@ miguel cervantes:
We are at some unique conjuncture when the Don is providing me with hard details and informed observations filling out my abstracted framework: A vision of utopia from the crucible of torture - and purty durn holistically balanced and poetic, too, yask me.

@ Scott Miller:
Freaks don't stroke me out, but strokes kinda freak me out.

Didn't want to get into an argument with you over your declining to argue.

Thinking may not be time after all to attempt to re-visit torture. Was thrown for a loss on First Down. Incomplete on Second Down. With lousy field position ran a Draw for minimal gain. Punt.

@ Scott Miller:
The amphidel will have to speak for himself, but, if you're trying to argue that wars are never popular, or even that "peace" is more popular than victory, and only the evil profiteers have ever said otherwise, I seriously doubt he'll meet your expectations. If that's not what you're arguing, then what are you arguing?

@ Scott Miller:
I haven't fallen for anything, and you should know me well enough by now to know that I don't make factual assertions in arguments like this one without a strong basis.

As for popular support for wars, I said "often," not "always," and there is plenty of evidence backing up my argument, going back ever since there've been opinion polls, and in every other objective form: Wars are often overwhelmingly popular especially at the outset, and acceptance of defeat is often a very difficult sell. Even in the case you mentioned, and even assuming that there weren't many other factors determining the nomination fight between Kerry and He-Who-Is-Better-Forgotten, the warmonger won, and the lesser-warmonger lost in the general election.

Popular opinion can be very volatile and utterly shameless. The people who thought invading Iraq was a good idea in 2003 don't necessarily feel any loyalty to their prior position.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/770/iraq-war-five-year-anniversary

"Right decision" was still a majority opinion throughout the '04 election. "Keep troops in til stabilized" was also, and even more consistently, the majority position.

However, opinions about the wisdom of the war are not the same as opinions about specific alternatives for ending it. Though Pew didn't compare detailed scenarios for exiting the conflict you can see a 10-point gap between "good decision" (38%) and "stay 'til stabilized" (47%). Pew didn't poll on "run away fast as possible," and even Obama had moderated his position by the time he was running against Senator Surge. We'll of course never know, and may never have been very close to finding out, how actually running away would have affected opinion about actually having done so. Could have gone either way, depending on a number of factors.

@ Scott Miller:
You can call the "real world" a "fabrication," but that doesn't change anything, it just re-defines "anything" as fabricated. The claim of fabrication is itself also such a fabricated anything, to the extent that it can be dealt with at all.

It's the familiar skeptic's fallacy - participation by way of a denial of participation.

But the politicians who sell the war to the public, or just find a way to make it happen no matter what, sell it in context of it bringing peace. So I guess the question has to do with the dime’s ownership. Who owns the dime?

I think you have that backwards. Politicians often have had a more difficult time selling peace to whatever public than selling war. Doing nothing would have been a very hard sell for the Bush Administration after 9/11, or to FDR after Pearl Harbor. One reason that World War I dragged on and on, grinding up a generation, is that people on all sides were generally in favor of fighting on. Right now in Libya, Xadaffy has been demanding "peace." His people prefer, for now, to fight.

The word peace has two meanings. The word we use in English goes back to the Latin, pax, the same root as "pact," and thus refers to the terms of an agreement between combatants putting an implicitly temporary end to fighting. In the ancient world, treaties might simply put a stop to fighting for a set number of years, with payments from one side to the other, territorial or trade concessions, maybe an exchange of hostages. The other meaning of peace refers to actual conditions of peace, and ends up being connected to ideals of a better - more just, stable, holy, etc. - order of things.

Sometimes seeking one kind of peace excludes the other or makes achieving it more difficult. Sometimes one leads to the other, or makes the other superfluous, or is thought to. Very many people, often including many who place the highest value on versions of the second kind of peace, reject the idea that mere absence of violence is the highest good.

@ fuster:
Your prize is things the way they are: Our answer is both, and a new dining room set.

Scott Miller wrote:

Of course violence is justified if you’ve already justified the violence. So in a way, once the rules have been established (that we’re being violent), I don’t see your points as illogical. The problem is that they stem from a fundamental falsehood: that peace can be established through war in the first place.

