Letting Others Do The Blogging For Me: 'America Deserves Better'

Andrew Sullivan has a great post looking at the Haditha massacre and what it represents-

From the moment George W. Bush exempted U.S. military forces from the Geneva Conventions if "military necessity" demanded it, he sent a message. From the moment George W. Bush refused to accept Donald Rumsfeld's repeated offers to resign after Abu Ghraib, he sent a message. From the moment, George W. Bush appended a signing statement to the McCain Amendment, arguing that as commander-in-chief, he was not subject to the ban on torture and abuse of military prisoners, the president sent a message.

Those messages - in a tense and dangerous war, where bad things will always happen - made a difficult situation one where abuse and war crimes were almost bound to take place. And command responsibility in the military goes upward. The president cannot fill the role of being commander-in-chief in order to declare "Mission Accomplished" and then choose not to fill the role when his troops commit war-crimes and torture and atrocities. In what George W. Bush himself calls a "responsibility society," he has ultimate responsibility for the forces he commands. And there is a direct and obvious line between his decisions to break decades' long adherence to the Geneva Conventions and the pandemic of torture, and now incidents of war crimes, that have plagued this war and stained the honor of this country.

To say this is not to be, as Glenn Reynolds argues, "pathetic and poisonous." It is to face the fact that this president has formally lowered the moral standards for American warfare - in writing, and by his actions. He was given a chance to stop this with the McCain Amendment, and he dodged it. He is now reaping the whirlwind. We all are - not the least the vast majority of great and honorable soldiers whose profession has been stained by a derelict defense secretary and a torture-condoning president. The troops deserve so much better. So does America.

And so did the people of Iraq.