Why Treating POWs Properly is Important

The Paper Chase has a couple human rights groups arguing that our treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay makes it hypocritical for us to criticize Iraq for Geneva Convention violations.

I'm not going to touch that assertion, but I do want to point out something that seems lost in the shuffle. The best reason for abiding by the Geneva Convention is NOT the prevention of reciprocal violations. Even if the Iraqis begin torturing our POWs, there is a very good strategic (and probably a moral) reason for treating their POWs properly: We want them to surrender.

If an Iraqi soldier or general thinks he is going to be mistreated by the coalition, or shipped off without rights to a Caribbean island for indefinite detainment, he is much less likely to surrender.

The best historical example is the final assault on Germany. German POWs were treated well by American and British forces, and our forces received relatively good treatment in return. Even more importantly, as the German regime began to crumble, Germans were willing to surrender to American and British forces. By the end of the war we had over 400,000 POWs in America (German and Italian), not to mention thousands of prisoners still in Europe.

Not so on the Eastern front. Years of brutality and summary execution of prisoners on both sides convinced Germans (probably correctly) that they would be mistreated or killed if they surrendered to the Russians. Thus they fought to the last man, inflicting significant Russian casualties in the process.

So I think the real question is, not whether our treatment of the Guantanamo detainees makes America hypocritical, but whether fear of that fate is keeping Iraqis soldiers and their leaders from surrendering.