McCain On Torture’s Follies
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Smart Things Said By Smart People, The War On Terrorism, WarHe’s finally penned an editorial on why torture is wrong and the reasons we need to stop.
If anybody can unite us over the torture issue, McCain can.
And for my money, the following is THE most important point about the War on Terrorism and torture’s effect on it:
To prevail in this war we need more than victories on the battlefield. This is a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists. Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas. They inevitably become public, and when they do they threaten our moral standing, and expose us to false but widely disseminated charges that democracies are no more inherently idealistic and moral than other regimes. This is an existential fight, to be sure. If they could, Islamic extremists who resort to terror would destroy us utterly. But to defeat them we must prevail in our defense of American political values as well. The mistreatment of prisoners greatly injures that effort.
Definitely worth a read or five.
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 and is filed under Smart Things Said By Smart People, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
