Quote of the day

MANIFESTO

I'm ordinarily not a big fan of Andrew Sullivan, but he nails the ethical problem of torture in this month's Atlantic:

In long wars of ideas, moral integrity is essential to winning, and framing the moral contrast between the West and its enemies as starkly as possible is indispensable to victory, as it was in the Second World War and the Cold War. But because of the way [Bush] chose to treat prisoners in American custody in wartime—a policy that degraded human beings with techniques typically deployed by brutal dictatorships—we lost this moral distinction early, and we have yet to regain it.

I've never seen this argument made quite so succinctly.