“BUSH WAS RIGHT”

A neocon hard-rock anthem for dispirited Republicans. I’m not sure if it’s a parody, but I suspect not. Whatever it is, it’s a beaut.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY I: “People need to be clear what the stakes are here. If we were to do a premature withdrawal, there could be a Shia-Sunni war here that could spread beyond Iraq. And you could have Iran backing the Shias and Sunni Arab states backing the Sunnis. You could have a regional war that could go on for a very long time, and affect the security of oil supplies. Terrorists could take over part of this country and expand from here. And given the resources of Iraq, given the technical expertise of its people, it will make Afghanistan look like child’s play.” – Zalmay Khalilzad, telling it like it is. As I have been writing for a while now, the paradox is that, as domestic support plummets, we seem to be making some progress in key areas: training Iraqi troops, peeling off Sunni elites, rebooting the economy. A sudden collapse of support for the war effort and peremptory withdrawal would be the worst of all worlds: the Bush-bots will simply revert to a Weimar-style “stab-in-the-back” narrative, with the mainstream media being the villains; al Qaeda will rejoice; the sectarian militias that are already a problem would strengthen and start preparing for the coming power vacuum. Patience, please. Which does not mean, of course, no criticism.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: Money quote from a helpful piece in yesterday’s WaPo:

“‘We don’t torture’ means that we don’t use worse tactics than [‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’] — except when we do. Waterboarding (in which a prisoner is made to believe he is drowning) and withholding pain medication for bullet wounds cross the line into torture – and both have allegedly been used. So does “Palestinian hanging,” where a prisoner’s arms are twisted behind his back and his wrists are chained five feet above the floor.
A Nov. 18 ABC News report quoted former and current intelligence officers and supervisors as saying that the CIA has a list of acceptable interrogation methods, including soaking naked prisoners with water in 50-degree rooms and making them stand for 40 hours handcuffed and shackled to an eyebolt in the floor. ABC reported that these methods had been used on at least a dozen captured al Qaeda members. All these techniques undoubtedly inflict the “severe suffering” that our law defines as torture.

It seems to me that the press has not been specific enough. Why hasn’t somebody asked McClellan if the president believes that “waterboarding” is “torture.”