Carter: America tortures

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Dar's dishonesty consisted in the conceiving of his question: he might better have put it "Are we winning in Afghanistan and if so, when have we won?" That might have been a better question, and it wouldn't have been crafted to try and trip up someone, as dar's was -- not that he's very good at that when he's crossing swords with someone of my experience. If I'm going to answer a "have you stopped beating your wife" special, it will be an answer to something deeper than the surface of the question.

Tw has for a couple of years now been desperate to find anything at all he could give me grief about. Not on his best day. Not for the likes of him.

The opposition to this war against the newest fascists remains without any idea for actually winning it at all, let alone winning it better than the Bush Administration can. This prevents their point of view from having worth or integrity. You yourself, Bruce, have no idea how better to win this war, nor, I note, any principles on which to base an idea that your road has more virtue than mine. I did in effect ask you about that not long ago and got back complete silence. Either you have no principles on which to oppose me, or you're being reticent because you doubt they'd compare well to mine, or...? Just because you once told me you weren't at all on my side, is that any particular reason to run around trying to prove it at each and every opportunity? People who try that around me tend to talk themselves into corners...

The only right road against undemocracy is to win against it. There's nothing wrong with accomplishing this by a holistic strategy incorporating both war and peace -- but war is needed to answer the war they'd start to prevent, for whatever reason their warmongers think sufficient, their integration into the global economy and attendant culture, or mosaic of cultures.