At least we can agree to disagree on the substance of the debate. Most people rarely reach the substance of a debate and are satisfied to discuss the sound bites and talking points fed to them by an untrustworthy press.

These really are not easy issues under the surfaace and I congratulate you for probing them.

I believe I will have a good Father’s Day and thanks for the sentiment.

I welcome further responses on this or other subjects, because in the end, I can’t resist a good discussion.

Thanks

You are correct to accuse me of demagoguery, and I’m sorry for it. I let my own emotions get carried away, and I should not have said what I did.

We have very different perspectives on things, and while I disagree with you completely I respect you for trying your best to protect that which you hold dear. I think that you’ve been misled, and are not seeing the real human cost of your actions. But I guess you could say the same for me.

I hope things go well for you, sir, and I wish you a happy Father’s Day in advance.

No doubt you are the people and wisdom will die with you. You have probed the depths of my soul and now are able to judge not only my essay, but my thoughts and motivations as well. But then, of course, you missed the entire point of the essay to begin with.

First, you are not the first to be confused by the interesting and difficult-to-define relationship between individual conduct (i.e. my responsibility before God before whom I will one day stand to be judged) and the conduct of countries. It is a tricky area and I don’t claim to know exactly how to strike the balance. You would probably agree that “turn the other cheek” is a valid philosophy for an individual seeking to remain at peace with all men. I wonder if you think that would be good practice for a country. Imagine had France adopted a “turn the other cheek” philosophy in WW2 (Oh, but they did – JOKE :^) ). Perhaps you have a clearly thought out position on this. Most are fairly muddle headed on this subject. Clearly, applying standards of individual conduct to countries and their governments would lead to an ever changing geopolitical landscape, unless of course, you believe that ALL countries could be persuaded to go along, in which case you are among those that Machievelli says are imagining a world that does not exist.

Secondly, you take for granted that your definitions of torture, good, evil, patriotism, etc. are THE definitions. You seem to give not one shred of possibility that perhaps the methods used by our government were anything other than what YOU conclude them to be. Your essay assumes from the beginning that your positions are unassailable.

Thirdly, you conclude that I don’t understand Machievelli, that I have no understanding of The Prince, and further, that by using quotes from him, my essay is a “repudiation” of the “founders and everything they stood for”. I recognize the moral failings of Machievelli, but I also know truth when I see it. The two quotes were carefully chosen. I nowhere in the essay advocate an “end justifies the means” mentality. What I do advocate is assessing the world and humanity in a realistic way. To quote a famous philosopher “People are no darned good” – Okay, that’s my quote. It is my version of Romans 3:23 which says, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” If you insist on seeing the world as full of good people just longing to do good, you will be forever disappointed. This is not to say that men aren’t sometimes self sacrificing and capable of tremendous acts of kindness and generosity. It is simply an acknowledgement that depending on the goodness of man is like “a broken tooth or a foot out of joint”.

Also, Machievelli is correct in assessing for the Prince that it would be nice to loved and feared but since men love at their own free will and fear at the will of the Prince, it is best to choose the one he can control. He further admonishes the Prince to avoid being hated. I use this as an analogy of the US’s place in the community of nations. A lot of people spend a great deal of time and energy worrying about whether the US is loved by the rest of the world. To this I say that Machievelli has good advice. Better that we enjoy a healthy fear from other nations than to waste time trying to be loved. It’s a fruitless and thankless task.

“Evil men are destroying America, sir, and you’re one of them.” Wow! Why use the word “Sir” in this sentence. Certainly, I don’t conclude any massive respect here. Substantive debate is always welcome. Demagoguery based on emotion is never a way to win a debate.

You also fail to understand the overall point. To repeat:

This is not a call for the wanton killing of civilians. It is a clarion call to understand war for what it is. If, in the lead up to the current Iraq conflict, the war had been calculated as to what it would take to totally defeat (as in Germany or Japan) the country of Iraq, one has to wonder if we would have fought the war at all. By realizing that wars are between countries and not just governments and militaries, and that winning will require civilian casualties (lots of them) and an utterly devastated infrastructure and lead to decades of future suffering for those left behind, one can then make a clear assessment of the risks and rewards for starting a war.

Recognizing war for what it is forces a realistic assessment of its consequences. Put in this perspective, how many conflicts since WWII would we have waged?

• Korea?
• Vietnam?
• Gulf War?
• Iraq War?

I won’t make any pronouncements here regarding you motives, your intellect or your sincerity. I only question your reasoning. It is surface and has not considered the full ramifications its implementation would have on the US.

A final word about “Torture”:

The purpose of the Justice Departments renderings on Torture (now called the “Torture” memos – so named by an unbiased press simply trying to give the facts – JOKE :^) ) was not to reign in an overzealous bunch of CIA and FBI operatives chomping at the bit to “have at” those guys. The purpose was to give clear guidance to a group of men and women who were paralyzed by a lack of definition and a fear of going beyond what was allowed by law because the status of the individuals did not lend itself to easy definition. A careful reading of the Geneva Convention, for instance, clearly indicates that it does not apply to these people – they don’t meet the qualifications. Therefore guidance was needed before any action could be taken.

Of course, Torture, in and of itself is difficult to define. If it was easy to define, things would be simple. Just make a law that reads, “Thou shalt not torture.” You say that the Founding Fathers, whom you rightly revere, wrote the Bill of Rights, etc. to guarantee certain inalienable rights, and so they did. They also wrote an injunction preventing “cruel and unusual” punishment. What are the chances, do you suppose, that we have the same definition for this phrase that they had when it was written? Or even a hundred years ago? We know that this is not the case.

