John Yoo, infamous author of the Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of torture on suspected terrorists, slams President Obama for banning torture in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, gravely warning that Obama “may have opened the door to further terrorist acts on U.S. soil.”

Throughout the article, Yoo insists that torture is America’s most effective weapon against terrorists and warns that without it, the U.S. will be incapable of intelligence-gathering:

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial. [...]

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us.

Considering the Bush administration repeatedly insisted its use of coercive techniques was “limited,” it would be a far stretch even for loyal Bushies to suggest that torture is not the one and only method to obtaining information. And as ThinkProgress has made clear again and again, numerous intelligence experts and real interrogators agree that, far from being “the most effective intelligence tool,” torture simply doesn’t work.

Yoo continues his screed by making up facts about Obama’s ban:

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America. … His new order amounts to requiring — on penalty of prosecution — that CIA interrogators be polite.

Yoo has no idea what he’s talking about. Nothing requires anyone to “be polite” — although the rapport building method has often proved to be interrogators’ most effective technique. And the notion that good-cop/bad-cop would be banned is simply false, Media Matters pointed out earlier this week:

In fact, the Army Field Manual explicitly permits good cop-bad cop interrogations under the name of “Mutt and Jeff” interrogations, which involve two interrogators “display[ing] opposing personalities and attitudes toward the source.” The Field Manual says the “goal of this technique is to make the source identify with one of the interrogators and thereby establish[ing] rapport and cooperation.”

It’s no secret that Yoo is an ardent torture enthusiast: He famously said that only those techniques that inflict pain equivalent to “death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions” constitute torture, and last year refused to agree that the president could not order a detainee buried alive. With Obama signaling a clean break from the Bush administration’s terrorism policies, it’s no wonder Yoo is desperate to restore his crumbling torture regime.

Pointing to the absence of “soaring poetry” in Barack Obama’s inaugural address and the President’s shocking statement to Al Arabiya that “we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect” with the Muslim world, Fouad Ajami laments the “return to realpolitik and business as usual in America’s encounter with that Greater Middle East.”

Say what you will about the style — and practice — of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush’s presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress.

True, Mr. Bush’s diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared.[...]

Where Mr. Bush had seen the connection between the autocratic ways in Muslim lands and the culture of terror that infected the young foot soldiers of radicalism, Mr. Obama seems ready to split the difference with their rulers.

Yes, maybe Bush’s policies were an abject failure, and Middle East autocracies strengthened as a result, but hey, for a minute there Bush put those autocracies on notice (Here’s Bush putting Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah on notice back in April 2005, holding hands as they stroll around the ranch.) This is all delusive nonsense, but its unsurprising delusive nonsense. After all, Ajami was bemoaning the heartless realpolitik of the Obama administration even before the Obama administration had begun. Even though Obama’s inaugural address contained an explicit attack on authoritarianism, Ajami has chosen to interpret the new president’s lack of enthusiasm for invading more Arab countries and killing vast numbers of their inhabitants in the name of democracy as evidence of a troubling “realism.”

Like most of his neoconservatives comrades, realism is clearly not, in any sense, something Fouad Ajami is troubled by, as evidenced by his continuing inability to grasp that, while Bush’s words about the need for democracy in the Middle East may have been nice to listen to, his actual plans for promoting democracy the Middle East were staggeringly dumb. Bush’s “freedom agenda” proved hollow because that agenda also included kidnapping, torture, indefinite detention, invading and occupying foreign countries, enabling a sectarian civil war in which hundreds of thousands were killed and maimed and several millions displaced, all of which contributed to previously unseen levels of anti-Americanism while further empowering some of the most conservative, undemocratic forces in the region. It was not out of a loss of nerve, but out of a need to contain those forces that Bush unceremoniously discarded the freedom agenda. But expect Ajami to continue arguing that neoconservatism didn’t fail, it’s just never been tried.

As for Obama’s foreign policy, there’s no evidence thus far that President Obama plans anything like the global withdrawal that Ajami projects. As the ThinkProgress team showed in yesterday’s Progress Report, every indication is that Obama intends to strengthen America’s global leadership role, though with greater emphasis on responsible governance and less emphasis on invading and occupying foreign countries.

In light of Ajami’s disdain for the pragmatic new direction of U.S. foreign policy, however, I think it’s useful to consider — again — something Ajami wrote in his most popular work, 1998′s Dream Palace of the Arabs, his critical examination of the worldview of modern Arab intellectual elites:

In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could and could not be done. The political culture of nationalism reserved its approval for those who led ruinous campaigns in pursuit of impossible quests.

What a difference a decade makes.