1 Boring Old Man

I woke up wondering why President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are so willing to go to the wire for torture, depriving detainees of a right to fair trial, John Bolton, no judicial review of wiretapping. Why are they opposed to the Geneva Conventions?It’s as if they’re saying their barbarism justifies ours.

I wonder why he says this is the great ideological conflict of the twenty-first century. I don’t miss the point that the Terrorists want to convert us all to Islam like in the good old days of the Ottoman Empire. But, ideological conflict?

from The Left Coaster

Pakistan has reportedly released over 2500 foreigners many of who are member of Taliban or al-Qaeda.

Some of those releases reportedly include 3 people associated with the killing of Daniel Pearl, Fazl-e-Raziq: A senior aide to Osama bin Laden,Mohammad Khaled: A brigade leader who led the Taliban in against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Ghulam Mustafa: "He was once close to Osama bin Laden, has intimate knowledge of al-Qaeda’s logistics and financing and its nexus with the military in Pakistan".

…

This appears to be a major blow for the Afghanistan situation where the Taliban were making progress in taking over parts of the southern portion of the country. The agreement between Taliban and Musharraf will provide the Taliban with a safe haven in Pakistan, more fighters and some experienced leaders.

So the war in Afghanistan continues to spiral downwards with the terrorist groups appearing to make a very serious comeback. The British have threatened to pull out if they can’t make progress in 6 months. These developments bode ill for the British and NATO in Afghanistan.

As true as soccerdad‘s concerns are, I question the long term confinement of war prisoners – even if the consequences are that some will return to fight – paricularly with suicidal religious fanatics. There is a level of humanity and civilization that needs to be maintained, even in war. That’s the point of the Geneva Conventions, which I for one, believe in.

My point about Bush’s insistance that we regress to the level of the enemy, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," is related. I think they are going through the same thing that a lot of soldiers go through. It happened in Viet Nam and it’s happening in Iraq – soldiers who deal with the difficulty of war by becoming brutal killers, dehumanizing the enemy [they’re evil!]. The experience from the post Viet Nam War is that the ones who did that were the sickest of all when they came home. Many of them remain severly ill. Soldiers in Units that maintained a semblence of their humanity, even in the wartime situation, recover from the experience.

Whatever their felt reason for going the "Old Testament" barbarism route, it’s clear that Bush and Cheney are both deteriorating in front of our eyes. They sound "sick" when they speak now. I didn’t like what they used to say, but they didn’t sound mentally ill. They sound that way to me now. They’ve gone over to the Dark Side…