For a variety of reasons, I think that it’s fairly safe to say that we’re going to hear a lot in the coming months about Abu Ghraib and other incidents of “abuse” in Iraq. I say this both because the so-called “torture memos” that Alberto Gonzalez wrote as White House Counsel are sure to be a big deal during the Senate hearings to confirm him as Attorney General and because it’s now become quite clear to me that the media (and those Republicans eager to court favor with the media) are now out to get Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. All of this, in my view, is truly a shame.

Now, let’s get something straight. I don’t think that the abuse of prisoners is a positive thing. In fact, I think that it’s wrong to treat anyone sadistically as a matter of sport. But, the corresponding point is this: even though I think it’s wrong, I don’t particularly care about it either. It’s fairly close to my view on homosexuality: it’s gross but, if you keep it out of my sight, I don’t much care what you do.

Look, ladies and gentlemen: this is a war, not tea-time. People are going to be abused. People are going to be senselessly killed. Those things happen in war. If you can’t accept that, you should stop paying attention.

Nothing bugs me more than the people who claim to support the war but who fly off the handle, consumed by some sort of sick grief, when discussing a few “tortured” terrorists. At least the people opposed to war have an excuse for weeping like babies for the enemies of freedom: they’re already openly on the same side.

One of the great myths out there about torture is that it “doesn’t work.” That is, to put is simply, obvious nonsense. If torture really didn’t work, then humans wouldn’t have used it as a reliable means of information extraction for centuries. If torture really didn’t work then interrogators wouldn’t want the power to resort to its use during “ticking bomb” situations. If torture really didn’t work the Israeli Supreme Court, which has as much experience on the issue as any other court in the world, wouldn’t allow considerations of necessity to be used as a mitigating factor when considering the sentences of people charged with torture.

Of course torture works. What doesn’t work is a straw-man argument constructed by the left and civil libertarians which holds that torture doesn’t work because someone being tortured will, “tell you whatever you want to hear.”

That’s true: but that’s only going to be a matter if either the person conducting the torture is inept or if the objective of the torment isn’t the extraction of information, but the coercion of false statements (IE: “Comrade Krutuv was privy to the details of the plotting of Trotskyite counterrevolutionary saboteurs and worked to assist them in spreading false news of crop failures.”).

A competent individual will easily be able to use torture to extract necessary information. It that truly wasn’t the cause, we wouldn’t even be talking about this.

Torture or other similar things may not be pleasant, but they may also be necessary. We can’t afford to be hyper-sensitive in war.

One of my greatest fears is that the Global War on Terrorism is being stalled by an ultra-caring and radically litigious culture which is more wrapped up with the rights of killers than results. It’s bad enough that police are handcuffed in this country by the decisions of lunatic judges: are we to fight wars the same way as well?

The culture of sensitivity, this cult of emotion, it isn’t just an annoyance: it’s a major danger. On at least two occasions already it’s been the primary cause of foreign policy problems which would otherwise have been avoided.

In the first Gulf War, in 1991, the US held off on destroying the Iraqi Army as it retreated from Kuwait because it feared that the images it was creating would anger the Moslem world and, more importantly, because it upset the stomachs of some in the US chain of command. Had the Iraqi forces been utterly obliterated, as ought to have happened, the odds are much higher than Saddam Hussein would have been overthrown in 1991.

In the opening stages of the Iraq War, US forces sought to minimize Iraqi casualties when, in truth, a much more prudent strategy would have been to drive them to the highest levels possible. Now the US is paying for that miscalculation in blood.

We need to learn to accept the realities of war. People die, and often that’s a good thing. People are tortured and abused and, while that’s never a happy occasion, that may be necessary as well.

We can’t fight and win a war if our field of action is limited by the afternoon-special morality of the Oprah-watching crowd.