War is violence, killing, death and destruction.  It should be resorted to as a very … very … last resort, when all else has failed. The United States should never embark on a war unless it is willing to win it in as short a time as possible.

You don’t amputate a shattered leg one inch today, another tomorrow, and another inch the following day. You amputate it below the groin in one operation, getting the trauma over with as quickly as possible so the healing can begin.

Here’s an example as to how this applies to Iraq. If I were president and wanted to pacify Baghdad, I’d turn to my military commander and say, “You are in charge of Iraq, not the State Department. The American ambassador and all representatives of all other departments of the U.S. Government operating in Iraq take orders directly from you, not after they’ve cleared your orders with their bosses in Washington. Anyone who refuses your orders will immediately be put on a plane and returned to the U.S.”  I’d add, “General you have ninety days to pacify the city. Use whatever force is necessary and if you require additional troops, I will supply them.” Then I’d turn him loose. Ninety days later Baghdad would be pacified.

What are the rules of engagement and what do I mean by “whatever force is necessary?” If a terrorist fires at our soldiers with a rifle, they should return fire with a machinegun. If they fire at us with a rocket launcher, we return fire with a tank gun. If a terrorist sniper in a window kills one of our soldiers, we aim a tank gun at a place about one meter below the window sill, fire one round and take out the sniper, wall and all.  Of course we have to accept the fact that the anti-American mainstream news media and Washington elites will spin our actions to make us out to be the terrorists and make the terrorists out to be saintly, freedom fighter patriots.

Too often the same events are misunderstood or misinterpreted, often by those who mean well. That is why occasionally we need to pause and put things in perspective. Until we see through the glass clearly we can never honestly and fully evaluate the facts and determine whether there is really something amiss. And if there is something amiss, take action to fix it.

For example, for years the Abu Ghraib fiasco has been limping toward an ignominious end.  Abu Ghraib is the Iraqi prison that was taken over by U.S. Forces at the end of the war and used to intern terrorists.  Some of the American guards decided to have perverse fun at the prisoners’ expense. So they used police dogs in fake assaults on the prisoners. Other guards humiliated the prisoners by doing such things as parading them around naked. 

Guantanamo is a U.S. military base in Cuba where a prison to house terrorists has been built. The basic charge there is that the terrorists are not treated humanely. An investigation by the United Nations concluded that while the treatment of inmates was not torture in the legal or normal sense, the conditions under which they were held could be misconstrued by some as “amounting to torture.” Webster’s dictionary defines torture as, “The infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding).” None of that happened to prisoners at either Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. Accusations of torture at either facility are without a basis in fact. Abuse and harsh interrogation tactics are not the same as torture.  Water boarding may be scary, but it’s not life threatening.

The chief job of the President of the United States is to protect the American people, not coddle terrorists who go around beheading newspaper reporters and innocent women and children. Were I president and were there a nuclear bomb hidden somewhere in Manhattan and about to explode and should I be faced with the choice of saving a half million American lives by water boarding the terrorist who planted the bomb, I’d personally turn on the spigot. That’s what the American people deserve and what they expect from their president.

Torture consists of such things as pulling out fingernails with pliers, cutting off ears and toes, applying electrical shocks or blowtorches to genitals or gouging out eyes. We do not and should not torture, period.

Being nude or threatened but not harmed by a dog or water is not torture in any sense or definition of the word. Taking pictures of naked prisoners may be humiliating and is certainly wrong and improper, but it is not burning, crushing or wounding.  Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are necessary and, for the most part, properly run detention centers and cannot be compared to the horrors of Auschwitz or Dachau.

The overplayed stories told about prisoner conditions and maltreatment at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo do not just reflect on the conduct of the few soldiers who broke the law. They reflect on the honor, integrity and international reputation of the American military and of the United States of America as a whole. 

For the record we investigated the allegations, got the facts, corrected what needed to be corrected and punished those who deserved punishing. But we should make no apologies to terrorists caught in the act of attacking, murdering, and beheading innocents. What we are trying to do in Iraq is to bring freedom, security and stability to an oppressed people. That is a good thing to do even if, unfortunately, some of our actions went wrong and a few of our soldiers broke the law.  Let the country whose armed forces or national government has never broken a law or done a wrong thing cast the first stone at us. Until then, we should refuse to listen to the misplaced whining of weak, overly ambitious politicians – national and international -- and malignant special interest groups, or to grovel at the feet of self-serving elites. What happened - happened. It’s been fixed and punishment has been meted out. Now let’s move on!