Free Republic

Prisoners captured in Iraq are not handled with kid gloves and gently placed in a paddy wagon like liberal protestors arrested in Seattle. They are trying to kill Americans when captured and would love nothing better than to kill their captor and escape to fight another day.

While there are some that fit into this category, the vast majority of the prisoners we are dealing with are either people who were arrested on suspicion without any solid evidence, or were arrested for relatively minor crimes such as theft, etc.

Furthermore, even if you look at the worst of the worst, torture is both morally wrong, and technically ineffective. Torturing somebody just gets them to tell you what you want to hear, not what is true. If you were tortured for long enough, you would confess to being a member of Al Qaeda. It's dehumanizing for them and for those who enact the torture.

You may say that they don't deserve better than that, and perhaps you are right. Having said that, it is vitally important for us to be better than them. How can we go around the world demanding that people end human rights abuses when we will readily do the same thing given the chance?

Did Bush and company lie? Not precisely. I do think they honestly believe, as many did, that Saddam had some sort of weapons program. However, their belief was so strong that they ignored the evidence they had in their hands that indicated he didn't. They did exaggerate the evidence they had to make their case though. They did knowingly ignore contradictory evidence.

You illustrate well what the problem is with our country in that you present leftism as a disease (as I have seen people on the left present the rightist view). In the end, the truth is in the middle.

Did we go into Iraq to make Democracy? No. If that were true, we'd have gone into a horde of other countries long ago.

Is it good that the Iraqis are freed from the power of a brutal dictator? Maybe. We won't know the outcome of this for years, but I'm optimistic, even as one of those diseased leftists. They may turn into a realtively free country, or they could balkanize, and be ruled yet again by dictators.

Does one vote change everything? No. If the government can take that ball and run with it, and bring real improvement in the lives of Iraqis, then we'll have something. There is ample historical evidence that Democracy is not a cure all (Zimbabwe, Haiti, etc).

Have our efforts created a breeding ground for terrorists? Yes.

The Iraq war is not simple enough to exalt as a success or condemn as a failure on the basis of what has happened so far. What the US did was set a lot of pieces in motion, and I don't believe that anybody could predict where it would go. It may turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the middle east, or it could devolve into a region-wide conflict.

Only time will tell.