Category: The Dish

Someone finally asked the president directly about a torture technique he has personally authorized – waterboarding. A member of the MSM did it – Bill O’Reilly. Money quote:

O’REILLY: Now Brian Ross of ABC said ‚Äî reported the CIA water boarded Mohammed. That is dunked him in water, tied him down and then that broke him. Is that true?

BUSH: We don’t talk about techniques. And the reason we don’t talk about techniques is because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust. We’re in a war.

O’REILLY: Is water boarding torture?

BUSH: I don’t want to talk about techniques. And ‚Äî but I do share the American people that we were within the law. And we don’t torture. We ‚Äî I’ve said all along to the American people we won’t torture, but we need to be in a position where we can interrogate these people.

O’REILLY: But if the public doesn’t know what torture is or is not, as defined by the Bush administration, how can the public make a decision on whether your policy is right or wrong?

BUSH: Well, one thing is that you can rest assured we’re not going to talk about the techniques we use in a public forum. No matter how hard you try because I don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust their tactics if we capture them on the battlefield.

But what the American people need to know is we’ve got a program in place that is able to get intelligence from these people. And we’ve used it to stop attacks.

The intelligence community believes strongly that the information we got from the detainee questioning program yielded information that made America safer, that we stopped attacks.

Secondly, the courts. Yes, I believe that it was necessary to have military tribunals because I ultimately want these people to be tried. And it took a while to get these tribunals in place.

The Supreme Court ruled that the president didn’t have the authority to set up these courts on his own, that he needed to work with Congress to do so. And we did.

What’s interesting about these votes that took place in the Congress is the number of Democrats that opposed questioning people we’ve picked up on the battlefield. And I think that’s an issue that they’re going to have to explain to the American people.

Good for O’Reilly. Bush’s answer is, of course, preposterous. If al Qaeda is not aware that its members could be waterboarded by the CIA, then it has not had access to the Internet for a very long time. Notice also the abuse of English by this president. Here’s his description of torture: "questioning people we’ve picked up on the battlefield." It’s a direct lie on many levels. Many of those we have tortured were not on any battlefield. Many in Gitmo are innocent and many have been released as innocent. Secondly, we have moved from the plain English "torture" to "coercive interrogation techniques" to mere "questioning." This is simply lying. If the president were asking for the right merely to question detainees, there would be no debate at all. But he isn’t. And we all know that, don’t we? Even those who support the president on this have to concede he’s lying, right?

I have three looming talks/book signings. Tomorrow, I’ll be reading, debating and signing books at Borders, 1801 K Street NW, in Washington D.C. at 6.30 pm. On October 21, I’ll be at the Wisconsin Book Festival, reading and signing at 1.30 pm, at the Memorial Union Theater, 800 Langdon Street, Madison, Wisconsin. And I’ll be at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs at the James Hotel in Chicago on October 23 at 5.30 pm. Then on to LA for Bill Maher’s show.

Don’t forget you can get a signed copy if you email a request to theconservativesoul@gmail.com. And don’t forget our Book Club. In three weeks’ time, I’ll be airing the best criticisms of my book via email on the blog and responding to their points. You can join in by buying the book here and emailing theconservativesoul@gmail.com with your comments, criticisms and questions. Thanks for the many thoughtful emails I’ve already received. I’m a little swamped, but I will try and respond to as many as I can.

I may regret this, but after our spirited discussion of the merits of 1980s music, here’s a contest. Ransack YouTube and find either a) your favorite ’80s music video from a period you love or b) one that exemplifies all that you loathe about the decade’s pop music. I’ll post the two best and the two worst. Put "Best/Worst 80s video" in the content line of the email. It helps me sort through the mailbag. YouTube only, please.

Max Boot makes a practical, constructive proposal for rescuing what’s left of democratic Iraq. Money quote:

We have more than 140,000 troops in Iraq, but fewer than 4,000 of them act as advisors. There are barely enough to go around for higher-level Iraqi headquarters; there are no "embeds" available to consistently operate at the company and platoon level, where most of the action occurs. The Iraqi police forces are even more neglected.

What’s more, some of the best and brightest American officers are being steered away from Iraqi units. Everyone in the U.S. armed forces knows that the way to the top is to command American units, not to advise foreign units ‚Äî even if the latter task is more difficult and more important.

We have to make it prestigious within the military culture to be embedded with and training Iraqi forces at all levels. Right now, it isn’t. That has to change if we are to have a chance.

A passionate war supporter now urges pragmatism, nuance and flexibility even in defining what our actual goals are in Iraq. Money quote:

My only observation is that Iraq is never quite the same place over time. While there are elements about it which endure, the character of the conflict has changed in so many respects that the correct frame of reference (it seems to me) is not back towards some archaic policy expectation expressed in a 2003 or 2004 document but in identifying the drivers of the dynamic and attempting to influence it in ways that only become apparent as you go along. Our goals are something we will have to discover.

