profane honor

Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor's at the stake.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet, act IV: scene 4

(i sometimes wonder if that quote sums up g w bush's philosophy. it's wrong, of course: hamlet was brilliant but haunted, so he made errors of judgment.)

mark danner, on book tv talking about his latest book, the secret way to war: the downing street memo and the iraq war's buried history, mentioned that a terrorism suspect we turned over to egypt got tortured till he "confessed" that saddam hussein was plotting to give WMD to al qaeda.

it was perhaps the first piece of "evidence" that led to the current mess, and it shows one of the 2 main arguments against torture: its results are unreliable. (i haven't forgotten that bushbots still claim iraq had WMD till just before the war, and rick santorum recently revealed "proof" of it. it turned out the chem weapons he cited were deteriorated 1980s shells found not a few months ago but 2 years and dismissed by everyone still in touch with reality.)

the other, of course, is that it's wrong: it violates the golden rule. (i don't buy the claim that avoiding torture protects our troops from it when they get captured.)

danner also pointed out that, since iraq's population is less than 10% of ours, 2 or 3 months at the current rate of iraqi civilian deaths is equivalent to the whole american death toll in vietnam. (he actually said "3 months," based on 2k/month. i added "2 or" because of the more recent report of 100 a day for 2 months. 6k dead iraqis times 10, roughly equal to 58k GIs dead in vietnam.)

of course, numerical comparisons are flawed—the US population was smaller during the viet war—and essentially meaningless. what counts is that all those deaths were needless: results of going to war on false info.

wars are sometimes said to be "prosecuted." it's an apt word for it: if you don't prove your case beyond reasonable doubt but go to war anyway, you're likely to kill and maim innocent folk.

but that only happens in a kangaroo court, right?

(danner also mentioned in passing that when gops shout "stay the course" or "cut and run," dems don't seem to have anything to shout back. let me suggest "failure of policy," "failure of strategy," or simply "quagmire." and let's not forget "crusade" and "axis of evil"—the 2 terms most responsible for setting the world ablaze.)