Torture, right or wrong?

I was recently posed the question of whether or not torture in Iraq was wrong. After a great deal of comparing real information with misinformation that could be devised from torture I came up with a question of greater significance.

All I know is that when military action is dictated by popular opinion, the military is almost always defeated. Popular/Mob mentality is never rational when it comes to the military and tactics. The average person is all about instant gratification and adversely tactics are all about patients. Personally I think the largest hindrance to US efforts abroad is interference by the American people. Could the US have won VietNam? Of course. If it hadn't been for leaders being more concerned about their own popularity then the outcome of the war, the US could have crushed the communist North Vietnamees and the world would be a different place. But that was not to be.

If the people of Rome had stayed out of military dealings during the Second Punic War and allowed Fabius to defeat Hannibal they wouldn't have been completely crushed at Cannae. Fabius knew Hannabal was the better general when Hannibal was able to choose his own battle field. Unfortunately the people saw Fabius' tactics as indecisiveness instead of patients. If Fabius had been allowed to continue what the people chose him to do, it's my opinion that he would have defeated Hannibal long before Cannae as he nearly did at Campania. But instead popular opinion elected Marcus Vera consol in 216BC on the promise of a grand army crushing Hannibal once and for all. Because of that Rome suffered it's greatest defeat ever at Cannae. At Cannae the Romans had amassed an army of nearly 100,000 men to confront Hannibal's much smaller armyof around 25,000. In the end the Romans were routed with losses between 50,000 and 70,000 men. If it hadn't been for Hannabal's indecision after Cannae, Rome would have been no more.

Islam is not fighting a war of IUDs and bombs. It's fighting a war of popular opinion orchestrated by fundamentalist Islam and accessorized by the western media. They know if they can shift American popular opinion against the war that America will eventually be forced to pull out of Iraq by its own people. Use the ignorance of the people against themselves, what a brilliant tactic.

Is torture right or wrong? I don't know, I leave that to the philosophers to debate. The real question is, what did more harm to a favorable outcome in Iraq, the act torture itself or the fact that the media lambasted the population with the images of torture?