Not wanting to get into a lengthy exposition on philosophical Utilitarianism here, but the humane treatment of prisoners is a great case where Doing the Right Thing serves your long-term interests much better than doing the wrong thing. The key difference here—and one that is probably only understood with age—is the timescale. If all you care about is the immediate gratification of bloodlust or revenge—or winning the next election—, then torture or carpet-bombing may work perfectly well. If you truly are dug in for a war that may last for generations, doing the right thing is well worth the required expenditure of self-discipline, restraint, and patience.

This has some scary implications though. I do not know how a society obsessed with immediate gratification, brutally short-term quarterly earnings cycles, sensory-overload video games and media, 2-to-4-year election cycles, 5-minute news stories, and 1-day news cycles, can ever develop the correct perspective for moral action.

Time to read “Collapse” now.

But, ya gotta admit, phrases like:

Zarqawi—and the ~20,000 like him—

could confuse – Zarqawi is a well-known foreign terrorist. I doubt there are 20,000 foreign terrorists in Iraq (I’d guess a few hundred).

the Islamic fundamentalists, the terrorists and their ilk;

But maybe it’s a semantic problem. The insurgents (ex-Baathists, primarily) are using terrorist techniques now, targeting civilians. So, they’re “terrorists”. I might have inferred you meant “foreign” terrorists, the inclusion of Zarqawi aiding the inference.

It seems there’s a concerted effort to blur the lines between al Qaeda-like terrorists, who might threaten the US (to a miniscule degree) with Iraqi Baathist foot soldiers, who never threatened the US. It’s easy to see the advantage of blurring these categories, to turn a war of choice into one of self-defense and reprisal.

But sorry for implying that you were making this explicit claim.

Don’t know where the idea came from that the insurgency is primarily made up of foreign terrorists on a jihad.

You seem to have inferred the “foreign”, “terrorist” and “jihad” parts on your own.

Don’t know where the idea came from that the insurgency is primarily made up of foreign terrorists on a jihad. Oh yeah, the Bush administration keeps saying that, and the news readers keep reading it. I guess it’s true then.

That public belief in such a reality would be convenient to the US administration, and contradicts all objective accounts of the insurgency’s composition, is surely coincidental.

Cuz if we weren’t fighting terrorists like Al-Zarqawi in Iraq, we’d be fighting them in the US. And the real people of Iraq would still be showering us with roses, if not for fear of those foreign terrorists.

Like Al-Zarqawi’s “website” said a few days ago, he’s super tight with bin Laden, they trade strategy and recipes and stuff.

The insurgents in Iraq got passports stamped in Bali, Madrid, Kenya, Nairobi, they make cheese with the Germans and French, they speak Pashto when they’re hanging with the Taliban, Arabic when they were scheming with OBL, and Persian when they’re meeting with the Iranian mullahs. They’re international, these insurgents, and you’d better believe they’d be on the streets of NYC if the flypaper wasn’t drawing them into Iraq. They prolly come from Syria, where most of Saddams WMDs went.

TV told me.

Not to mention that Rumsfeld’s offer to resign was rejected – twice and Alberto Gonzales was promoted. What kind of message does that send?

I’d be careful with the argument that torture doesn’t provide results and use the lesser argument that it doesn’t provide reliable results.

This isn’t our first series of posts about torture and abuse on QandO as I pointed out earlier. And we have been quite plain in our moral condemnation of torture, first and foremost. In the response to all the rationalizations for torture cited above I wrote:

“But in a broader argument, we’re saying that you can make all the technical arguments you care to make, rationalize torture and murder as some sort of burning necessity upon which our safety is dependent and claim that abuse is fair pay-back for the behavior of our enemies, but we, all of us, reject any argument which tries to legitimize torture and abuse, and we reject it on principle. None of us want to hear bad things about our military. But when it does bad things, it should be criticized. This is an argument about who we are and what we support on principle, not what we can rationalize as appropriate given the current circumstance.”

And that principle is that torture is and always has been morally wrong, and as Americans who believe in standing on principle torture is unacceptable morally for any reason and at any time. That was the whole purpose of the rebuttal to the comments. Sorry if it wasn’t clear.

I think that you’re being unfair to the QandO guys. For one thing, when you read their posts, they strongly and clearly express a moral objection to torture.

We know that there are people who consider their dismissal of torture stories to be a positive thing, evidence of their own toughness and lack of squeamishness. I’m imagining myself in a debate with someone who doesn’t share my moral concern with torture. I’m unlikely to sway them; it’s ultimately a value judgement.

I think I’d have a much better chance of convincing them that torture isn’t in our best interests because of the galvanizing effect it has on Muslim “persuadables”. That’s an argument that the other guy can’t dismiss as easily, and it’s one that the conservative war-backers at QandO are well-equipped to make. I’m very glad to have it out there.

Well it’s good to know they’re on our side, but I have no respect for someone who thinks this is not primarily a moral issue.