LFTC - Obama's Convenient Churchill

Historian Arthur Herman, in a superb column, eviscerates President 44's dubious citation of Churchill as having opposed torture, noting that 44 apparently relied upon a blogger, rather than the history book UK PM Gordon Brown gave him.p AH deals with the torture issue:"There is no place for compromise in war," Churchill wrote. In choosing between civilized restraint and the British people's survival, he never hesitated. He contemplated using mustard gas if the Nazis invaded England. He authorized the fire bombing of German cities, the so-called terror bombings, in order to cripple the German war effort and morale. He was prepared to let Mahatma Gandhi die during his hunger strike in 1943 rather than be blackmailed into abandoning India, the last bastion against Japanese domination of Asia.As for German POWs and spies, Churchill left matters in the hands of his interrogation master, Col. Robin Stephens, nicknamed "Tin Eye" because of his monocle and martinet manner. It's true that Stephens told his interrogators that "violence is taboo" -- the source of Sullivan's claim that Churchill didn't allow torture. Stephens, however, felt perfectly free to use every degree of psychological pressure on his detainees, including sleep deprivation and hooding prisoners in solitary confinement for long stretches. He'd have tried women's bras and caterpillars, like our own interrogators, if he'd thought of it.But there's another, more powerful reason why the British didn't torture their captured German spies. They didn't have to. Thanks to the Ultra code-breaking program, British MI5 had access to nearly every major German High Command decision. Had Ultra not existed, the attitude toward captured German spies would've been a lot less casual. (Sixteen were in fact executed for espionage before war's end.)Likewise, if America hadn't had the Clinton-era intelligence "wall of separation" that prevented the CIA and FBI from sharing information before 9/11, a place like Gitmo might never have been necessary.Yet those who today denounce Gitmo as an American gulag -- including our president -- are the ones who complained most bitterly about warrantless wiretaps. They refuse to see that the need for the one resulted from the lack of the other."Moral force," Churchill once said, "is no substitute for armed force, but it is a very great reinforcement."Bottom Line.p President Obama would profit greatly by learning more about what Winston Churchill really thought about fighting atavistic enemies in a war of survival.p Better he learn it the easy way, by reading Churchill, than the hard way, by what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1978 (referring to the Soviet Union) called "the pitiless crowbar of events."p The event came 18 months later, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter--shocked that Soviet boss Leonid Brezhnev had lied to him--said that he had learned more from the invasion about the Soviets than anything else before had taught him.p Watching presidents go to foreign policy school in public can make us witnesses to a painful spectacle.