Reader Response: When you say we have to go down a level to meet and destroy evil are you saying waterboarding is not torture? Christopher Hitchins got waterboarded and said if that is not torture, then there is no torture.
     What I am saying is that stopping Hitler --or the genocide in Darfur--  requires armed force and the will to use it --which means killing people. That is what I refer to when I say we have to get down into the gutter ourselves. War, after all is evil. Even a "just" war entails the taking of human lives.
     I agree with Obama and McCain that waterboarding and other forms of torture are not permissible for Americans. But if the matter were left up to you, personally, and you could absolutely prevent the planes crashing into the World Trade Center by waterboarding a terrorist, would you do it? If you didn't do it, and the planes crash, what would you say to the families of the victims? Would the 3,000 dead be on your conscience? Let’s make the dilemma even more onerous. You have in your custody 100 suspected terrorists. One of them, you don’t know who, may have information on a WMD attack on an American city. Do you waterboard them all? Do you waterboard none of them?
     Moral choices become agonizingly complicated when you fight evil. If the only way to bring down the Nazis is to kill them, do we do it? What if some of the killing is long, drawn-out and painful, involving lots of innocent civilians? Do we do it anyway or do we let Hitler continue to ship Jews to Auschwitz?  If the only way to stop the Janjaweed from raping 7-year-old girls in Darfur is to drop napalm on them, do we do it? Or do we let the girls get raped?
    And if we do use deadly force, do we lower ourselves to the level of the enemy? Can we do that as long as our motives are “pure?”

My Reader Retorts: Seems your questions are only answerable with 20/20 hindsight, which does not exist. McCain gave the Green Bay Packers offensive line as member of his squadron when tortured in North Vietnam. Seems your questions are only answerable with 20/20 hindsight, which does not exist. McCain gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line as members of his squadron when tortured in North Vietnam. So the reliability of the information is in question when torture is used. When we violate the premise of our country (and even the Attorney General won’t say if waterboarding is torture) I believe the country sinks into a murky area that will be difficult to extricate it from. There must be a high road and someone needs to walk it or we look as bad as the bad guys.
     If I were about to be tortured I would be screaming –for a stenographer. But I would tell the bad guys anything they wanted to hear, true or not. Torture has proven over the centuries to be an unreliable way of getting at the truth. And for the record, waterboarding is torture.
    I still believe that deadly force is the only thing that can deter genocide in Darfur. What I’m saying is that if we have to engage in the evil of war to rescue the suffering black Africans of the region, we just have to be careful that we don’t lower ourselves so far into hatred and brutality that we squander our souls in the process. 

Defying logic…Barack Obama has gotten an eyeful in Iraq. He has met Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who said he thinks the Coalition troops could be withdrawn over 16 months as Obama proposes. There is a reason the Iraq government believes this. The war has been won. The government is meeting the political and social goals set by the Coalition, banished armed resistance from the cities and is backed up by a reliable army that grows stronger every day.
     For that they can thank General David Petraeus’ brilliant counter-insurgency strategy and The Surge. The Surge put enough additional American troops on the ground to allow the establishment of neighborhood strong points in Baghdad and to train and support the Iraqi army as it developed into a respectable fighting force.
    So, given the success of The Surge, why did Barack Obama say this to ABC’s Terry Moran when asked if, knowing what he does now, would he still have opposed The Surge: “These kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult….Hindsight is 20/20. But I think that what I am absolutely convinced of is, at that time, we had to change the political debate because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one that I just disagreed with, and one that I continue to disagree with -- is to look narrowly at Iraq and not focus on these broader issues [Afghanistan and Pakistan]." Huh?    
     In other words, even if he knew The Surge would be successful, Obama would still have opposed it. This says volumes about his capacity to be commander-in-chief.