'Ideals that were really never in our possession': Torture, honor and US identity

International Relations

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 243-261

  Steele, Brent J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS   (United States)

Author keywords

Abu Ghraib; Aesthetics; Ethics; Foucault; Honor; Ontological security; Self identity; Shame; Torture; US identity

Indexed keywords

EID: 44849085790     PISSN: 00471178     EISSN: 17412862     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0047117808089897     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2007 International Studies Association annual meeting in Chicago, and at the University of Kansas Department of Political Science's International Studies on the Kaw seminar. I thank Tony Lang for his comments as a discussant on the ISA version, and Juliet Kaarbo, Philip Schrodt, Cristian Cantir, Andrew Hom, Ryan Gibb, Linsey Moddelmogg and all the participants of the Kaw seminar for their comments. I am especially grateful for the detailed comments I received on the topic of honor from Jon Acuff and Debra Sheffer, and also for insights obtained from Jack Amoureux, Hannah Britton, Jon D. Carlson, Harry Gould, Eric A. Heinze, Oded Lowenheim, Amir Lupovici, Kate Schick and Jeremy Youde. Finally, I wish to thank the editors of International Relations, Ken Booth, Toni Erskine and Michael Foley, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and assistance on this article at various stages of its development.
2. 'A Matter of Honor', Washington Post, 28 September 2005.
3. 'Exposing the Truth of Abu Ghraib', available at: www.cbsnews.com/ stories/2006/12/07/60minutes/main2238188_page3.shtml (accessed 15 February 2008).
4. The vote tally was 65-34; see: www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/ roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session= 2&vote=00259#top (accessed 15 February 2008).
5. Peter Wallsten, 'GOP Candidates Divided on Detainees', Los Angeles Times, 17 May 2007, p. 15. I note the opposition of John McCain, also a Republican candidate for president, to this view below.
6. Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel, The Torture Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. xviii.
7. Brent J. Steele, 'Making Words Matter: The Asian Tsunami, Darfur, and "Reflexive Discourse" in International Politics', forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly, 51, pp. 901-25.
8. Andrew Linklater, 'Torture and Civilization', International Relations, 21(1), 2007, pp. 116-17.
9. Richard Ned Lebow, 'Constructive Realism', International Studies Review, 6(2), 2003, p. 347.
10. Jack Donnely, Realism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 67.
11. Richard Ned Lebow, 'Fear, Interest and Honour: Outlines of a Theory of International Relations', International Affairs, 82, May 2006, pp. 431-48.
12. Lebow, 'Constructive Realism', p. 347.
13. Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 272.
14. Wendt distinguishes between what he titles 'corporate' and 'social' identity (what I term self-and collective identity). The former are 'intrinsic, self-organizing qualities that constitute actor individuality'; the latter, 'sets of meanings that an actor attributes to itself while taking the perspective of others, that is, as a social object'. Alexander Wendt, 'Collective Identity Formation and the International State', American Political Science Review, 88(1), p. 385.
15. Lebow, Tragic Vision, p. 273.
16. Douglas Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 143.
17. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Regarding ontological security and international relations, see Jeffrey Huysmans 'Security! What Do you Mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier', European Journal of International Relations, 4, 1998, pp. 226-55; Bill McSweeney, Security, Identity, and Interests (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Carol Kinnvall, 'Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity and the Search for Ontological Security', Political Psychology, 25(5), 2004, pp. 741-67; Brent J. Steele, 'Ontological Security and the Power of Self-identity: British Neutrality and the American Civil War', Review of International Studies, 31, July 2005, pp. 519-40; Brent J. Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2007); Jennifer Mitzen, 'Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma', European Journal of International Relations, 12(6), 2006, pp. 341-70.
18. Jane Bennett, '"How Is It, Then, That We Still Remain Barbarians?": Foucault, Shiller, and the Aestheticization of Ethics', Political Theory, 24(4), 1996, p. 667.
19. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Uses of Pleasure (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 28.
20. James Bowman, Honor: A History (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), p. 34.
21. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. xvii.
22. Sharon Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 73-4.
23. Bowman, Honor, p. 10.
24. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor.
25. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 'Honor and America's Wars: From the Revolution to the Mexican Conquest', the 2004 James Pinckney Harrison Lectures in History, 22 March 2004, available at: www.humiliationstudies.org/ documents/WyattBrownMexico.pdf (accessed 15 February 2008); 'Honor and America's Wars: From Spain to Iraq', the 2004 James Pinckney Harrison Lectures in History, 5 April 2004, available at: www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/WyattBrownSpainIraq. pdf (accessed 15 February 2008); 'Honor, Shame, and Iraq in American Foreign Policy', note prepared for the Workshop on Humiliation and Violent Conflict, Columbia University, New York, 18-19 November 2004, available at: www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/WyattBrownNov04NYConference.pdf (accessed 15 February 2008).
