When wingnuts snark, it's usually pretty painful -- like being hit on the head with a giant canned ham. Here's K-Lo taking a meaty swipe at Andrew Sullivan:
"The first strategic crisis created by the Bush-Cheney torture regime is now occurring."
Thank you, Andrew. To think I was going to blame Iran.
Now, that might be justifiable, were the "crisis" that Sullivan had in mind simply the fact that Iran now has British hostages. But, of course, that's not what he's talking about:
[The captured sailors] are being "interrogated," apparently. The news reports put that word in quotation marks. I wonder if it emerges that they are being subject to George W. Bush's preferred euphemism "coercive interrogations." And if that turns out to be the case, and we have to pray it isn't, then what will the United States and its ally Great Britain say in complaint? After all, Iran is only doing to Western soldiers in captivity what the U.S. has been doing to "enemy combatants" since the war began. Then there's a question of what kind of trial they might face. One in which their defense gets a chance to see all the evidence against them? Oh, wait ... we don't do that either.
The first strategic crisis created by the Bush-Cheney torture regime is now occurring. It won't be the last. And if these British sailors are found to have been mistreated and their "trials" tainted, who in the international community is now going to come to Britain's and America's defense?
Sullivan is clearly saying that the Bushite torture policy was a vast strategic miscalculation, because it seriously mucks up the US's ability to put pressure on Iran in a case just such as this one. The wingnuts may like to gloat about stuff like the capture of "300" Iranian agents in Iraq, but it's a nasty problem if the rest of the world -- especially the Muslim part -- could plausibly point to Abu Ghraib and say "an eye for an eye." Iran's position is stronger than it should be in this ugly situation, and that's a stunning strategic blunder on the part of the administration and its apologists.
I'm no fan of Andrew Sullivan. But it's instructive to realize that over on the Right Blogosphere he is a heretic for taking the extreme views that torture is wrong and that perhaps letting ourselves be perceived as operating on the same moral plane as the government of fucking Iran is not in our national interests.