Daniel Larison proves again why I consider him to be one of the sharpest commentators writing today:

The love affair with war crimes that some on the mainstream right have never ceases to perplex me. When smaller wars have been waged in which civilian centers are being bombarded, we often hear from this crowd that the problem with Western nations today is that they lack the will to inflict the mass casualties inflicted during WWII bombing attacks, and when challenged about ongoing operations they will say, “Oh yeah, well what about Dresden and Tokyo?” To which I might respond, “Well, what about them? These were unspeakable crimes.”

Many of the same people who preach such insipidly simplistic and irrational messages about fighting and even “ending” evil will be the first to find refuge behind the “complicated” nature of wartime decisions. At least they will do so if it means that they can ignore the real moral complexity of these situations, in which all belligerents are capable of committing war crimes and ought to be held to the same standard. It is this latter point that is really quite simple: if the torture practices authorized by the last administration had been carried out against Americans, we would not hesitate to call them crimes and demand punishment for the guilty, and if the same kinds of bombings were done to our cities by foreign military forces we would not think twice about calling them war crimes. Acknowledging this should not be an occsasion for excessive self-flagellation, but it does have to be acknowledged. Perhaps even more corrupting and dangerous than the abuses of power and wartime excesses themselves is the willingness to minimize or approve of wrongful acts carried out by the government.