I’ll state my position as plainly as I can – the CIA could waterboard “Mahmoud” once a week, and western democracies would be nowhere in danger of becoming “no better than the enemy” or “losing our soul” or other such nonsense. Some of the tactics employed during WW2 in defeating the Axis feel rather short of pleasure thresholds, but the victors emerged from the morass as the “greatest generation” nonetheless. (Of course, give it time. Another 20 years and we’ll could well be sending reparations and “never again” mea culpas to the descendants of Hiroshima.)
But then again, relativism was never my strong suit. Try as I might, I cannot place “water up the nose” on the same ethical plane as say, the application of a cordless drill to a prisoner’s temple or forcing him to watch while his children are raped and then slaughtered.
Not so the readers of the Guardian!
What’s interesting to me is how the subject is currently being discussed, or rather reacted against, very often with wholesale fantasy. For every partially serious response to a particular point, there are two, perhaps three, comments that are unhinged and simply perverse, albeit in a broadly similar way. I stopped counting after a dozen different commenters asserted, smugly, that no war against terrorism exists, or that the West shouldn’t have made efforts to defend itself, or that the US is some kind of fascist autocracy, or that Osama bin Laden and his associates weren’t responsible for 9/11, or that the US government killed its own citizens for unspecified reasons, or that Bush and Blair are morally indistinguishable from homicidal jihadists. As a thumbnail sketch of Guardianista opinion, or a large part thereof, these reactions are worth noting.
And then, there’s the whole question of, you know – winning. One of the most maddening arguments utilized by the political left that goes largely unchallenged is the assertion that “you cannot win a war against an insurgency”.
Well, speaking as a lowly citizen, may I make a suggestion? Could we please get busy and come up with a way to defeat insurgencies, because if we don’t, western civilization as we know it is doomed.
“Dear Mahmoud. Sorry about that dunking thing a while back. We’ve voted those dreadful people out and replaced them with Enlightened Diplomats. Here’s the thing – you and I both know we are incapable of defeating an enemy who wears no uniform, obeys no rules of combat, engages in terrorism and random attacks on civilians, but this is of little concern because we are confident that you will never bring those tactics to our soil.”
Perhaps that’s the true legacy of Vietnam and to an extent, WW2 – the notion that one can lose a war and still go home again. After all, Germany, Italy, and Japan still claim spots on the map. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake on our part.
