Mistreatment is Called For...

There has been a great deal of bloviating about the Geneva Convention of late, in particular a great deal of pious outrage that the Attorney General's office would opine that the Geneva Convention may not apply to some prisoners in U.S. custody.

First, a little quiz - What is the Geneva Convention?

A) Shriners meeting in a historic European city
B) Protocols for the treatment of captured soldiers

If you answered "B" you are half correct, just like every other intelligent person I have asked. The Geneva Convention was popularized in the U.S. (or at least in my mind) by the hit series Hogan's Heroes where plucky American prisoners of war routinely made jackasses out of their Hun captors. Bob Krane's Colonel Hogan was forever citing the Geneva Convention, declaring this action or that by Werner Klemperer's Colonel Klink was against it. However, Americans are ignorant as to why the treatment of prisoners is so carefully proscribed. It is so the other half of the Geneva Conventions - the protocols of warfare - would be followed.

There are many ways to conduct war. One is to show up in uniform with an accountable command structure and hammer head to head with the other guys in uniform with an accountable command structure. The obvious disadvantage is that the enemy knows who you are, and your commanders can be held responsible for your actions. The advantage is that you can tell combatant from non-combatant, someone has a reason to discipline the troops, and civilians deaths are (theoretically) minimized.

We must bear in mind this point: Humane treatment of POWs is the incentive to conduct warfare more or less away from civilians. Put another way, the Geneva Convention specifically intends to prevent terrorist-style warfare.

Now, those on the left who decry the misuse of combatants found outside of a conventional, uniformed military are making the point that if we don't treat these prisoners well then our troops won't be treated well when they are captured. On the other hand, if we treat combatants "well" whether they are conducting hostilities away from civilians or not, what exactly is the incentive to conduct warfare away from civilians?

When I was just a slick sleeve private at Ft. Leonard Wood, Senior Drill Sergeant Stahl told us to never, ever take our uniform off in a war zone if we wanted any hope of surviving capture. Even our photo ID declared not just name, rank and serial number, but that we were covered under the Geneva Convention, so long as we conducted ourselves accordingly.

Set aside the fact that we are fighting an enemy that hasn't agreed to the Geneva Convention. If we fail to treat illegal combatants significantly, substantially and memorably worse than we do legal combatants, we collapse the whole incentive to engage in combat legally. If we are too kind to illegal combatants, we actually imperil the very purpose of the Geneva accords, to protect the lives of civilians. The left should understand that.

Tim McNabb