What do You Call a Milestone Which Doesn’t Measure Anything?

Imagine, if you will, that there is a paranoid recluse living on your block. Sullen and unpleasant, he spends most of his time inside his house and actively avoids anything approaching civilized discourse with his neighbors.

Then, one bright and sunny day, he murders someone innocently strolling down the sidewalk. He barricades himself inside of his home before the police can arrive.

There would be an attempt at negotiation, of course. It is well worth the effort if you can get the perp to give up without having to risk more lives. But if that doesn’t happen, if he decides to commit suicide-by-police, eventually the forced entry team is going to have to suit up and do what has to be done to protect everyone who lives in that neighborhood.

But, as the body armor is being strapped on and the equipment is being checked, what would happen if the SWAT guys were told that they had to back off just as soon as one of their members was killed? An innocent person died, so they have to give up and leave when another life is lost. That way there is some sort of cosmic balance, you see?

They would look at you like you were some kind of freakin’ idiot because, let us face it, you would be a freakin’ idiot to suggest such a thing.

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More on Torture

Mitch’s old post on the McCain Amendment just received a thoughtful comment, almost one year later, from a commenter who points out some of the unpleasant realities of the practice known as “waterboarding.” It really does sound bad. Is the commenter’s characterization accurate? I don’t know but it seems plausible.

Let’s stipulate that waterboarding is torture. I think it is but I could be mistaken. It’s clearly a lot less damaging to suspects than are many traditional tortures. If, as the commenter claims, few people can last more than 14 seconds then so much the better. They can reveal what they know and go on to live their lives, though perhaps imprisoned, at least in one piece physically.

The real question is what to do instead of waterboarding people whom we think have valuable information. Currently we tacitly allow torture by other countries to which we and our allies send suspects for interrogation. The recent UK bomb plot was stopped based on information gained from such a suspect who was sent to Pakistan and tortured. We are going to have more such ticking-bomb situations in the future. Should we observe all of the niceties and accept a higher rate of successful attacks by terrorists? Should we waterboard some suspects ourselves? Should we extradite them to places such as Pakistan and Jordan and look the other way when they are tortured (really tortured)? These are the only options. Choose one. There is no free lunch.

I agree with Wretchard and other commentators (and, I think, President Bush) who argue that public officials who oppose torture of terror suspects should explain why as-yet-theoretical risks of civil-rights violations of suspects outweigh demonstrated risks of mass-death from terror attacks. I am not saying that people who oppose torture have no case, only that they should make one. So far they have mainly asserted that torture is bad without comparing it to the alternatives and weighing the costs and benefits. That’s an evasion. We should have a debate.

Or perhaps, by their silence on the cost/benefit issue, torture opponents have already conceded the argument. I hope that’s not the case. I think the country would be better off to debate this and other important issues openly.

The Bombing of Japanese Cities as Omen

A few days ago I watched part of a public-TV documentary, whose title I didn’t catch, about the US firebombing of Japanese cities. It was factually interesting but also full of hindsight judgment of the whole enterprise as immoral. (It’s possible that I missed something as I did not watch the entire documentary.) There was an emphasis on the death, destruction and horrible suffering that the bombing caused in Japan, and also on deaths among American air crews. There were interviews with former B-29 crew members who expressed moral qualms about what they had done.

This was all reasonable. I have no doubt that our bombing of German and Japanese cities was one of the most terrible things ever done. But what made the documentary tendentious was that it left out the political and military context; there was no more than superficial discussion of what led the USA to adopt such brutal tactics. The remarkable tenacity and cruelty of the Japanese fighters we encountered in our island-hopping campaign weren’t discussed, nor was the terrifying prospect of invading the Japanese home islands — a prospect which, until the atomic bombings, appeared certain and would have certainly killed millions. Instead the documentary framed our decision to burn the cities as having been based on Curtis LeMay’s desire to find a more-effective alternative to using inaccurate high-explosive bombs against Japanese factories. Of course, when you present the story in such a narrow way it makes it look like we went too far. The documentary might have been redeemed if someone had said: Yes, we did terrible things, but they only became conceivable late in the war after we learned what the enemy was capable of, and the alternatives were all much worse. But no one said that, at least not that I heard.

I don’t think this documentary could have been made in the 1960s or 1970s. It would have been widely seen as revisionist. Too many people were still aware, either from direct experience or from having learned about the war from family elders or in school or from the media, of the rationale for destroying the Japanese cities. But nowadays probably a lot of the people doing film production, and certainly a lot of the viewers, are too young and too scantily educated about World War II to recognize an incomplete historical treatment when they see one. This is a great pity in the context of the current war, because people in the democracies need to understand that insufficient seriousness in fighting radical Islam now could in the long run lead to a situation in which we kill millions in order to get the fight over with and protect our people. It could happen. The history of our war with Japan makes clear what we are capable of doing to an enemy who provokes us sufficiently. The Islamists, who are as cruel as the Japanese were, need to understand this too, but probably won’t until it’s too late.

(And of course these are not original thoughts on my part. I am grateful to a number of bloggers, as well as commenters on this blog, for helping me to think them through for myself.)

UPDATE: In the comments, Jim Bennett suggests that the Islamists are making the same specific miscalculation as the Japanese did: “The Japanese thought that suicide tactics would demoralize the Americans and serve as a demonstration of Japanese resolve. They were right, in a way, but they failed to anticipate what the results of that effect would be.” The thugs and autocrats who make war on us often have a poor understanding of the political dynamics of democratic societies in general and of American society in particular. Eventually they tend to overplay their hands.

The real game is the competition for public opinion in our country. Successful war means an early consensus for defeating the enemy; unsuccessful war means no consensus on what to do or even what the problem is — until the enemy miscalculates and provokes us severely. Both scenarios have the same ending for the enemy.

The only successful enemies the USA has are ones with limited goals who are shrewd enough to remain below our threshold of provocation. The leaders of wartime Japan were insufficiently shrewd and failed to limit their goals. The Islamists appear to be repeating those mistakes.

In honor of the late Oriana Fallaci

Eric from Classical Values proposes Something along the lines of a Judeo-Christian-Atheist Alliance in defense of the West.

Ms. Fallaci was an Atheist who valued the cultural heritage of the West, and correctly saw that it was in grave danger from Islamic violence and terrorism. She met with Pope Benedict XVI, to discuss these matters not long before her death. The Pope is willing to say things Muslims don�t like, without apologizing for it, either. Good.

Everyone who values freedom and the cultural heritage of the West, even accepting the differences among our interpretation of those things, now has a common enemy. We should work together to defeat that enemy. We can work out our very important differences as civilized people, in a lawful manner, by argument, persuasion, electoral politics, litigation — but not suicide-murder bombings, or video-taped beheadings, or mob violence or fatwas.

I am an orthodox Roman Catholic, and I am very open to the idea.

So, query, how to give some practical effect to such a proposed alliance?

UPDATE: The exact language used by the Pope, with a link to the full speech, is below the fold

UPDATE II: Perry de Havilland says “sign me up”

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Quote of the Day

Hamstringing law enforcement with PC rules then reacting to the resulting public disappointment with magisterial pronouncements about the sole of legitimacy residing in the state has the effect of disempowering those who would trust the state and empowering those who would subvert it. Hence the bizarre phenomenon of laws which only restrict the law abiding, while scofflaws are more less left to scoff.

On an international scale the result is Darfur, where only the sleeping lifeguard is authorized to save the drowning man who, though capable of swimming, is prohibited from doing so.

Wretchard