily waterboardings), then it was legitimizing itself in the same Augustinian way as war is legitimized. It was "just torture", not "total torture".
Overall, I still think that most forms of asymmetric urban warfare involve having to make decisions that are ethically problematic in the same way as torture, and so I can't classify it as a unique moral evil. If you think that torture is very wrong, then you should think that the war against terror itself is very wrong based on all the collateral damage it's inflicted on innocents, and want us moved back to a defensive posture as quickly as possible. (Not at some hypothetical point during Obama's second term, which seems to be the current timetable.) While I feel that we should have treated captured high-level terrorist leaders more humanely, I still feel far, far worse about the tens of thousands of civilians and footsoldiers who have died or been injured in a war that, in hindsight, doesn't seem to have served any rational purpose.
