This is what our tax pounds and many British and Allied lives were spent to end forever...
To liberals, libertarians, isolationists, Little Englanders, pacifists and other opponents of the torture of waterboarding.
This is what the victims of torture need in order to recover and rebuild their lives when the torture has been ended - say by the 'illegal war 'against Saddam Hussein.
This is what the victims of waterboarding need to recover rebuild their lives when the waterboarding has been ended, say by the victims telling our Allies' intelligence agents who the other terrorists are, and where they trained and what their plans are..
1 comment:
1. It's not clear that all Libertarians oppose the war.
I certainly didn't. However, I have an objection to fighting a war where the objective is unclear and we elect to handicap ourselves in our fight. Like Sherman I believe that once we decide to fight the war, we should do what is necessary to win it quickly. However we live in an era that believes that war can be made "moral". Thus wars go on indefinitely because hurting an opponent sufficiently to actually end the conflict would be achievable only through such force as would break the rules (written or unwritten)
2. It's not clear that the war was fought to end mass killings or torture. Certainly such things did occur but the logic of humanitarian intervention is that we need to do it at the time, not years after. There's no demand to intervene in the Congo or Sudan despite the ongoing murders there.
It seems more plausible that the cause was the concurrence of opinion that we needed to "fix" the Middle East after 9-11. I think that remains a worthwhile goal but this generation hasn't got the moral courage to actually do what our children or grandchildren will eventually do.
I'm optimistic about Iraq but that was an American success (and a British failure); Less so about Afghanistan because it seems that "our" Afghans are barely better than the Taleban. And besides, now that the chosen one has taken over, I wonder whether the Americans will see it through.
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