The National Review’s Rich Lowry points out the logical inconsistency in our European critics’ “concerns” over Gitmo, the Al Qaeda detainees (POWs?), and the Geneva Convention. In “Geneva Absurdity,” Lowry writes,

[…] the Geneva Convention seeks to protect innocent civilians by keeping soldiers in uniform, and by defining those combatants who don’t wear uniforms as being outside the rules of warfare and undeserving of the privileges afforded to legitimate prisoners of war.

During the bombing in Afghanistan we heard a lot from the Europeans about collateral damages, so it is strange that they should now turn around and be willing to overlook the chief cause of civilian casualties in Afghanistan: al Qaeda and Taliban troops who not only didn’t wear uniforms, but actively hide among civilians.

One might even think that the Europeans would be especially eager to define al Qaeda and the Taliban as outside the rules of civilized combat, given (again) the Europeans’ understandable concern with protecting civilian populations from the depredations of war.

But that, of course, would require following a consistent moral principle rather than simply a knee-jerk anti-Americanism: i.e., the Americans are wrong when they bomb terrorists who are hiding among civilians, and wrong when they try to follow rules to discourage terrorists from hiding among civilians.

Lowry’s right. Consistency follows from adherence to a particular, stable set of beliefs — the hallmark of “vertical” Enlightenment thinking — but European intellectuals have moved beyond such oppressive paradigms. Now — liberated from the shackles of bourgeois “reason” — these progressive thinkers are free to operate contingently, which means (among other things) that there’s no “reason” why what Lowry calls “knee-jerk ideology” is any less “valid” than logic as the animating force behind a given position.

The ends justify the means…

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