Month: October 2007

"When I was in the officer’s basic course, one of the instructors, only half-jokingly, proclaimed, "Beatings and drugs are for fun, not for information." His point was you can get anyone to say anything you want through torture. Good information came from psychology, interpersonal skills, and long hours with your prisoner. The best interrogators I’ve worked with tended to be very good at reading people and very good at using their understanding of the person and their culture to get them to talk – no waterboarding required…

We should be developing an ideological alternative (or alternatives) to jihad and are instead alienating our allies, enraging the populations from which the terrorists arise, and most importantly, alienating our COG [center of gravity] in the form of the U.S. electorate. A liberal democracy, such as the US, operating in an environment with pervasive media cannot afford to dally in tactics that may provide some short term gains at the expense of long term success.

It is not just the US that has made this error in judgment. The Brits and French did the same in their COIN [counterinsurgency] campaigns in 20th century and suffered for it. We should learn from their mistakes – and ours," – Army Capt. Kyle Teamey, a current military intelligence officer.

Or to put it another way: President Bush has a weak person’s idea of what strength is; and a dumb person’s idea of what intelligence is.

A new line on ending the war: "immediately upon taking office"?

Pollster.com finally includes him on their New Hampshire polling chart, replacing Gingrich with the Texan constitutionalist. Now, that wasn’t that hard, was it? He’s basically at the same polling level as Huckabee, but with far more money and Internet support. Unlike Thompson and McCain, he isn’t falling. Romney and Giuliani look pretty stable in New Hampshire. The BJU endorsement of Romney will help in the South, one presumes. The problem with Giuliani is that he will split the GOP (even though he remains the candidate most are excited about). Of course, that may be part of his attraction as well. If I weren’t afraid of his hot-headed temperament, unreconstructed belligerence in foreign policy, and contempt for civil liberties, I’d be tempted. Just to rattle the GOP as it currently exists. But if he wins, his main advantage would be a Clinton candidacy. Whatever damage Giuliani does to GOP fundraising and unity, Clinton will repair it.

There is only one person who can rescue Republican fundraising, reunite the party, rally the base and win the presidency for the GOP. And you know who she is.

What do they look like? What do they believe? Here’s a first stab by one of them:

X-Cons are pragmatic idealists. They have strong faith in religion, small government, and the free market. Yet they are not Utopian and have no illusions that politics will make life much better (though they believe government can make it much worse).

That pretty closely identifies me. I might add that if this is what an X-Con looks like, they cannot be too happy with what has happened to the Republican party these past few years.

Barcelona, Spain, 7 pm.

There’s been a lively discussion of Mark Lilla’s superb book on the history of political theology over at Cato Unbound. Mark’s opening essay is here. Damon Linker responds here; Philip Jenkins here. My own contribution is here. My bottom line:

America is substantively and experientially a deeply religious country, and its political discourse has always been saturated with religious rhetoric and imagery. I don’t think Mark or I would dispute this. It is a country whose politics is experientially creedal. It doesn’t incubate the kind of high Tory pragmatism that I admire in the English experience; or even the kind of atheist secularism that helped spawn socialism in other developed countries in the twentieth century. But the power of that religious presence — I call it "Christianism" and describe it at length in The Conservative Soul — is in many ways a testament to the strength of the secular constitution that resists it. In fact, I think that without the kind of secularism that Mark detects in the founding documents and Constitution, America would long since have succumbed to some version of theocracy or another.

I linked to Pharyngula’s report on Hitch’s alleged support for killing lots of Muslims. Others strongly disagree. Check out countering views here and here. A newspaper report here quotes him as follows:

Responding to a question from an audience member on what he said was the futility of killing Muslims in Iraq to end extremism, Hitchens parodied:

"’How does killing them lessen their numbers?’ You must have meant something more intelligent… We worry too much in America about our ‘right’ to be in Iraq… Make them worry. Make them run scared… I’m going to fight these people and every other theocrat all the way. All the way. You should be ashamed sneering at the people guarding you as you sleep."

Some video is available here.

Repeat after me: "No more triangulation!"

Yglesias gives it a once-over.