That was the toast Soviet leader Josef Stalin proposed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill over dinner in 1943 in Tehran. They were meeting for the first time and the discussion had turned to the fate of Nazi leaders following Germany’s defeat. Stalin wanted no fewer than 50,000 of them executed. Churchill considered mass summary executions dishonorable. Roosevelt, “in an apparent attempt to lighten the conversation, suggested perhaps 49,000 would be adequate.”
William Shawcross recounts this exchange early in his new book, “Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.” A distinguished journalist, Shawcross brings a strong dose of common sense to the fevered debate over what constitutes due process and proper treatment for those now waging an unconventional war against the West. He also brings a unique pedigree: His father, Hartley Shawcross, was Britain’s lead prosecutor at the military tribunal that became known as the Nuremberg Trials.
In hindsight, it’s easy to imagine that Nuremberg was the inevitable culmination of World War II. But as Hartley Shawcross understood and William Shawcross makes clear, “there was absolutely no precedent.” George Orwell was among those who believed it was a bad idea. He predicted such “cruel pageantry of the law” would focus “a romantic light on the accused.”
Chief prosecutor (and U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson saw things differently: “We must make it clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it.” Nazi leaders would be charged also with “crimes against humanity,” a completely new legal concept that “encompassed the persecution of racial and religious groups.”
What has all this to do with 9/11 and Mohammed, the terrorist currently incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? Shawcross explains: At Nuremberg, our civilization designed a vehicle to anathemize men imbued with evil. But evil re-invents itself in every age. In the 1940s, the world confronted and, with immense sacrifice, defeated the horror of fascism. The scale and the nature of the threats are different today, but the ideology of al-Qaida and its Islamist associates shares attributes with Nazism; it, too, is totalitarian, and it, too, has anti-Semitism at its core. In the case of al-Qaida, that intransigent hatred is extended to all “infidels.” Just as Hitler planned a “thousand-year Reich,” so the Islamists call for a global caliphate in which they and their laws prevail absolutely and endlessly.
There is this difference between then and now: At Nuremberg, we were dealing with an enemy that had been defeated and an ideology that had been discredited. Today, by contrast, our enemies continue to fight, and Islamic supremacism is far from vanquished. Islamists of various stripes are well funded – the West’s addiction to oil guarantees that – and prominent in international organizations. What’s more, Iran’s theocratic rulers – for years the world’s main sponsors of terrorism – may soon possess nuclear weapons.
We in the West can’t seem to agree on the laws of this new war. For example, in both Europe and America, the activists, lawyers, academics and journalists known as “transnational progressives” insist that under Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions – added in 1977 but never ratified by the U.S. – those who routinely violate the rules of war are entitled to all the rights and privileges of honorable prisoners of war – and civilian trials as well.
Also: They have judged the Bush administration criminal for having used “enhanced interrogation techniques” – which they denounce as illegal “torture” – to pressure Mohammad and a few other al-Qaida commanders to reveal what they knew of ongoing terrorist operations. (A total of about 30 unlawful combatants were subjected to coercive tactics; exactly three were waterboarded – none at Guantanamo, where detainees enjoy protections that the defendants at Nuremberg never dreamed of.)
The West, Shawcross concludes, has come to a dangerous crossroads. In the1940s, the United States and Europe had “the will and the ability to sustain their defense of freedom.” To meet the Islamist challenge of the 21st century, Shawcross writes, the Western democracies again “must be self-confident and strong enough to defend themselves against the forces of tyranny.”
Europe in particular, Shawcross adds, “risks repeating the fatal weaknesses of the 1920s and 1930s. If American power is withdrawn, the world will finally realize how much they owe to the most benign hegemony ever created.” By then, of course, it will be too late for such awareness to make a difference.
