[lit-ideas] Re: Max Boot

  • From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:53:22 -0500

Joerg ecrit: Wars of deliberate aggression, concentration camps, torture, Ermaechtigungsgesetze, embedded press and total desinformation...



A parallel "war of deliberate aggression" would be if the USA invaded peaceful, metric Canada.

To call Gitmo a "concentration camp" is a bit of a stretch. In addition to the obvious difference in comfort between the two, Gitmo has a different purpose than Dachau. It's more like a stockade for implementing the first phase of a criminal investigation. The point of Gitmo is to try to extract (nontorture-produced) information from the terrorists: prisons are for punishing, Gitmo is for getting prisoner X to reveal that he knew Y, so an intelligence analyst can piece together the esoteric jigsaw puzzle of al-Qaeda.

Torture of terrorist leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not something I'd wince at, given the stakes and the person tortured. However, as a general policy it is of course to be deplored.

"Ermaechtigungsgesetze" as "enabling action" is probably your term for "pre-emption." (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Of course, every nation pre-empts, but Bush's formal policy of pre-emption has been discredited to the extent that our intelligence services are not sufficiently foolproof to warrant the disaster of mistaken pre-emption. In smaller theaters, however, pre-emption is practiced by all major nations ... nobody wants to be victim of a surprise attack.

"Embedded press" ... I fail to see the objection. We fought WWII with embedded press. Go ask Walter Cronkite.

Total disinformation? You give the media (and the administration) too much credit there. Al-Qaeda's pretty good at disinformation, by the way. According to MEMRI, al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the East Coast blackout some years back. I forget what they called their fictional action ... something like Operation Allah's Hammer.

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