Thursday, 30 April 2009 by bbbeard.

Snippets from the infocean:

Cliff May took on Jon Stewart on the Daily Show: or was it vice versa?  Among other things, they talked about WWII and lessons we might have learned about torture from that epic, traumatic conflict. Backed into a corner, Stewart averred that he believed that Harry Truman was a war criminal. Setting aside the fact that I have been known to make virtually identical statements, this notion raises the amusing prospect of a parallel universe in which Dwight Eisenhower prosecuted Harry Truman for war crimes.

Coincidentally, Mr. Obama cited Winston Churchill (reportedly by way of the London Times — or was it Andrew Sullivan?) as an authority on winning wars without creating indelicate situations: “We don’t torture”. It seems to me that Mr. Bush made virtually identical statements. I suspect neither man was being quite so virtuous as to meet the current standards of the radical left.

And the Times story by Ben Mcintyre isn’t quite as elevating as one might hope. Mcintyre tells us about Churchill’s spy-breaker Robin Stephens. Mcintyre tells us that Stephens eschewed physical violence. However, the plain reading of the account tells us that Stephens was more than willing to use sleep deprivation, threats of violence, drugs, and alcohol to try to break down his prisoners. (Why did he think a drugged, sleep-deprived prisoner was more likely to produce truthful intelligence than one who has been slapped or “walled”?) None of these techniques are allowed under the Geneva Convention — which, by the way, just as in the current situation with Al Qaeda, is not applicable to spies and other non-uniformed combatants. The use of drugs or alcohol to “disrupt profoundly the sense or the personality” is explicitly illegal under Title XVIII, as is the threat of imminent death. So Stephens would have been liable for sanctions under current U.S. law. It is not even clear whether Stephens’ bag of psychological techniques would pass muster under current U.S. law, either.

But the amusing part of all this for me is that the advocates for Zubaydah et al. seem only recently to have discovered World War II as a precedent. When it was important to understand why we went to Iraq, why the war was taking so long, why there were reverses as well as advances and pointless as well as necessary deaths, the left would not hear of it.

Stewart  raised a point I have made myself, though he takes the wrong lesson from it, I think. He noted that the Japanese, who were atom-bombed at the end of the war, would seem to have thereby earned the perfect right by the “ticking time bomb argument” to torture Allied prisoners in the hopes of gaining actionable intelligence. But then he asks stupidly if that means we should apologize to the Japanese for prosecuting their soldiers. Of course not — Harry Truman is dead, and Stewart’s absurdity is just another specimen of the pernicious practice of blaming and apologizing for previous generations.

What it does mean is that we should be careful about assuming that it was noble to prosecute Japanese soldiers for mistreatment of their prisoners. Are we sure that the Allies never thought of those prosecutions as punishment for Pearl Harbor? Was there a failure of imagination, an inability to see how the deaths of 500,000 Japanese civilians in the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and 66 other cities could lead to more brutality, not less? Granted, the now-famous prosecution of Yukio Asano did not hinge on the gathering of intelligence. By all accounts Asano was merely a sadist, more like a serious version of the Abu Ghraib Nine than the interrogators of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. But what if the Japanese had hints of the development of an atomic bomb? What if they had captured a pilot who they believed knew the whereabouts of the base from which the atomic bombings were to be launched? A partisan interested only in sullying the reputation of the Bush administration might not admit it, but there is certainly a case to be made that the Japanese would have been justified in using “enhanced interrogation” to coerce this information from their captive. From our perspective a generation later, it might have been better that the 220,000 civilians who were vaporized in the atomic bombings had not died. And from our perspective on this scenario, there would have been more than a little component of retributive justice in prosecuting persons associated with those interrogations.

Of course, in the case of the WWII prosecutions, the accusers were the victors. In the current case, the accusers are… Democrats. Who do they think the enemy is?

UPDATE:

Well, of course, in hindsight I should have predicted that Churchill’s hands were most probably not as clean as Andrew Sullivan and Ben Mcintyre would have us believe (in their vicious quest to paint Mr. Bush as the new Hitler). The ever-obliging gents at the Guardian pass along the story of the Cage, where on a posh street in Kensington Palace Gardens, captured Nazis — including civilians — were tortured throughout the war and for several years after. [h/t Michael Tomasky]

UPDATE 2:

As usual, Frank J. explains it all with his scintillating moral clarity.

UPDATE 3:

The Churchill scholars are coming out of the woodwork on this one. Richard Langworth tells us that there are precisely 156 instances where the word “torture” appears in the 50 million words written by (15M) and about (35M) Sir Winston.  None of the uses are consistent in meaning with Mr. Obama’s quote. [h/t Powerline]

UPDATE 4:

This story keeps sprouting new legs. The lovable-but-wooden Bill Whittle, PJTV guy, takes Jon Stewart apart with surgical precision in a video that is deservedly gaining wide viewership. (Shouldn’t this spawn a new gerund, “Whittling”?) Stewart apologized, sort of, saying, gee, well, WWII was, you know, complicated. As Allahpundit remarked,

The moral calculus about how far to go in roughing up jihadis to save how many lives is difficult, as was the calculus about how many lives would be saved in the long run by incinerating Japanese kids in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war. The fact that Stewart is a hard no on the former yet considers the latter iffy suggests a mentality I simply can’t fathom.

Me neither.

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Tuesday, 21 April 2009 by bbbeard.

Obama’s latest ploy is to dress his imperial majesty in budget-cutter clothing, demanding sacrifice around the Cabinet table. One Hundred Million Dollars! Sure sounds like a lot of money. But even the AP isn’t fooled, having borrowed a calculator with scientific notation from the geeky guy in IT and concluded that 100 million dollars per annum to the federal government is like a large latte and a scone to a middle class family. Per year, that is. My colleague Rand Simberg calls it “100 MicroBaracks” which does not quite roll off the tongue like Brian Riedl’s acute observation that $100M is the amount the federal government spends every 13 minutes.

None of which means anything to Obama’s target audience, which is the vast shallow sea of government-educated folks who are fuzzy on the difference between a million and a trillion, who don’t order scones, who couldn’t quite explain the difference between $6 a day and $6 a year, or for that matter, the difference between 13 minutes a day and 13 minutes a year.

The ideal target audience, in other words, for the desperate ploy by some conservatives to downbrand the Democratic Party as the Democratic Fascist Party. Jonah Goldberg wrote the illuminating text “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change“, which drew jeers and cheers from the usual suspects but which went largely unnoticed by Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere. Now Jim Lindgren reports that the liberal=fascist meme is starting to break out into the general conversation, to the extent that liberal commentators are girding their defenses.

What does it all mean? It means that the political class believes that a non-negligible percentage of the voting population is composed of idiots. To some non-negligible extent, they may be right.

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