There's no question about the amazing personal courage of the people being tortured in American prisons and concentration camps, but that doesn't mean that they have any strategic judgment, as you suggest.

No one questions the amazing personal courage of John McCain during the Vietnam War.

It's only "amazing" if McCain was able to resist the demands of his torturers.

Was he so able?

Note: These sycophantic ledes are not particularly helpful to Democratic aspirations.

"Wherever the German [excuse me, 'American'] soldier plants his boot, there he must remain."

Here you have the concise summation of anything and everything that Senator John McBomb has ever "thought" about "national security" and "foreign policy."

The slightly longer version: Just keep Eisenhower's famed military-industrial complex stuffed and bloated with "unwarranted influence" beyond any capacity to do actual work while simultaneously and piously absolving it of any accountability for never FINISHING anything of value.

Or, in algebraic formula terms: PARKINSON'S LAW + THE PETER PRINCIPLE = LUNATIC LEVIATHAN. The "work" will expand to fill the [endless] time allotted for its (un)completion while in the hidebound bureaucratic hierarchy people rise to their level of incompetence -- which leads inevitably to Quixotic quagmire conundrums of vast and self-perpetuating stupidity.

Contrary to the self-serving apologetics of America's congenitally credulous "foreign policy elite," domestic politics do not stop at the water's edge; they begin there. "The strife of the parties at Washington," as H. L. Menken called it -- or "intimidation by the rabid right at home," in Barbara Tuchman's immortal words -- explains the perennial political paranoia insidiously fabricated from insular America's eminently and naturally secure strategic position by fatuous fascists consumed by lust for power and access to the Treasury that comes with it. American "foreign policy," as someone once said of academic faculty politics, exhibits its particular viciousness precisely because it concerns so little of any actual significance.

Bizarre and belligerent refrains like "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" and "stay in Iraq for one hundred years," et cetera, do not reveal anything out of the ordinary for either Mad Dog John McBomb or his cavalier claque of radical "conservative" colleagues. Quite to the contrary, brain-dead banalities like these epitomize the recrudescent reactionary mindset that defines both Senator You-Know-Her and John McBomb, either or both of whom would gladly commit gleeful genocide by "obliterating" tens of millions of foreigners for nothing more than never attacking America and/or not publicly licking our boots sufficiently in gratitude for our historic aggressions against them.

As in Southeast Asia decades ago, we Americans have gone needlessly and pointlessly batshit-nuts simply because we could and no one could stop us. Senators You-Know-Her and John McBomb both personify this inbred, ingrained insanity. Neither deserves yet another fuck-up-and-move-up Peter Principle Promotion. Rather, both deserve a celebratory tar-and-feathering for their puerile, pathological pandering to the paranoid public they have purposefully petrified.