Which of the following are “Torture”?

• Imprisonment
• Solitary confinement
• Hard labor (breaking rocks with sledge hammer 10 hrs/day)
• Being forced to stand for 24 hrs straight
• Being forced to remain awake continuously for days at a time
• Being subjected to loud rock music for days at a time
• Not being able to observe your preferred religious practice
• Desecrating your revered Holy objects
• Being yelled and screamed at
• Waterboarding as carefully defined by the Justice depart rules
• Having your fingernails pulled out
• Electric shock
• Burned with a hot iron
• Beatings
• Reading this Essay

There is a line somewhere isn’t there? Would everyone in every circumstance draw the line at the same place.?

Obama made a huge mistake when he flatly declared that Waterboarding was torture. There are as many ways to waterboard as there are people to imagine it. He now finds himself in a box he cannot get out of.

I’m simply saying that he should have stayed out of the box.

Happy Memorial Day.

The purpose of being good is not to “feel good about ourselves,” while at the same time hindering our own progress. The reason to be a good person is because it’s objectively right. As in, nobody’s making this up; Jesus, Gandhi, the founding fathers and Martin Luther King, Jr. all endorsed good behavior because it was really the best way of doing things.

It’s never right to do evil … it only feels right in the heat of the moment. “Enhanced interrogation techniques” are an example. You say that they would start to sound pretty good to you if somebody were to threaten your loved ones. So where would you stop? Would you gouge out somebody’s eye with your fingers? Would you invent “cruel and unusual punishments” for them? What limit is there to the pain and depravity you would invent, and where would that limit come from?

The founders of the United States forbid those things in the Bill of Rights, and they did so under the understanding that these rights weren’t granted by that document. They did so knowing that all human beings everywhere had the right to be free of such treatment, by virtue of being human. And they wrote that passage to guarantee that freedom, for the few people whose safety they were sworn to uphold. So when we torture people on the soil of another country, not only are we insulting that country but we’re also violating the principles our country was founded on. And everyone in the world can sense our hypocrisy.

Your essay is a repudiation of those founders and everything that they stood for. But why? What on earth gives you the moral authority to question those principles? How in the name of all that is good can you invoke Machiavelli, whose very name is synonymous with betrayal and manipulation, to challenge the people who brought us those freedoms? Are you even aware that The Prince was a work of satire?

Of course, you do so because you believe the words that he wrote in jest; because you honestly think that expediency trumps high-minded principle. Because you feel that the founding Americans lived in a different world, in one that’s so far removed from your reality that they couldn’t possibly understand it. They couldn’t possibly know that one day, evil men would want to take away your freedoms. They couldn’t possibly understand that. Could they?

But they understood that better than you ever will. Because they fought evil men to secure your freedoms, not only on the battlefield but in courtrooms and parliament halls. They’ve seen terrorism and tyranny both at their worst, and they knew what people were capable of. And they didn’t give you those rules to keep you from fighting the terrorists; they gave them to you to keep you from becoming the terrorists. They gave them to you to keep you from becoming the kind of person that they’d want to fight.

What is the worst thing that the Islamic militants could do to us? They could destroy America, certainly, if they’re as powerful as the people in charge make them out to be. But how? By attacking our cities? That only brought us together, and earned sympathy for us worldwide. By poisoning our steams, defiling our lands, infecting us with diseases? There’d still be Americans in this country, and they’d be American no matter what.

But what is it that makes them American? The accident of their birth? The general awesomeness of this patch of land in North America? How about the United States’ military? It certainly seems awesome. But if you take away the land, the parentage and the instruments of destruction, you still have an American. No matter where she is or what country she was born in, so long as her heart longs for freedom — for herself and for every human being on earth — that person is an American, and nothing you do could ever take it away from her.

That’s why your depriving other people of basic human rights, subjecting them to torture, considering their deaths an acceptable part of wartime conduct and denouncing their freedoms as worthless is the worst thing you could possibly do. Because that is destroying America. Not the country, the land or the people, but America the ideal; the one that everyone from Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. has fought for.

That is the ideal you are setting aside, and the sacrifice you deem acceptable. You are destroying America, because in the heat of the moment when you had to choose between honor and temptation you gave in to the latter. And you don’t even know if it’s doing you any good.

You have no idea if the information you’ve extracted under torture is reliable. You have no idea how many people are suffering, how many people’s rights are being violated even in your own country, or just what happens in those interrogation rooms … the ones you’re so happy to send people inside to do your bidding in, so long as you don’t have to watch.

You don’t even know what kind of a return on your investment of one trillion United States dollars you’ve gotten. If the recession and the devaluation, to the point where there’s talk of adopting the Euro as our United States’ currency, was worth it. Or if, setting principles aside again, you could’ve been safer spending those dollars to do something other than wreak havoc in an Arab nation — one that was only tenuously connected to the very terrorists your leaders claim to be fighting.

You don’t even know where that money went or who has it now, do you?

Was it worth it?

Evil men are destroying America, sir, and you’re one of them. I don’t care how you see yourself, you just wrote an essay that justifies evil and condemns good as naive. And that is the kind of evil that let Hitler get away with everything, Godwin’s Law be hanged.

May God watch over this country, and its hundreds of thousands of victims.