Right Side of the Rainbow

Perspective:

Rules of interrogation, Korans, prayer arrows pointed to Mecca, visits by U.S. congressmen, Middle Eastern food, inmates as voracious readers of Harry Potter, and the absence of a single inmate lost in captivity: All of that suggests humane treatment toward terrorists — often caught in combat, always out of uniform, and not subject to the Geneva Convention. Guantanamo seems radically different from any prison run by any other current wartime state, much less like anything in our own past when, for example, we summarily shot German agents not in German uniforms during the Battle of the Bulge.

[…]

In the age of utopianism we demand impossible standards of perfection. Then when they cannot be met, we conclude that we are not good at all, but the equivalent of a Pol Pot, Hitler, or Saddam himself — an elected American president who is a worse terrorist than Osama bin Laden.

And in a war with enemies like few other in our recent history, the contrast between rhetoric and reality is only accentuated: panties over the head of an Iraqi inmate, no head at all on an American prisoner; Korans given to the enemy terrorists in jail, Bibles outlawed for visitors to our friends the Saudis; our elected president becomes a member of the “Bush crime family” as we worry about proper barristers for Saddam Hussein’s genuinely criminal family. As we fear that we have fallen short of the postmodern therapeutic age, Islamic fascists brag they are avatars of the Dark Ages.

As always, Victor Davis Hanson’s writing is essential reading.