Should civilized nations use "Enhanced Interrogation" techni

[Occhidiangela]

And, second, you piss off enough people, especially irrational, barbaric people, and something bad will happen. So, you need vigilance and you need to eliminate irrational, barbaric people. You could kill them all, or at least try. Or you could target barbarianism. The first doesn't seem to be working, indeed, it seems to be breeding more. And, for the second, you need international cooperation. Shrub type arrogance and stupidity may not be the best way to get that cooperation.

Here is a thought for you, in re Shrub and the WTC.

The core reason that tower didn't go down in the '93 attack was that the perps didn't plan well enough. Their motive was roughly the same as Osama and his little gang's motive. The baseline struggle against America by various disaffected third world malcontent/scum is not something Shrub invented. As I read it, it's a hangover from Woodrow Wilson's bloody progressivism ... selectively applied along with his friends at high levels after WW I sorted out who the losers were in the Imperial game to that point. But Shrub sure took the hand he was dealt and played it badly. No win for him in global Texas Hold 'em, no sirree.

My experience in the dealing with terrorists of the Islamic sort goes back to Beirut gun line, early 1980's. It's an old problem too long overlooked by both our Army and the Congress who "organizes and fund" our armed services. ALso, one's enemy gets a vote.

To call out "barbarism" as the enemy is, to me, as impractical as the strategic statement General Joulwan made in late 1990's when he was commander of NATO: "The threat is instability." In short, it doesn't do anything for policy or problem solution.

Barbarism is, as a target, an abstraction. As well launch a strike on freedom, while you are at it. What has to be dispensed with, IMO, is the silver bullet theory of war, the one that pretends that one can have a struggle without taking any blows. The 9-11 attack was a blow in a far longer fight. The pretense that there was a bubble of Mana Shield over the US needed to be shattered, one way or another.

It was.

The fight, the struggle between varying camps and ideologies, is standard human practice. The pretense that we, as in we the human race, are somehow beyond war needs to be dispelled if any fool out there still holds it, particularly if that fool is a decision maker.

The nuclear age didn't end war, and it won't. All it does is raise the difficulty level of the undertaking. So too do many other tech advances, like garage door openers. (Used for quite some time as IED triggers) Use of Germanium for IR lenses and scopes. TUngsten or DU for anti tank rounds? Why, and at what cost? And so on.

War is here to stay.

What changes is how it is fought. Rummy and the boys IMO did a below average job of taking principles that were ten years old -- that were sort of newish when I was in staff college -- and applying a few of them well, and most of them badly, or not at all. The recent new doctrine on counterinsurgency was, IMO, profoundly telling of how little actual thought went on during Clinton's years, how little action. We were going over that ground ten years before Patraeus went to Combined Arms Command and strong armed that doctrinal shift.

EDIT and here is something I left out. Bush said he didn't do nation building, and while that is a correct assessment of his policy, he failed to grasp Powell's pithy observation that "if you break it, you own it." He refused to do so. His failure with Garner to Bremmer to a civil war is ample evidence of that.

Bush, as a policy maker, violated nearly all of Clausewitz' and Sun Tzu's advice on how to match aims and means, as well as Bismarck's, so he was bound to screw up quite of bit of what he tried in the war field.

Obama isn't showing me much better form. My hope is that he learns on the job. No confidence in that, however. We shall see.

I won't recommend targetting barbarism. I recommend targetting barbarians, like the Mexican drug cartels. It's not like they haven't been at this for a couple of generations .... and their war is a political and economic power grab.

Occhi