26. 'The story or stories by means of which self-identity is reflexively understood, both by the individual concerned and by others': Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 243.
27. Anthony F. Lang Jr, Agency and Ethics: The Politics of Military Intervention (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002).
28. Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), esp. ch. 4. Iver Neumann, Uses of the Other: 'The East' in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), esp. pp. 218-19.
29. Lang, Agency and Ethics, p. 28.
30. Reinhold Niebuhr, 'Human Nature and Social Change', The Christian Century, 50, 1953, p. 138.
31. Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, and Narrative (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 38.
32. Michel Foucault, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabino (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 367.
33. Jutta Weldes, 'The Cultural Production of Crises: U.S. Identity and Missiles in Cuba', in J. Weldes, M. Laffey, H. Gusterson and R. Duvall (eds), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 42.
34. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
35. Debra Sheffer, 'Honor, Manhood, Nostalgia and Civil War Soldiers', paper presented at the 'Peace, War and Change' Seminar, Hall Center, University of Kansas, December 2006, p. 15.
36. Kenneth Tucker, Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory (London: Sage, 1998), p. 199.
37. Weldes, 'Cultural Production', p. 46.
38. Bowman, Honor.
39. The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in its 1979, 1982 and 1987 surveys entitled 'American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy', asked respondents whether they thought Vietnam was 'fundamentally wrong and immoral'. Each study concluded that 'views on Vietnam clearly correlate with willingness to use troops overseas', with those supporting the Vietnam War generally supporting the more robust use of US forces overseas. Reports are available at: www.ccfr.org/ publication_report_list.php?report_type=P (accessed 15 February 2008).
40. Norman Podhoretz, 'America the Ugly', Wall Street Journal, 11 September 2007.
41. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, 'Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy', Foreign Affairs, 1996, pp. 18-32. For recent work on neo-conservatism, see Michael C. Williams, 'What Is the National Interest? The Neoconservative Challenge in IR Theory', European Journal of International Relations, 11(3), pp. 307-37, and 'Morgenthau Now: Neoconservatism, National Greatness, and Realism', in Michael C. Williams (ed.), Realism Reconsidered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
42. Caroline Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington's Army (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 62.
43. Bowman, Honor, pp. 36-7.
44. The military funeral 'tells us something about the status of the individuals involved, the power arrangements that surround them, their value to public policy, and whether the individual or others contested that value': Cox, Proper Sense, p. xi.
45. Cox, Proper Sense, p. xii.
46. See, for example, Robert Kaplan, 'Fort Leavenworth and the Eclipse of Nationhood', Atlantic Monthly, 278(1), 1996, pp. 74-90; Thomas Ricks, 'The Widening Gap Between the Military and Society', Atlantic Monthly, 270(1), 1996, pp. 66-78.
47. Greenberg and Dratel, The Torture Papers, p. xviii.
48. Josh White, 'Abu Ghraib Tactics Were First Used at Guantanamo', Washington Post, 14 July 2005.
49. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 2006; first published 1977), p. 325.
50. Robert Kaplan, Warrior Politics (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 132-3.
51. Philippa Winkler notes that 'The combination of sexual humiliation and physical abuse combines to destroy cultural and national cohesiveness'. See her 'Sexualized Torture by US Troops: Implications for the North South Divide', paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, California, March 2006, p. 11.
52. Bill Gertz and Roman Scarborough, 'Wolfowitz Sees "Shaming Effect" on Arab World', Washington Times, 29 April 2003.
53. Seymour Hersh, 'The Gray Zone', New Yorker, 24 May 2007.
54. See also Linklater, 'Torture and Civilization', p. 114.
55. Mark Bowden, 'The Dark Art of Interrogation', Atlantic Monthly, October 2003, p. 53.
56. It should be noted that the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, which allows suspects the right not to incriminate themselves, has been the basis for prohibiting coercive interrogative techniques against American citizens. Caveats abound, however, as the Bush administration has asserted that the Fifth Amendment and the corollary Miranda right do not apply to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and that there is a 'public-safety exception' to Miranda: Bybee memo in Greenberg and Dratel, The Torture Papers, pp. 153-61.
57. Jane Mayer, 'Whatever it Takes', New Yorker, 19 February 2007.
58. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man, Immoral Society (New York: Scribner, 1932), p. 93.
59. Darius Rejali, 'Torture, Democracy and War', presented at the Workshop on 'Techniques of Violence in Civil War', Peace Research Institute of Oslo, 21 August 2004; Darius Rejali, Torture, Technology and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
