Guess I should have used italics. The bit you quoted was a parody of Irish in MT's view. He seems to think that if we took the gloves off, we'd have more success against Islamic extremists.
And he's probably right, but would require us to so deform ourselves that it's almost inconceivable.
There's a much stronger case that
we have no vital interests in the Middle East, and can best protect ourselves through
off-shore balancing, which is far less likely to generate blowback.
Probably not the most apt analogy. Here's what I was driving at: are we concerned with effective policy, or with bragging about how tough/serious/ competent we are? It's been my experience that gun owners plan to defend against home invasion in one of two ways; they either plan: (1) to gather their family into a defensible room, lock the door, and call the cops; or (2) to play commando by "clearing" rooms, etc. If a man is concerned with protecting his family above all else, (1) is unarguably the better option. But lots of men still plan on (2) because it confers some psychological benefits onto them.
I see the same biases at work in this debate. Moral concerns aside, I oppose torture because the objective evidence indicates that: (1) it doesn't produce unique actionable intelligence; (2) it reduces our ability to project soft power; and (3) it increases the probability of blowback. But a lot of people still insist on defending torture because it mentally "steels" them against a frightening and barbarous enemy.
On a related note, a couple of researchers from the School of Public Affairs at American University conducted
a study wherein one group of students was shown clips of
24's Jack Bauer successfully eliciting critical intelligence from a captured terrorist via torture, while another was shown the same torture clips but without including the "successful" results. The former group was overwhelmingly more likely to support torturing foreign detainees than the latter. Most frighteningly, as described by Philippe Sands' book
The Torture Team and Jane Mayer's
The Dark Side, the Federal lawyers who justified these "enhanced interrogation techniques" cited Jack Bauer more frequently than the Constitution in their internal memoranda.
