Mark Steyn prides himself on being a realist, on seeing through various hackneyed templates of events, and calling the world like it is. But, of course, he has his own exhausted templates, rooted in his own tired ideology. And so we come across this particular idiocy from his latest column:
Anyone who supports the launching of a war should be clear-sighted enough to know that, when the troops go in, a few of them will kill civilians, bomb schools, torture prisoners. It happens in every war in human history, even the good ones. Individual Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians did bad things in World War II and World War I. These aren’t stunning surprises, they’re inevitable: It might be a bombed mosque or a gunned-down pregnant woman or a slaughtered wedding party, but it will certainly be something.
This is true, so far as it goes. But Steyn does not grapple with the massive elephant in his living room. These kinds of atrocities happen even when a country commits itself to moral standards in warfare, even when its leaders at every level insist on following the Geneva Conventions. How much worse is war going to be when a country’s own leaders openly flout the Geneva Conventions, express contempt for them, and proudly violate the law of their own countries and the U.N. Convention against torture? Has this distinction between this war and every other war in American history been lost on Steyn? In Vietnam, American soldiers were court-martialed for "waterboarding" a detainee. In Bush’s administration, CIA officials are trained to do it, and medical professionals monitor the victims to ensure they are kept healthy enough for further torture. These facts are no longer in any dispute. When the president treats the enemy as animals, even when they are off the battlefield and can harm no one, why should his troops be held to a higher standard in the thick of grinding urban warfare, where the enemy is still at large?
And spare me this nonsense about knowing that torture will follow every war. If I had been informed in early 2003 that the liberation of Iraq would be conducted outside the Geneva Conventions, I could not have supported what would have been an unjust war in its execution. Period. If the president had been candid and explained that this war would require America to jettison its long history of humane detention policies and become a nation that practices and outsources torture, I would have been unable to support the war. Those of us who believe in the American tradition of humane warfare and in the moral boundaries of just warfare are not fair-weather hawks. We simply expected America to retain its honor in warfare. We were duped.
The Dish 