![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The article is a month old, and yet bears revisiting.
There are ways to win wars. There are ways to defeat insurgencies. There are ways to get information, and there are ways to discover secrets.
Chaining people up, beating them, denying them water-- these are not methods conducive to any of the abovementioned goals. Oh, sure, in the short term they may yield some limited results, but in the long term they're utterly self-defeating.
Let's get this straight: we did not bring 9/11 on ourselves, and we are not inviting further terror and reprisals through our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. What we are doing, when we engage in torture and murder like this, is losing the war. All moral arguments aside, this is self-defeating. We can do better than this. It will require more work, more dedication, and more effort, but we can do better than this.
There are ways to win wars. There are ways to defeat insurgencies. There are ways to get information, and there are ways to discover secrets.
Chaining people up, beating them, denying them water-- these are not methods conducive to any of the abovementioned goals. Oh, sure, in the short term they may yield some limited results, but in the long term they're utterly self-defeating.
Let's get this straight: we did not bring 9/11 on ourselves, and we are not inviting further terror and reprisals through our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. What we are doing, when we engage in torture and murder like this, is losing the war. All moral arguments aside, this is self-defeating. We can do better than this. It will require more work, more dedication, and more effort, but we can do better than this.
