Sullying Our Reputation

The Senate overwhelmingly has passed a measure sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of anyone in the custody of the United States military. The Bush administration has threatened a veto, and Vice President Dick Cheney has been lobbying for an exemption for the CIA.

McCain's amendment to this year's military spending bill would restrict interrogation techniques to those authorized by the Army Field Manual. The 90 favorable Senate votes included knowledgeable hawks such as Sens. John Warner (R-Va.) and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), and the amendment has been endorsed by former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili.

Why oppose a measure that says we should live up to our ideals, as well as the Convention Against Torture that was negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the Senate? According to Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.), "The last thing we want to do is put undue burdens on military and intelligence officials who are on the ground trying to obtain critical information on the war on terror." In the words of Sen. Pat Roberts (R.-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, "Passing a law that effectively telegraphs to the entire terrorist world what they can expect if they are caught is not only counterproductive, but could be downright dangerous."

When President Bush spoke to the United Nations about terrorism Sept. 14, he said, "This war will not be won by force of arms alone ... We must also defeat them in the battle of ideas." He was right. In the Information Age, success is not merely the result of whose army wins, but also whose story wins. Hard military power is not enough. We also need the soft power of attraction. The current struggle against extremist jihadi violence is not a clash of civilizations, but a civil war within Islam. We cannot win unless the Muslim moderates win. While we need hard power to battle the extremists, we need the soft power of attraction to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Muslims. Polls throughout the Muslim world show that we are not winning this battle. In Jordan and Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is more popular than Bush. The graphic images and detailed stories of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib have done enormous damage to the credibility and soft power that we need to win this struggle. It does little good for Karen Hughes, the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, to tour the Muslim world with messages of goodwill if her administration threatens to veto a measure to prevent torture. One graphic image is worth more than a million official words or the billion dollars that we spend annually on public diplomacy.

We can learn a lesson from the past. During the Vietnam War, the United States was also widely unpopular around the world. Protesters filled the streets to demonstrate against our policies. The song that the demonstrators sang, however, was not the communist "Internationale," but rather Martin Luther King's "We Shall Overcome." At the same time that our government policies made us unpopular, the openness of our civil society made aspects of America attractive. Today, there is no way to take back the pictures of a soldier holding a Muslim on a leash or a hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires dangling from his body, but the fact that we have a free press, independent courts and a Congress willing to confront the executive and reaffirm the values expressed in the ban against torture provides us a similar measure of soft power.

Since the House of Representatives has not passed an amendment to the appropriations bill that bans torture, the fate of the Senate measure will be determined by a conference committee of the Senate and the House in the coming weeks. It will have to weigh the administration's opposition to the investment in our soft power that John McCain's amendment represents. The Senate's affirmation of the ban on torture is an important message to the world. What a pity it would be if the administration or the conference committee should step on it.

By Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former assistant secretary of defense and the author of "The Power Game: A Washington Novel."