INTRINSIC ERROR

In his pell-mell rush to have America thought of as a "fair" country, President Obama is making a fundamentally flawed argument. He apparently believes that certain actions are inherently bad regardless of their context.

Take the case of waterboarding captured terrorists. He has outlawed the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique on the basis that "it is torture and torture is wrong." Presumably he would prefer to see thousands, millions, of innocent people killed rather than our using waterboarding to find out about future terrorist attacks and to stop them.

But actions to be evaluated as good or bad, moral or immoral, must be seen in context. Initiating force against and killing innocent people is wrong...but killing in self-defense against the initiator of force is not. Lying is morally wrong if it is used to gain you something you are not entitled to...but it is perfectly moral to lie to the thug who has invaded your home and asks whether you have any jewelry or where your child is hiding. Context of human action is critical!

As non-signatories to the Geneva Convention, as violators of all rules of warfare, terrorists have forfeited the right to demand certain "civilized" behavior. Even if waterboarding is torture, they have no right to be exempted from it, and our President has no right to refrain from using it in performing his duty to protect us against initiators of force.

I put the word "civilized" in quotes as a literarily sarcastic way of stressing that human civility does not and never should impose a requirement that we fight evil with one hand tied behind our moral back.

Quite the reverse. Our message to all should be clear:

"World, initiate force against us and we will respond with unrestrained power of a magnitude you cannot imagine. We are totally, unrestrainedly, committed to the preservation of our lives."

My message to President Obama is also clear:

"Sacrifice yourself and your family, if you wish, to a "sea of blood" by way of a mindless no-torture rule... but you have no right to sacrifice me."

Or your minor children, for that matter.