It has served, frankly, I think, as a recruiting tool. They can now take these memoranda and go to prospective, you know, recruits and say, This is the worst that the enemy, the United States, would ever do to you....It’s given them a tool to make it more attractive to recruit people, and you know, this kind of thing is harmful to us over the long haul.I realize that Rove's whole thing is projection, and this is certainly an exercise in that, but I see this as evidence of a bigger problem--the right's tendency to overincentivize human activity. I'm not saying that people don't respond to incentives or that we shouldn't offer them in order to encourage people to do laudatory things. But just look at the gaping void known as the GOP's social policy to get a sense of how much the CEO mindset has seized the Republican Party. How else to interpret hostility toward allowing gays to serve in the armed forces or ensuring nondiscrimination in securing a home loan or getting a job aside from as a function of a worldview that says that making things tough enough on gay folks will turn them straight? That allowing gay folks even fundamental rights in our society is somehow "emboldening" the gay community. And then there's foreign policy--we can't do this, because it will embolden the enemy. We can't do that, because it will show weakness. In other words, because it will incentivize attacking or not.
As I said, this sort of calculus has its place. But when it comes to foreign policy what's more important than incentives are interests. The Middle East is, largely, poor (with some clusters of rich oil magnates), lacking in infastructre and economy, and as usually happens in countries that can't sustain themselves the ruling elites who caused the problems cast about for scapegoats. America and Israel make good ones--we're foreign, speak different languages then they do, there's ancient and modern hostility there and there's the little matter of the Palestinian crisis and the Iraq War to help sell us as bad guys. But nobody in Iran, for example, is hungry because of us. Nobody in Saudi Arabia is unemployed because of us. Admittedly, our alliance with Israel makes us partly responsible for the Palestinian crisis, and we need to try to find a fair solution to that problem. But we're not really keeping the Arab world down, and most Arabs know it. However, this sort of vicious cycle can generate free-floating anger that demagogues can deploy against their enemies. And an enemy that engages in torture is even easier to demagogue against (as the late Saddam Hussein could attest to, were he still alive). Not torturing makes their case a little harder (though they manage nicely), but it also keeps moderate Muslims from radicalizing. Perhaps that's too strong a claim: I'll just say that torturing certainly led to moderate Muslims being radicalized, according to sources too numerous to name. (Jane Mayer is one.)
But this bit from Rove is really mystifying. Terrorists who are ready to kill themselves are going to be cowed by the threat of torture? Sounds a lot like the notion that tougher jail sentences will be a deterrent to drug dealers. People who aren't afraid of dying for their cause aren't going to respond to incentives like this, and incentives matter less when matters of real conviction are involved. (I'm a detractor of the rational economic actor model, but that is a discussion for a later time.) This is vintage Rove, trying to turn an opponent's strength into a weakness, only it's so incoherent that one wonders whether Rove's heart is still in it. And the GOP's revolving door of failures spins round once again.
Oh, yeah, and have I mentioned that I'm really glad that Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee beat Harold Ford in 2006? Here's why.
