Fighting Dirty

There an interesting article in today's Washington Examiner by Gregory Kane called, "Don't start nothing, won't be nothing," in which the author explains why the waterboarding of terrorists doesn't bother him. He makes a couple of noteworthy points. After mentioning that as a 9/11 survivor (he was on the ground floor of the World Trade Center), the torture of Al Qaeda terrorists doesn't "exactly fill [him] with grief," Kane writes

Nor am I feeling the arguments of those
who claim how torture violates our principles and destroys our values Does it, really? We were in a war against terrorists. War is called war for a reason. It’s because nasty things get done in a war, lots of them. The Allies killed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians in bombing raids during World War II. Should we have NOT bombed Germany and Japan because killing civilians violates our principles and destroys our values?
 
Or does torture violate our principles and destroy our values while wholesale killing of civilians is acceptable?

Kane isn't impressed by Obama "piously intoning that America 'does not torture.'" Instead, he thinks the president would be better served by telling terrorists

from now on the nation will invoke the great African-American Prime Directive of “Don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing.” Because once you start something, then anything goes.

If not that policy, he suggests another,

If it’s worth fighting for, it’s worth fighting dirty for.

Kane doesn't say so, but that's exactly why we have an organization like the CIA -- to fight dirty. It's too bad many otherwise intelligent people just don't understand that.