Ever have one of those days where everything you read makes you think “I shouldn’t have to explain why this is wrong.”? Well, this is one of those days :

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: “If you want your family released, turn yourself in.” Such tactics are justified, he said, because, “It’s an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info.” They would have been released in due course, he added later.

Never mind that this is (as Atrios has pointed out) a clear violation of the Geneva Convention. Common decency should dictate that you don’t kidnap the wives and children of your enemies and hold them hostage. Yes, this is a guerilla war, but that shouldn’t matter.

Isn’t one of the main reasons (I know, “what reasons?”) we’re there because we’re trying to set a moral example? I was under the impression that the military is trying to give the Iraqis hope through liberation. What’s the ultimate message that they’re trying to send? “We’re not quite as bad as Saddam”?

Considering that we’re spending much, much more on military than any other country, can’t we afford to at least pretend to be the good guys? Forgive me for getting a little off topic (and being overly optimistic) here, but it seems to me that one of the things we should expect from having a military as advanced as ours is to be able to take the moral high ground more often than we do. That not only means playing fair when your opponents are playing dirty, but playing by “the rules of war” that the rest of the world has agreed on.

From the indifference to civilian casualties (”Shock and Awe” anyone??), to the bombing of Iraqi state television, to the use of depleted uranium, clusterbombs, and landmines, to last week’s parading of the corpses of Saddam’s sons, it’s clear that the short-term results of our military’s “win at all costs” strategy have become as morally corrupt as those of the regimes that we’re trying to depose. Considering that we’re in the right here (as much as I oppose the war, Saddam was an evil guy) and that we’ve got massive amounts of resources at our disposal, why can’t our military “play” fair?

Despite what the Bush Administration thinks, the ends don’t justify the means. Fighting dirty, whether it’s a kid on the playground pulling someone’s hair or an American G.I. kidnapping an Iraqi child, is the kind of thing that you’d expect of someone who is weak and outmatched, not the most technologically advanced military on Earth. If our military is really the good guys here, maybe they should start acting like it.