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.

More than a Superhero Movie...Moviegoers are participating in a mass seminar on the nature of evil. The Dark Knight, a film in the Batman franchise by director Christopher Nolan, features a character of pure evil: The Joker, as played brilliantly by the late Heath Ledger. The Joker bears some study in this film, which explores the nature of evil and what men and women must do to combat it.
     First, we have to come to understand the nature of The Joker’s evil. He is not made evil by greed, or by the lust for power. Evil, for its own sake, the drug The Joker is hooked on. Picture Hitler without the trappings of state power. As Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred observes, “Some men just like to watch the world burn.”
     Second, we discover that The Joker’s evil has a kind of twisted integrity. As one National Review columnist put it, he cannot be reasoned with, bought off, bullied or intimidated. That makes him incredibly frightening and dangerous. Like the serial killer Ted Bundy, The Joker is a master manipulator on a mission to prove that while he can be purely evil, the men who oppose him cannot remain purely good.
    The Joker has a valid point. Hitler, who was purely evil, was not brought down by sweet reason and acts of kindness. He could not be reasoned with, appeased, bargained with, bullied or intimidated. He wanted, from the very beginning, to start a war that would immolate millions upon millions of human beings, and he got his wish. To stop him from burning down the entire world we had to lower ourselves to his level, and to all the dirty work that war entails. We destroyed Hitler, but we came away with unclean hands.
     That is the lesson of the movie; that to destroy evil one must make hard decisions and carry them through, even if it means descending into the gutter to catch and kill the adversary. This is quite a message for a superhero movie to deliver, but The Dark Knight is no ordinary adaptation of a comic book. It is a harrowing demonstration of how fast things can fall apart if evil is given the slightest chance to succeed.

The Butcher of Darfur...Pure evil backed by the power of the state is, thankfully, a rare commodity in this world. The difference between a Ted Bundy and an Adolf Hitler is not in the degree of evil, but in their access to power. Give pure evil the power and you get Pol Pot, or Joseph Stalin, or Omar Hassan Al Bashir.
     Al-Bashir’s continued existence is a blot on the honor of world civilization. The president of Sudan, it is al-Bashir who planned, initiated and is ordering the massacre of black Africans in Darfur.
     In the London Sunday Times yesterday a doctor –Halima Bashir-- serving the refugees in Darfur told a horrifying story of the depredations of the Janjaweed, the mounted murder squads that have claimed over 400,000 lives of black Sudanese and displaced 2.5 million others so far.
    The doctor was discussing supplies she needed for the village clinic when she noticed a commotion outside. A wailing crowd approached and they carried in their arms the girls from the local school. Their dresses were dirty and bloodied. The people in the crowd screamed that the Janjaweed had attacked the school and raped all the schoolgirls. The youngest was seven, the oldest 13. They had all been gang raped. Their legs and privates were lacerated and bruised. In all Dr. Bashir treated 40 victims.
    A teacher from the school, who was also raped, described the scene to Dr. Halima:

 “It was like a band of wild animals just jumping on us and forcing us to the floor. All around me girls were being raped, regardless of their age. The Janjaweed carried guns, knives, heavy sticks — the ones they use to beat their horses. If any girl tried to resist, they beat her. They were shouting and screaming at us. You know what they were saying? ‘We have come here to kill you! To finish you all! You are black slaves! You are worse than dogs! Either we kill you or we give you Arab children. Then there will be no more black slaves in this country.’ The worst was that they were laughing and yelping with joy as they did those terrible things…. They said, ‘We will let you live so you can tell your mothers and fathers and brothers what we did to you. Tell them from us: if you stay, the same and worse will happen to you all. Next time, we will show no mercy. Leave this land. Sudan is for the Arabs. It is not for black dogs and slaves’.”

     Dr. Halima passed the story on to U.N. representatives. Not long after she was abducted by Janjaweed troops, bound and gagged, severely beaten, then gang raped. She was released and fled to her native village --which was attacked and destroyed by Sudanese helicopters and Janjaweed riders. Her father was killed in the attack.
     This is just one story among thousands of tales of atrocity and murder. The International Criminal Court last week charged al-Bashir with genocide, but it is going to take military action to put an end to the holocaust of black Africans in Darfur. The problem is that no one seems willing to do the job. The logical candidates are the United States Britain and France. Perhaps, with a new administration, the Allies will take action. Or perhaps not.