[quote]quan2m wrote:
Not that this thread hasn’t already been inundated with reasonable arguments as to the use of torture, but of course I would like to give it a go.
Once upon a time guerrilla warfare was considered uncivilized and at times criminal. Today, we train every soldier that will carry a rifle in the rudiments of guerrilla warfare. Oh well… the rules of warfare change over time to adopt the most effective warfighting methods for the objective desired.
Torture has and will always be acceptable. Maybe not to you, Maybe not to me. However, to an officer who is charged with the well-being of his troops, or a CIA operative who thinks of 9/11 and the current situation in Israel torture seems like a good idea. I like that someone out there is doing what needs to be done to win. Period. You can argue philosophy all day long, but I can guarantee you that your philisophical arguments mean jack shit in the real world. Get used to it. Right now, you’re in a safer world because someone decided that some other bastard needed to be tortured to save lifes and win battles.
Try to use some of that energy to spend some time thinking about something useful. Like getting African nations to give up the tribal faction bullshit and start working toward national gov’ts that don’t solely subsist on violence, extortion, and hand-outs from the UN.
You could get a lot more mileage out of that than trying to win a war w/o fighting.
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OK, if you want to argue for terrorism on utilitarian grounds, and turn your back on centuries of America’s promise, that’s fine. But let me ask you a couple of questions then. Do you think the war against Islamic extremism, the “global war on terror,” is a war that can be won entirely or even mostly by military force? The situation in Iraq is not good (it’s undoubtedly better than the NYT would have you believe, but they just secured the fucking main airport road in Baghdad, after two plus years of war). Read Andrew Krepinevich’s article in Foreign Affairs a month back if you disagree, spend the eight bucks and learn something about guerrilla warfare from a guy who served in the Army and literally wrote the book on Vietnam. Now, after two and a half years of war, we’re in this state, and the military is having huge manpower problems just fighting this war, while huge swathes of our country, right or wrong, turn against it. So, with that in mind, is there any way we can defeat Al Qaeda and their ilk by primarily military means? If you’re semi-rational and accept the fact that this is a war for “hearts and minds,” that we have to win Muslims over to the ideas of democracy and freedom, the same way we won over millions of Eastern Europeans two decades ago, then it seems pretty clear that Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and every other blatant abuse of captured Muslims is the worst thing you could possibly do to win this war. I’m not talking about appeasing the enemy, I’m talking about not turning the entire Middle East against us by killing captives, beating prisoners, and even abusing the religion of our enemies to get information out of them. Is potentially getting information about a car bomb in Baghdad worth turning millions of Muslims against us?