"The Dark Knight" as political allegory

As we're coming up on the summer blockbuster season (and it's a Friday afternoon), here are three differing and very interesting views of last summer's "The Dark Knight" as an allegory for the war on terror:

Ian Keegan (here) sees shades of hard-core Zarqawi's rise to power within al Qaeda in the Joker's takeover of Gotham's gangs, and notes the Joker's use of the cheap tools of asymetric warfare. He also notes that:

the real value of Dark Knight regarding the discussion of terrorism, in my opinion, is in its depiction of the effects of terror. As viewers we are placed in the shoes of a populace targeted by a successful terrorism campaign. We see innocent people being attacked and killed, while the police and the Batman are unable to make any progress towards stopping the source of the violence. And even though we are experienced movie-goers who know that in the end the forces of good will prevail, the movie is so well made that we are forced to consider the possibility that the Joker cannot be stopped. How we act, threatened by a seemingly unstoppable terrorist threat?

Spencer Ackerman (here) doesn't buy it:

This misses the point about The Dark Knight in important ways. Batman prevails. He prevails by perverting justice in a very serious way: through blanket surveillance over everyone in Gotham and, inevitably, by stopping Harvey Dent. In a caped-crusader version of Michael Walzer’s “clean hands” argument, he essentially makes a martyr of himself to Gotham by agreeing to do something he knows very well is wrong and accepts that his ultimately-Pyrrhic victory must include Gotham believing him to be the villain. Remember when Alfred says that he stopped the Burmese bandit by burning down the village? That’s how you know good won’t prevail. (And how you know it’s more Sassaman than McMaster.) The Dark Knight, for all its virtues and for all its flaws, is a movie that embraces The Dark Side, however agonized it is about that decision.

Adam Serwer (here) disagrees, and thinks that "The Dark Knight" does in fact work as a liberal critique of Bush-era war on terror tactics:

But of course the point of The Dark Knight is that people can resist such transformations, that they don't have to become monsters to survive. The Joker knows Batman isn't a monster, not really, but he tries to make him one by making him break his One Rule: Batman doesn't kill. You could argue that such things as Hong Kong scene "support" rendition, but this is a comic book movie, and heroes have to do cool things. Within the context of the Batman narrative, the only rule that matters is the One Rule. Moreover, we're given a cautionary tale in the form of Harvey Dent in what happens when government officials start to believe that rules no longer matter.