A note to editors, bloggers, pundits and other purveyors of opinion: you are ALL playing into the hands of Bush, Cheney and this administration. How? By constantly using the phrases they want you to use, namely those that frame all debate in terms of “war.” Every time you use descriptives like, “War in Iraq,” or “War on Terror,” or phrases like “...in a time of war,” or “...a war-time president...” in fact any time you use the word “war” to describe the events Bush & Co. have brought down on the world, you are playing into their hands. They don’t care if you agree or disagree. They don’t give a damn what you say about them. As long as you couch your criticisms in an acknowledgement that “We are at war,” they’ve won game, set and match. They are empowered by that one word more than any other.

But the fact is, we are not at war. Congress is solely empowered to declare war on sovereign nations and it has not done so. What has happened is that President Bush has sent an oversized SWAT team to break down Saddam’s door, haul him to jail and secure his stash of oil. Unfortunately for Bush, there are other factors he didn’t count on that now beset the brave men and women he sent to do his dirty work. To call this fiasco a “war” legitimizes much of what Bush has done and lends gravitas to his lightweight presence in the White House.

And, of course, it validates the fear factor that is so essential to almost all administration tactics. The word “Terror” runs a close second and should also be avoided if at all possible.

Please, please...start looking for other terminology. “Conflict in Iraq” should do the job. “The American venture in Iraq” looks good. “Struggle to deter violent religious fundamentalism,” will drive them nuts. It will rob them of an important tool if we all refuse to let them choose the vocabulary with which they seek to frame every important issue of the day.

Wonderful interview with Mark Danner, whom I very much admire.

One issue I’d like to bring up here, though it might be a bit off-topic: Wasn’t it pretty well established, as far back as the Korean Police Action, that torture consisting of the infliction of physical pain and emotional distress was an ineffective way of gathering information from captured enemy? Didn’t I hear or read that, especially in dealing with fanatics, a subtler, somewhat counter-intuitive approach worked better? I thought I was told that when dealing with someone who’s convinced that your tribe has sex with its parents and eats its children, uses toilet paper imprinted with images of the Prophet and routinely urinates on the Koran for laughs, the first task is to have that person realize that you are none of the things he has been taught to believe about you. (Of course, physical torture does the opposite, serving only to confirm the questioner’s barbarity and strengthen the fanatic's resolve.) The approach of offering a smoke, showing family pictures, letting the detainee acclimatize to your presence, humanizing his enemy and slowly, patiently deprogramming him from his fanatic beliefs, causing his rationales for participation in violent acts or the planning of violent acts – doesn’t that make a lot of sense? Sort of a way to do well by doing good. I really did believe that the old bamboo-under-the-fingernails stuff had officially gone by the boards, not for humanitarian reasons but because it really didn’t elicit useful information. Anyone here know better?

I agree with the fundamental point Cinta is making. Down with tightassed-ness, up with taking risks!

Here in L.A., we have Max Boot. Okay, he's a little better than Domenech, but he's a blithering idiot, a Bushie who'll say anything including that water runs uphill to rationalize the administration's foolishness and corruption. But that's the point. The L.A. Times HAS to put someone on their op-ed page to create "balance." So they put a jerk like Boot and we all laugh up our sleeves. (Sure, there are people who think Boot is writing pure gospel, but those are lost souls anyway.) Same with the WP and Domenech. There are articulate, thoughtful conservatives out there doing some pretty decent writing, but that's not who you carry at an essentially liberal paper. You create "balance" by showcasing the more common variety conservative pundit: spittle-spraying, dishonest, so tangled up in the falsehoods and bunglings of this administration that he/she is reduced to name-calling and innuendo. I wish they'd left Domenech at the WP.