Who said anything about seeking "peace" through war? The warriors don't seek peace, they seek victory, or, in less absolute but still teleological terms, a better position than the one they would be left to occupy if they merely surrendered.

But "in for a dime" isn't about subjective agreement with some logic or set of rules. It's about being implicated objectively regardless of what you say or think. That's partly why bob's Trolley Problem is relevant. It's not just the question of whether or not water-boarding KSM yielded life-saving intelligence - and not just in regard to the direct victims of possibly averted terrorist attacks, but the future victims of escalated retaliation. It's also a question of whether refusing to torture is merely pretending to refuse to torture, leading to more and worse torture. What if the choice, in the real world, comes down to 1 Al Qaeda bigwig being water-boarded under medical supervision, then being held under civilized conditions while awaiting civilized trial... or countless actual and suspects AQ operatives, accomplices, and innocents being subjected to medieval agonies and death?

@ Scott Miller:
Not really. Besides, I don't think miggs really does agree with very much of what I wrote. I think he agrees only with the bottom line on the particular issue.

@ fuster:
Amphidel. Infidibian.

@ fuster:
That does indeed qualify as one whopper of a link. Could be the longest I ever did see. But somewhere there's probably a contest for amalgamating the longest possible links, and that one wouldn't even get you in.

@ fuster:
Hah, how little you know, frog infidel!

fuster wrote:

you have an opinion on what you would have done?

Strapped on a bomb vest and taken as many of the invaders as possible with me, for the glory of Allah, of course.

What I mean is that it would be as likely for "me" to end up in that situation as to end up having to decide bob's Trolley Problem - so it doesn't compute. Do I believe I could possibly compromise my perfect ideals to save my buddies? Of course. Have no real idea what I'd do in his shoes, but the story comes across as fishy.

I don't judge him by it - I judge his conduct as a politician from his conduct as a politician, and I consider it embarrassing and deplorable.

@ fuster:
West's approach is to treat the whole thing as something to be proud of, an opportunity for his usual blustery bullshit, and to treat the divorce from the service as amicable, almost normal: He was just too good for the Army as it was, but that doesn't mean that the Army isn't great! Put together a campaign film of former comrades talking about what a great guy he is.

His fans think he's presidential material, but I think he's more likely to end up a B-1 Bob Dornan type.

@ fuster:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_West_%28politician%29#Iraq_interrogation_incident

fuster wrote:

Virtual certainty—a fitting end note for a confused essay about the confusion of what constitutes ethical action in our system of justice

Taken as a whole, that was a rather confusing comment. Not entirely sure how to parse it.

As for the virtual certainty part quoted above, what I said and believe is that, in a country where a) large numbers are prepared to condone the use of physical coercion in extreme situations, and b) from the top to bottom we are ready to take whatever convenient excuses to look away from objectively much worse things, it will end up being employed, either by volunteers or under whatever ad hoc legal rationale, even if it's not under a true or manufactured "ticking bomb" scenario administered at the highest levels.

Col West was rewarded for his voluntaristic "enhanced interrogation" of an Iraqi captive with a seat in congress and a vocal nationwide fan club.

Scott Miller wrote:

They take place as if the “in for a dime” part was a given.

That's because it is.

@ miguel cervantes:
Looks like you may have gotten that on the wrong thread, Don.

@ fuster:
Wasn't a huge fan of Gunsmoke, but many aspects of the show clearly reflected and probably reinforced consensual or dominant values. That people liked black and white TV shows didn't mean that they were in favor of lives without color, but that wasn't what Gunsmoke was about.

24 was rather mono-maniacally about "Jack," the volunteer torturer willing to do what the lily-livered ivory towered types over and over again turned up in states of denial about. But he hardly was the first and I doubt will be the last action hero taking the law into his own hands and, ahem, violating the rights of very, very bad guys.

Dunno - I think both underlying propositions are accurate, and furthermore interrelated. There is substantial support for the resort to torture in extremis - overwhelming support under certain definitions of the relevant terms. In my opinion, popular cultural artifacts can both reflect and enhance or consolidate that support, and pin down the definitions.

@ fuster:
I think you may be in denial. Forget 24, what about the opinion polls, one after another?

Just after the "underwear bomber" was apprehended, I put up a reader poll at HotAir. The respondents were nearly unanimous behind "water-board now while his information might still be useful."