I know this sounds awfully wooly and unspecific, so let me try it explaining the thought in this way. Nonlinear dynamic systems like unstable societies are very sensitive to initial conditions. Arbitrarily small perturbations can lead to significantly different effects in the future; hence their behavior can’t be predicted confidently very far into the future. You can’t treat them in a linear manner. The only way to handle them in by shortening your reaction cycle to manage and so, hope to influence where the system will converge given enough time.

A reader writes:

Only one thing puzzles me about your blogging, which is why you continue to say that Bush, Cheney, Robertson, and vitually the rest of the Republican party are not the real conservatives. I mean, Edmund Burke’s been out of the picture for quite some time, now. Your position is a bit like saying that the jihadists and their supporters in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the West Bank and so on aren’t the real Moslems, despite their own statements of religious conviction. There’s some disagreement over the core teachings of Islam, sure, but it’s a bit polyannish and even disrespectful to say of tens of millions of people that they don’t know what their own beliefs are.

In terms of American conservatism, I’m 40 years old and throughout my entire conscious life, self-labeled conservatives in the United States have been for regulation of the individual (anti-sodomy laws, anti-abortion laws, flag-burning legislation) and deregulation or (more accurately) empowerment of corporations. They’ve been for greater secrecy in government, too – more classified documents, notably. The liberals (or progressives or, simply, Democrats) have been for deregulation of individual behavior, coupled with greater controls on corporations and more transparency in government (e.g., declassification of documents under both Carter and, especially, Clinton).

It may be that the liberals are acting like conservatives, while the conservatives are acting like liberals, but accepting that takes a sort of through-the-looking-glass intellectual contortionism. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that, in the era in which you live, you are actually a moderate lefty?

Well, we can argue about these labels indefinitely. I don’t think a moderate lefty favors a flat tax, means-testing Medicare and social security, or abolishing agricultural subsidies, for example. But it’s a fair point that my own position is obviously no longer the mainstream Republican one. My book is an attempt to say: forget the labels. Here’s an actual argument. I think it’s conservative and has a proud conservative lineage. But maybe I’m wrong. The real point is whether you agree or disagree, not what label you put on it. Maybe my position is now more appropriately held these days within the Democrats, or, more plausibly, among Independents. Fine. I endorsed Kerry last time, as the lesser of two evils. But I don’t want to lose a genuinely conservative tradition – or rather cede the term "conservative" to the religious right without a little struggle. That’s the book, in a nutshell. Some of you moderate liberals and liberal conservatives may be surprised by how much you agree with it. And some evangelicals may be surprised by their own overlaps as well.

"Apparently, these anticipated conservative non-voters are annoyed with Republican imperfection. They are disheartened, disappointed, disillusioned, distempered, and dismal – and thus plan to dis the party that better advances conservative principles in government.

They appear to have fallen victim to the false syllogism: 1) Something must be done; 2) not voting is something; therefore, 3) I will not vote. Of course the fallacy of the syllogism is that the second category could be anything. For example, No. 2 could as well read "eating dog excrement is something."

I rather suspect that they will feel about the same afterward, whether they chose the non-voting option or the scatological one," – Tony Blankley, RCP.

He begs the question: do the Republicans actually better advance conservative principles in government? Given rampant spending, accumulating debt, reckless warfare, unchecked executive power, legalization of torture, and the suspension of habeas corpus, this question is at least debatable. And it’s worth more honest discussion than Blankley’s condescension suggests.

The outing crusade gains momentum. Look: I loathe the closet. I despise the hypocrisy in the Republican party. But a witch-hunt is a witch-hunt. If the gay left thinks it will advance gay dignity by using tactics that depend on homophobia to work, that violate privacy, that demonizes gay people, then all I can say is: they are wrong. They will regret it. It will come back to haunt them. And they should cut it out. The fact that their motives might be good is no excuse. Everybody on a witchhunt believes their motives are good. But the toxins such a witchhunt exposes, the cruelty it requires, and the fanaticism of its adherents are always dangerous to civilized discourse. What you’re seeing right now is an alliance of the intolerant: the intolerant on the gay left and the intolerant on the religious right. The victims are gay people – flawed, fallible, even pathetic gay people. But they are still people. And they deserve better.

Hanover, New Hampshire, 3.30 pm.

"The maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing. And it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to try to do them, you not only may make them … worse, but you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere …

The argument for collectivism, for government doing something is simple. Anybody can understand it. If there’s something wrong, pass a law. If somebody is in trouble, get Mr. X to help him out. The argument for a free – for voluntary cooperation, for a free market is not nearly so simple. It says, you know, if you allow people to cooperate voluntarily and don’t interfere with them, indirectly through the operation of the market, they will improve matters more than you can improve it directly by appointing somebody. That’s a subtle argument, and it’s hard for people to understand," – Milton Friedman, back in 1975.

I cannot imagine what he thinks of a president who said: "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move." But then there are many things that this president seems to find hard to understand.