Two Sets of Rules?

Daniel Larison, another conservative with whom I sometimes agree, writes a brilliant take on the war crimes issue with some historical context. Comparing the Bush admin's use of torture to gather "intelligence" that could be used to fight terrorism and prevent further attacks on the United States to the use of weapons of mass destruction by Harry Truman in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he writes:

Because the prevailing view of Harry Truman and his decisions at the present time happens to be favorable, we are all supposed to believe that the “judgment of history” has “vindicated” Truman. This is a nice way of saying that propaganda and hero worship have overcome moral reasoning, and time has caused the moral horror of even a significant part of the American right in the 1940s to fade from memory.

His italics. This passage scares me a little, as I shudder to think that historians 50 years hence, who are more or less inclined to agree with the use of torture as a justifiable means to an end, would "vindicate" Bush and Cheney in the same way American historians who would never dare to state or imply that somehow mass incineration of innocent human beings was a heroic gesture. We sort of all know now that Japan was already pretty much defeated by the time the bomb was dropped, but that there was significant pressure to use the bombs because of all the work that had gone into testing etc. Plus the US really wanted to send a message of "Don't fuck with America."

Larison concludes:

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.

It is this point that really gets me worked up and has me shaking my fist at the computer: what fucking hypocrisy. More than 160 years after Manifest Destiny, we still think that our shit don't stink. I'm not anti-American by any stretch, but we cannot hold the rest of the world accountable to laws that we wouldn't ourselves follow.