TORTURE: IT'S NOT JUST FOR NORTH VIETNAMESE PRISON GUARDS ANY MORE!

In case you missed Paul Mirengoff's defense of torture over at Powerline, here's the money quote, full text available at this link.

McCain is fond of asserting that you can't get reliable information through torture. In doing so, he relies on his experience in North Vietnam. However, the ineffectiveness of the crude tactics of his prison guards of 40 years ago does not demonstrate that the tactics available to us today are ineffective. In fact, it appears that our tactics worked well with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. If they didn't work, why would Vice President Cheney and our top military leaders be so insistent on not taking them off the table [?]Surely McCain does not buy into the notion that Cheney takes the position he does because he is evil. In fact . . . McCain's position isn't really that different from Cheney's [because McCain sometimes speaks of a ticking time bomb scenario -- BEM.]. It's just that Cheney is willing to take the heat for defending tactics that will save lives. In this instance, Cheney, not McCain, is the American hero.

You read that right. Torture: it's not just for sadistic North Vietnamese prison guards anymore. We can beat those amateurs at the torture game any day of the week!

In the Manichean world of Powerline, the only possible explanations for Cheney's behavior are (a) that he wants to save American lives or (b) that he is evil. No mention of objections to restraints on executive power as such, even though resistance to constraints has been one of the major themes of the Bush / Cheney administration since the early days of the GAO energy policy group conflict.

Let's go a step or two further on Mirengoff and torture, however. (But first, let's put the questionable assumptions and assertions in the post aside. It's not clear that the top military officials really oppose the McCain Amendment, it's not clear what intelligence was produced by any torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.)

In general, I agree with John Robb's argument that the Iraq conflict is a moral conflict, partly by the design of those resisting U.S. presence there. More broadly, struggles against terrorism are moral conflicts. See Robb's post here.

The problem with a defense of torture like Mirengoff's is that it further weakens our shared morality. An unstated assumption of the argument is that torture is good because it shows resolve, an appropriate moral toughness and the manly willingness to cast aside constraints when necessary. A corollary is that those who express moral unease with torture are themselves morally suspect, weak, untrustworthy, and probably traitorous when push comes to shove. Even if the argument isn't always expressed, I think that what I've said here safely describes the phenomenon of the argument.

This argument is the product of deep cultural shifts on the right. On the intellectual side, the right's assimilation of Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean critiques of liberal democracy has probably helped. In addition, there is always a tension between inward looking, Polemarchan moral codes, if you will, and enlightenment and post-enlightenment liberal versions. Whatever the cause, though, attempts to divide people of good will on this issue are misguided.

Respect for human dignity is a principle that undergirds liberal democracy. At least the current debates over torture make that statement less banal.