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Tuesday, March 01, 2005


CONNECTING THE DOTS

Self-anointed humanitarian and ethicist Jonah Goldberg on torture:
Goldberg adds that many Bush supporters are more "realist" than their detractors say. "For an undertaking of this scale, this war is probably one of the most humanitarian efforts the U.S. has ever conducted, in terms of limiting civilian casualties and all of these things. What you get is an environment in which the U.S. gets punished for only being good, and not being perfect," he says. "But many people I know don't buy into the notion that wars which need to be won can be fought as antiseptically as people who are against the war claim they should be."

For him, that concept extends to the clandestine activities of the U.S. government. "If, because of a legal regime in the U.S. which guarantees the civil liberties of Americans -- and I'm all in favor of that -- we have to go to other countries in order to successfully interrogate terrorists, then I'm not horrified by that proposition," Goldberg says. And while he concedes that it fundamentally contradicts what the United States stands for, "what undermines what we stand for," he says, "is the publication of all this information."

"We did all sorts of terrible things in World War II, and there was a reason why we had military censors," he says. "I do think there's a reason why the CIA does this stuff in secret, and why I think it should do a lot of things in secret. These things have a lot of propaganda value, both negative and positive, so I think we need to separate out what we think are 'good policies' from what the consequences are if those policies are publicized."

"There are lots of things that are ugly and terrible about war," Goldberg adds. "I think that people on the right are more comfortable allowing for that."
You'd think a brilliant man like Jonah would have figured out the reason he's more comfortable with the horrors of this war: He has no first-hand knowledge of it - nor, come to think of it, do any of its leading advocates.

People who have actually fought in a war tend to be a lot less comfortable with the things Jonah has no trouble accepting.

UPDATE: I moved this up because I wanted to make sure Jonah got the attention he deserves.

UPDATE AGAIN: Steve has more.

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