As if you needed more reasons to oppose it, another government official experienced in interrogation and counter-terrorism, has publicly registered his disapproval of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – also known as torture.

Victor Davis Hanson, the classicist and military historian at Stanford University’s invaluable Hoover Institution has long advocated that the culture of Western civilization has throughout history given its constituents a decisive advantage over its enemies. In the brave new world of 21st century asymmetric terrorist and anti-terrorist warfare, this shamefully antiquated, western chauvninist, orientalist, </ivory tower newspeak> proposition of VDH seemed destined to meet its Waterloo in the bloody streets of Baghdad.

But it looks like VDH may wind up with the last laugh after all. The quantitative and qualitative success of General Petraeus’s COIN [COunter-INsurgency] strategy has turned the tables on the insurgency (knock on an entire rainforest’s worth of wood, of course), whose brutal tactics and inflexibility have cost it the strategic advantage and popular support it once commanded. As Andrew Sullivan opines:

Maybe this will be history’s judgment of the last few years: both the US and al Qaeda over-reached. But al Qaeda’s over-reach was greater. And in this we see why democracies do actually do better in warfare in the long run: because our leaders have to be responsive to the people; because legitimate internal criticism and debate forces course correction and exposes self-defeating hubris. With the Bush administration, this process took much longer than it should have, and the Bushies did all they could to stamp out, rather than hear, criticism. But in the end, democracy adjusts to reality; religious extremism cannot.

Whammy! Western Civ for the win!

Petraeus for President. and VDH as veep. And Andrew Sullivan as Secretary of the Interior[-Design].

Poor girl, she had the courage to point out the unpleasant realities of premature pull-out (hehe) in Iraq.