Remember in March 2003, when the US first started invading Iraq and you could turn on the TV and "watch war"? Remember how they were reporting that huge numbers of Iraqi soldiers were just outright surrendering? I don't know if this was true or not - I never heard much follow-up after that, and it is the sort of thing that makes for good propoganda - but the reporting made it sound like at the first sight of American military the Iraqi soldiers were waving white flags, to deliberately escape from whatever kind of hellhole the Iraqi military was. Upon hearing this mentioned several times, I turned to my father (I was at my parents' house that weekend) and said "So if this is true, that means that being a US prisoner of war is significantly better than being a free Iraqi soldier."
Obviously, I hadn't yet heard of Abu Ghraib.
This memory came back to me the other day, when the radio was talking about how people taken prisoner by Canadians in Afghanistan are treated. It occurs to me that, apart from the fact that we should be better than that, and apart from the fact that torturing our prisoners invites people to torture are citizens, and apart from the fact that it's ineffective anyway, and apart from basic human decency, this is another reason why we should treat our prisoners humanely.
Imagine if everyone, everyone in the world, knew that if they surrendered to or were arrested by a Canadian soldier, they would be put somewhere that's clean and sanitary, with sufficient food and health care, and they absolutely would not be beaten, raped, or tortured.
Clearly, the pragmatic decision would be to surrender, or to go quietly if you get arrested. Obviously some people aren't going to go along with this, but that would be out of ideology, not out of self-preservation. If our prisoners can get tortured, that gives people the motivation to do everything possible to avoid being taken prisoner, lest the unspeakable happen. Now if they didn't have this motivation to do everything possible to evade our troops, imagine how much easier that would make our military's job. Some people are still going to fight them because there is ideology and even fanticism involved, but others will have far greater motivation to go along quietly, or to surrender, or even just to treat our troops with a grudging respect. Imagine a situation where those rivers of surrendering enemy soliders - whether they were real or a creation of propganda - were unquestionably making the best decision for themselves and for their families. Wouldn't that make things better for everyone?
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