James Fallows linked to an old David Corn post showing some photos from Phnom Penh where you can see a waterboard in action as part of something the Cambodians use to illustrate the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. The attached email makes a point that I’ve made before but that can’t be made often enough:

As has been amply documented (“The New Yorker” had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the “enhanced techniques” came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they’re taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies–the states where US military personnel might have faced torture–were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That’s what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

Over and over again, you don’t see the world’s great geopolitical successes — the twentieth century USA, 19th century Britain, 18th century France — torturing their way to the top of the heap. Instead, you people who for whatever reason feel it’s important to generate some false confessions.

I’m a little confused at how it is that I’ve wound up in some kind of blog feud with Jewcy’s Michael Weiss but he seems to regard Daniel Lazare’s somewhat negative review of Walt & Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy as some kind of knock-down refutation of my views. But I liked Lazare’s review! The only observation I would make is that since Lazare is writing for The Nation he’s simply taking the Nation line on the occupation of the Palestinian Territories (namely that it’s immoral and contrary to American interests and, contrary to what you often hear, by no means wholly the fault of Yasser Arafat) for granted.

That’s appropriate in context but it winds up obscuring the fact that Lazare (and I, and Daniel Levy, MJ Rosenberg etc.) are in agreement with Mearsheimer and Walt about a matter of substantial importance even though we all (like, I imagine, almost all liberals) don’t accept the broad Mearsheimer/Walt “realist” perspective or the entirety of its analysis. I believe I’ve said in the past that it’s treatment of the Syria issue, in particular, seems badly wrong.

That said, the point on which Lazare I agree with Walt and Measheimer — that the sort of policies the “Israel lobby” has pushed the United States to adopt vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are neither morally correct nor conducive to America’s interests — is a very important one, and what I’ve repeatedly sought to do is defend them from critics from the right who prefer to evade that point with insinuations of anti-semitism. In this regard, it’s worth commending Martin Kramer, who’s made a real effort in this article and elsewhere to argue on the merits (unconvincingly, in my view, but it’s a real argument that I ought to engage substantively in the future) that the close US-Israel alliance does, in fact, serve American interests.

At any rate, I’m a bit confused about what Weiss’ beef with me is exactly, or why he doesn’t think Josh Marshall is Jewish, but I guess those are matters for another day.

Via Brian Beutler, Michael Rubin extolls the benefits of political reform in Iran for American national security: “An Islamic Republic accountable to its own citizenry would invest in better schools, hospitals, wages and infrastructure, and it would not divert billions for uranium enrichment and ballistic missiles.”

Of course one might think that a United States of America accountable to its citizenry would invest in better schools, hospitals, wagesm and infrastructure rather than diverting billions for defense but that’s not actually the case. And of course the opposition political party isn’t proposing to divert defense spending into domestic investments to any substantial degree either. The unified security budget project has toiled away for years arguing convincingly that if we refocused our security spending away from such a heavy reliance on the Pentagon we could both save money and enhance our national security, but it hasn’t been something that politicians are interested in.

What’s more, viewed realistically insofar as the Iranian nuclear program has a military rationale at all, the rationale is that a nuclear weapon is a good way of defending your country on the cheap. Pakistan couldn’t possibly afford to keep up with India in a conventional arms race, but a smallish nuclear weapon gives you a ton of deterrent power. The Iranian regime sees itself as beseiged by threats — located in a dangerous part of the world, subjected to unprovoked US-backed invasion by Iraq in the 1980s, and now with American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. They could try to build up a conventional military that could challenge the US, but it’s probably cheaper and easier to try to build a nuclear weapon.

Similarly, whether or not Iran’s interest in at least obtaining the capacity to build a nuclear weapon wanes is probably going to have less to do with the form of government in Iran than it will to do with perceptions of the security environment facing the country. Iran feels insecure, and also feels that the Pakistani and Israeli nuclear arsenals make the NPT regime a bit of a joke. To get the Iranians to verifiably disarm, something’s going to need to be done about one or both of those factors. Different people will have different perceptions, so changes in personnel at the top of government in Teheran would make some difference but it’s not automatic.

Photo by Flickr user Hamed Saber used under a Creative Commons license