60. Oded Lowenheim and Gadi Heimann, '"And If You Wrong Us Shall We Not Revenge?" The Pursuit of Revenge in International Politics', forthcoming, Security Studies.
61. Photographic images of the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib invite the conclusion that public acceptance of torture is dependent on efforts to ensure that its concealment protects moral sensibilities': Linklater, 'Torture and Civilization', p. 115.
62. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 33-4.
63. See www.hbo.com/docs/programs/ghostsofabughraib/synopsis.html (accessed 15 February 2008).
64. Rosemary Foot, 'Torture: The Struggle over a Peremptory Norm in a Counter-Terrorist Era', International Relations, 20(2), 2006, p. 137.
65. Foot, 'Torture', pp. 136, 139.
66. Foot, 'Torture', p. 138.
67. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 208.
68. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 207.
69. Foot, 'Torture', p. 141.
70. Michel Foucault, 'An Aesthetics of Existence', in Foucault Live, trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylverer Lotringer (New York: Semiotext, 1989), p. 311.
71. Linklater, 'Torture and Civilization', p. 117.
72. Foot, 'Torture', p. 144.
73. Linklater identifies this same quote and makes a similar point in 'Torture and Civilization', p. 116. McCain has repeated these sentiments, most recently at the same Republican debate where other candidates defended 'enhanced interrogation' methods, stating in contrast 'It's not about the terrorists; it's about us... It's about what kind of country we are', in Wallsten, 'GOP Candidates', p. 15.
74. An editorial in the Boston Globe asserted: 'there is a split... between leaders like President Bush with no combat experience and those like Colin Powell who know combat and want to maintain the Geneva Conventions as a protection for US troops'. 'Soldiers versus Bush', Boston Globe, 18 September 2006, p. A12.
75. Foucault, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics', pp. 352, 353. Besides the mode of subjection, Foucault lists (1) ethical substance; (2) self-forming activity whereby we 'can change ourselves'; and (3) the 'kind of being to which we aspire when we behave in a moral way' - our 'telos'. Foucault, 'Genealogy of Ethics', pp. 353-5.
76. Foucault, 'Genealogy of Ethics', pp. 353-5.
77. 'Bush Apologizes, Calls Abuse "Stain" on Nation', Washington Post, 7 May 2004.
78. Bowman, Honor, p. 24.
79. Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 72.
80. Foucault, 'Genealogy of Ethics', p. 351.
81. Bennett, 'How Is It Then?', p. 654, emphasis in original.
82. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 219.
83. Steele, 'Making Words Matter'.
84. Ronald R. Krebs and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 'Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric', European Journal of International Relations, 13(1), 2007, pp. 35-66.
85. According to Foucault, for an action to be "moral," it must not be reducible to an act or a series of acts conforming to a rule, a law, or a value. Of course all moral action involves a relationship with the reality in which it is carried out, and a relationship with the self. The latter is not simply "self-awareness" but self-formation as an "ethical subject"', Foucault, Uses of Pleasure, p. 28.
86. See http://durbin.senate.gov/gitmo.cfm (accessed 15 February 2008).
87. Foucault calls 'heterotopias' sites of 'counter-arrangements in which all the real arrangements...are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned'. These are sites of function - They have 'the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other'. Furthermore, they possess a duality of possibility - 'Creating a space of illusion that reveals how all of real space is more illusory, all the locations within which life is fragmented' and also 'have the function of forming another space, another real space'. Michel Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias', in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 352, 354, 356. On heterotopias, see also Mark B. Salter, 'Governmentalities of an Airport: Heterotopia and Confession', International Political Sociology, 1(1), pp. 49-66.
88. See http://andrewsullivan.com, and http://www.clintonfein.com/torture (accessed 15 February 2008).
89. http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/09/this_is_an_actu.html (accessed 15 February 2008).
90. Scott Horton, chairman of the Committee on International Law, in 'Ghosts of Abu Ghraib', available at: www.hbo.com/docs/programs/ ghostsofabughraib/synopsis.html (accessed 15 February 2008).
91. Foot, 'Torture', p. 138.
92. Bennett, 'How Is It, Then?', p. 664.
93. Hannah Britton, 'Trading Places: Juxtaposing South Africa and the United States', in Robin Riley and Naeem Inayatullah (eds), Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War (New York: Palgrave, 2006), p. 176.
94. 'At the beginning of the nineteenth century, then, the great spectacle of physical punishment disappeared; the tortured body was avoided; the theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment': Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 14.
95. Jean Bethke Elshtain, 'Shame and Public Life', in Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn (eds), Trauma and Self (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), p. 285.
96. Linklater, 'Torture and Civilization', p. 117.
97. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea; trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964), p. 170.