Victims Turning Perpetrators

Editor's Note: This commencement address was delivered to the Columbia School of International & Public Affairs on Monday, May 17, 2004 at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City.

Today, you are graduating from the School of International & Public Affairs. This ought to be an occasion for celebration. You have successfully completed your studies and you are about to enter the real world. But the real world is a very troubled place and international relations are at the core of our troubles. So it may be appropriate to pause for a moment and reflect on the world you are about to face.

Why are we in trouble? Let me focus on the feature that looms so large in the current landscape -- the war on terror. September 11 was a traumatic event that shook the nation to its core. But it could not have changed the course of history for the worse if President Bush had not responded the way he did. Declaring war on terrorism was understandable, perhaps even appropriate, as a figure of speech. But the President meant it literally and that is when things started going seriously wrong.

Recently the nation has been shaken by another event: pictures of our soldiers abusing prisoners in Saddam's notorious prison. I believe there is a direct connection between the two events. It is the war on terror that has led to the torture scenes in Iraq. What happened in Abu Ghraib was not a case of a few bad apples but a pattern tolerated and even encouraged by the authorities. Just to give one example, the Judge Advocate General Corps routinely observes military interrogations from behind a two-way mirror; that practice was discontinued in Afghanistan and Iraq. The International Red Cross and others started complaining about abuses as early as December 2002.

It is easy to see how terrorism can lead to torture. Last summer I took an informal poll at a meeting of eminent Wall Street investors to find out whether they would condone the use of torture to prevent a terrorist attack. The consensus was that they hoped somebody would do it without their knowing about it.

It is not a popular thing to say, but the fact is that we are victims who have turned into perpetrators. The terrorist attacks on September 11 claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives and the whole world felt sympathy for us as the victims of an atrocity. Then the President declared war on terrorism, and pursued it first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Since then, the war on terror has claimed more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks on September 11. This fact is not recognized at home because the victims of the war on terror are not Americans. But the rest of the world does not draw the same distinction and world opinion has turned against us. So, a tremendous gap in perceptions has opened up between us and the rest of the world. The majority of the American public does not realize that we have turned from victims into perpetrators. That is why those gruesome pictures were so shocking. Even today, most people don't recognize their full import.

By contrast, the Bush administration knew what it was doing when it declared war on terror and used that pretext for invading Iraq. That may not hold true for President Bush personally but it is certainly true for Vice President Cheney and a group of extremists within the Bush administration concentrated in and around the Pentagon. These people are guided by an ideology. They believe that international relations are relations of power not law and since America is the most powerful nation on earth, it ought to use that power more assertively than under previous presidents. They advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein even before President Bush was elected and they managed to win him over to their cause after September 11.