I haven't had the chance to really digest the Iraqi torture scandal but I did have some time to watch the coverage on BBC World in Milan and Madrid.   My thoughts are complex and I wish it wasn't such a strange proposition for some to accept that you can believe in the war and yet, somehow magically believe that torture is also bad.   Luckily, Victor Davis Hanson comes through with the right words -

If, on occasion, an exasperated and furious West sinks to the same level — renegade prisoner guards gratuitously humiliating or torturing naked Iraqi prisoners on tape — all the better, as proof that the elevated pretensions of Western decency and humanity are but a sham. A single violation of civility, a momentary lapse in humanism and in the new world of Western cultural relativism and moral equivalence, presto, the West loses its carefully carved-out moral high ground as it engages not merely in much needed self-critique and scrutiny, but reaches a feeding frenzy that evolves to outright cultural cannibalism.

For someone in a coffee-house in Brussels the idea that Bush apologizes for a dozen or so prison guards makes him the same as or worse than Saddam and his sons shooting prisoners for sport — moral equivalence lapped up by the state-controlled and censored Arab media that is largely responsible for the collective Middle East absence of rage over the exploding, decapitating, and incinerating of Western civilians in its midst.

The real difference will be that had these torturers been Saddam era prison gaurds, they'd have been either been chastised for not inflicting lifelong physical wounds or perhaps even promoted for their successful display of savagery towards the untermensch.  By contrast, in our world, confronting such a display of the banality of evil brings Congressional inquiry.   There is a world of difference.  

In both societies, the fact that the most base stuff of human nature will occasionally be placed on display is an inescapable, statistical consequence of gathering a few million individuals of any stripe in one place.  Both our world and Saddam's are made of the same raw, timeless & placeless, human material.  The real difference will be how the institutions and culture around those deviant actors react and it will be important for the world to see the almost promiscuous manner in which we will prosecute those involved.   The machinations of Congress and Internal Affairs military justice will be on unescapable display for the next few weeks & months.

Perhaps this is the one good thing that comes out of this God-awful mess -- a demonstration that although we both share the problem of thugs in our ranks that Americans have nevertheless constructed a society of law and liberty, scientific & economic progress and deals with these morons as they come up.