The Reluctant Ambassador

When European colleagues ask about U.S. acts of kidnapping and torture, what's an American CSO to say?

America didn’t always behave this way toward its prisoners of war. The respectful treatment that Americans paid toward German and Japanese prisoners of war in World War II and the help we provided their countries after the war paid dividends many times over. Germany and Japan both developed into prosperous democracies and strong U.S. allies. We should keep that in mind as we try to develop the same types of prosperous democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The problem is that apathy breeds complacency. What should be outrageous to Americans becomes simply "the way things are done" and slips into standard operating procedure without a whimper of protest. It seems that the fabric of what it means to be an American is being ripped apart and patched with an ugly remnant called torture, and no one seems to notice. If the time ever comes that individual Americans are tortured for alleged offenses against the government, I fear it will be far too late to raise any type of effective protest.

The greatest resource of America in its roughly 230 years of existence has not been its military power or its economic output; it has been its moral voice. It was the idea that the nation was founded on the unique understanding that governments did not derive their authority from a supposed mandate from heaven, but that every person had intrinsic worth and that governments derived their authority from the consent of the governed. As I explain to my European colleagues, there have been moments in our nation’s history that I am not particularly proud of and the recent revelations about U.S. sponsored kidnappings and torture certainly belong in that category. But throughout our history as a nation, we have been more true than any other to the fundamental principles of democracy and human rights. It is that point that I try to impress upon my European friends.

Are we now going to squander our nation’s greatest resource? I certainly hope not, but I’ve talked with quite a few Europeans who think that we have. It is affecting the way Europeans view Americans and is causing them to rethink their relationship with the United States. It may very well take generations before we regain that trust. In the meantime, the U.S.-European marriage against terror appears to be fast approaching a rocky divorce.

Paul Raines is CISO of a nonprofit international group in The Hague, Netherlands.