Procrastinet

I'll try!

Uhhh... you know, most liberal democrats are very pro-gun control, almost to an annoying, socialist, euro-fruit point. Anti-gun advocates routinely claim the right to bare arms is antiquated, and applies to an America of the past. I suppose the same argument could be made of the oath.

If you're talking about the Geneva Convention -- Al Queda isn't a nation state. Iraq was, and hopefully will be one day, so maybe it applies as well. I doubt they'd signed that treaty.

Kyoto wasn't signed. ABM was abandoned. Treaties are fluid, and like most contracts, have holes and can be negated.

It should be noted that all war is a crime though. And Billy certainly regarded international law and treaties fluidly as well. One can't let the country's self-interest be strangled by the red tape of foreigners.

So the Gevena Conventions, the reciprocity of which is supposed to protect our guys (and gals) in uniform and which the Administration invoked during the "combat operations" phase in Iraq to say that they would rain holy hell on anyone who violated them against our soldiers, are "the red tape of foreigners?"

And grabbing dozens of random guys and - ahem - "abusing" them was in the country's self-interest?

And on top of that, the right to BARE ARMS is antiquated?! SLEEVES FOR EVERYONE!

Hm. Thanks for pointing the typo out. Remind me to bill you for your proofing services.

I agree with the broad notion that torture, and other nefarious and illegal activities and war crimes, make us no better than the enemy. Is what we believe worth dying for?

But the details of war are different. And if you're a kid who's getting his ass shot at every day, and you're told that hazing the enemy, humiliating him, will save your buddies lives, then you're going to abuse him. Wars are won by those who'll do what the other side won't.

The Geneva Convention was a treaty conceived and signed after the death of "noble wars"-where Euro armies lined up neatly and tried to adhere to rules of combat.

We can't become our enemy. But in the grand scheme of things, sexually humiliating a prisoner is not as bad as beheading him on tape-two enormous violations of the convention.

And once again we come around to the "we're not as bad as the worst people on earth" justification, which is, was and ever shall be a morally bankrupt rationale.

Mostly, though, we've gotten off-topic when we discuss the psychology of a stressed out grunt. Today we're talking about an order, signed by the SecDef, which violates a long-standing international obligation which WE OURSELVES said applied to what we do in Iraq. And our president claims that we should be proud.

Sidetracking onto the niceties of whether the GCs apply to terrorists also neatly sidesteps the issue that many if not most of the guys (and women, and children) that we applied these methods to are not and have nothing to do with terrorists.

War is morally bankrupt, and the entire notion of fighting one "morally" is naive. Lincoln knew it, Truman knew it... even Nixon knew, which is why in the dwindling days of Vietnam, he, far too late, took the war to the enemy and started bombing the hell out of Hanoi.

Of course, the Bushies are livid at the 911 Commissions asserting that there was no connection between AQ and Iraq (which there was, but if that's reason to go to war, we should start filling out a long list of places to bomb). This information comes, according to the times, from peeps like Khalid "Ron Jeremy" Mohammad, who they tortured apparently, to extract info. So torture isn't even working for these yahoos.

I think there should be weekly screenings of "Three Kings".