Jeez, I leave the board for a little while and all hell breaks loose.
To Ilsa_Lund:
You (and many others) are overlooking a few simple logical points involving the WMDs (or lack thereof) in Iraq. GWB believed that Saddam had WMDs because everyone else believed it, including the French, the British, and the Russians. Those who opposed the war believed it, too. “Do not invade Iraq,” they warned, “Our troops will be met with a hellish barrage of chemical and bacterial weapons.” At one time Saddam definitely had WMDs and he definitely used them against human targets (most memorably, about 5000 Kurds). There was no logical reason not to believe he had WMDs, especially since he persisted in playing a coy (not to say insane) cat ‘n’ mouse game with the inspectors. More to the point, why would GWB (or anyone sympathetic to him) falsify intelligence and lie about the existence of WMDs knowing for a fact that once we got inside Iraq and found no WMDs the political backlash would be terrible? It makes no sense at all.
As I understand it, the French government is perplexed because GWB did not simply plant some WMDs in Irag and say, “There ya go. Case closed.” That certainly says something about the French.
As for my personal qualities…
May I suggest that you were somewhat shrill, Ilsa_Lund. If you knew me in person, you would know that I am no coward. In fact, given the proper circumstances, the odds are good that I would give up my own life to save yours, in spite of the fact that you seem to regard me as a particularly repulsive human being.
On second thought, maybe I wouldn’t do it for you, but I would certainly do it for your children.
All I suggested was that, in a situation in which the lives of thousands hung in the balance, I would be willing to apply a little “strenuous persuasion” to a bad guy in order to get life-saving information. I stated quite plainly that I would use a modest, relatively bloodless method to do this. Never did I offer up anything like your laundry list of gruesome tortures, which, I feel bound to point out, you delineated with almost ghoulish enthusiasm (I was impressed, but perhaps not in the way you intended).
In any event, I would never suggest that you should torture anyone. If that sort of thing is beneath you, by all means, maintain your moral high ground. You have my blessing. Seriously.
Just accept the fact that, during the long struggle ahead, somebody on our side is going to have to do something nasty sometime to someone. It cannot be avoided.
When did we become so squeamish about this? In *To Have and Have Not * (1945) the audience is invited to cheer as Humphrey Bogart pistol-whips a couple of tied-up Nazi goons in order to find out where they are holding his old buddy. It is certainly brutal, but most of the red-blooded men I know would do it in a heartbeat to save a friend.
The American people instinctively understand this sort of thing and its limitations. To recall another presidential campaign, Michael Dukakis fatally wounded himself when he responded to a question from Bernie Shaw regarding the hypothetical rape and murder of Mrs. Dukakis. Shaw asked: “Would you recommend the death penalty for the person who killed your wife?” Dukakis responded with a lame defense of his anti-death-penalty position which seemed to indicate that he wouldn’t care one way or the other if his wife was brutalized.
My father and I were watching that debate. I was taken aback by Dukakis’s answer and my father was dumb-founded. “My God,” he said, “Can he really be that cold?”
All Dukakis had to say was, “Bernie, I will always oppose the death penalty on principle. But in a case like that, I would take a baseball bat and personally beat the living shit out of the bastard who killed my wife.”
The American people would have understood and approved. He might even have won the election.
