Welcome Home! Now we're totally putting electrodes on your dick until you confess to being an Iranian double agent!

The British soldiers are on their way home, essentially unharmed, and an international incident has been successfully defused. But to some, this does not end the matter. As far as wingnuts are concerned, the problem was the soldiers themselves, who totally pussed out by going on Iranian television, wearing the hijab and confessing to paddling around in other people's bits of ocean. According to John Derbyshire at the National Review's blog, The Corner, the Brits should thoroughly shun their returning marines:

It is the job of a Royal Marine to fight, and if necessary suffer and die, for his country. They know that when they go in. It's what they are told! I nurse a quiet hope that if put to the test, I would stand up as well as any Marine. Whether or not I would, however, is irrelevant. Whether or not I could stand up well to torture, I expect Marines to.

And in any case, there was no evidence of torture or mistreatment in any of the filmed cases I have seen. They look just fine. You can't fake that. The girl sailor had that headscarf on within hours. From what I've heard of torture, even weaker cases can hold out for a few days.

Isn't that nice? But let's parse this a little, shall we? Because the depths of wingnuttery are here revealed. They are, in fact, thrice revealed. Permit me to enumerate:

1.) The Derb, were he not a fool, would see the trap into which his own tolerance of torture has placed him. Since we torture bad guys, and make them crack and confess to shit -- and, crucially, since we treat those confessions as truthful -- well, then, by wingnut logic, it is difficult to prove one's honor without withstanding some torture onesself. None of which changes the actual truth, which is that torturing people is very, very bad, and leads to the speaking of an endless sequence of untruths on the part of the torturee -- a fact which the British marine example demonstrates, and which right wingers, hating that demonstration, thus fling back on the demonstrators.

2.) He "nurses a quiet hope". This small phrase is emblematic of the entire experience of reading the Corner. It leaves a kind of film on your skin. There is a kind of puerile sentimentality and overly impassioned credulity (which, oddly, often is voiced as scorn -- but only in the sense that intense love of self necessarily implies hatred of others) that comes through nearly every post -- especially any post that mentions soldiers, the United States, or fetuses. It gives one the very real sense that these people aren't adults. They're sorority girls.

3.) It should be readily apparent from the thorough ass-pounding we're getting in the Middle East these days that right wingers don't really grasp the whole concept of diplomacy. But think it over -- if the Iranians actually had tortured those Brits, and pulled their arms out with vises, and beat them about the head and neck with those severed arms, what would the reaction have been in Britain? How would this have helped avoid a precipitous and disastrous confrontation?

As it was, the Brits went on TV unharmed, which was a hell of a lot better than seeing them bleeding and broken, both from the point of view of keeping the collective English head from exploding and from the point of view of making the Iranians look like bullies. The Brits then told the world that no one is fooled by this silliness of parading people on TV saying they love Islam or whatever, and the Iranians looked like they'd been scolded by their father. And, finally, Ahmadinejad was able to defuse the situation himself by simply backing away and giving the (unharmed) soldiers back to the Brits, a process that would be rather more difficult if they had been reduced to armless, legless, headless torsos. All of these outcomes were essentially good for Britain, and all of them would have been lost had anyone's balls been put in a vise.

I can only assume that the British are capable of hunting down their own terrorist attackers, and defusing their own international incidents, because they lack the essential factor in all of our screw-ups: sentimental, uncomprehending, torture-endorsing wingnuts.