What's the objective?

Do we want to win the fight or be nice?

Andrew Sullivan on today's discovery of the bodies of the two missing US soldiers in Iraq:

I doubt whether even Donald Rumsfeld will describe what has been done to two young American soldiers as a "coercive interrogation technique." But you never know. Some people wonder why I remain so concerned about torture, and the surrender of our moral standing with respect to this unmitigated evil. Maybe the news of captured, tortured and murdered Americans will jog their conscience. Or maybe it will simply reinforce the logic of torture-reciprocity endorsed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gonzales. As usual, complete silence from Instapundit. Almost radio silence from the Corner, except for the torture-advocate, Mark Levin, who is urging reciprocal atrocities. Give him points for consistency. And so the cycle of depravity and defeat deepens ...

And we maintain our standards of civility that differentiate us from most of the rest of the world. At what price?

How many other soldiers and/or civilians must be put into potentially the same kind of danger so that Andrew can feel morally superior to his enemies?

Doing the job of Iraq is not worth doing half-assed. Are we there to win the fight or aren't we?

I won't dogpile--and it needs no explanation--but Greg Riehl expresses a not-uncommon perspective on what Andrew Sullivan has become over the last two-and-a-half years.