Finding honor in Abu Ghraib.(on the right)

NEW YORK, MAY 14

SEVERAL voices, trying to sway the public temper, if not exactly to overlook the grim events, at least to put them in an anesthetic perspective, are saying: "So's your old man." And there is no questioning the truth of it, which is that the people to whom President Bush has extended an apology are people who have spent very little time deploring the atrocities of the enemy we face. They are, then, hypocrites.

But what does that do for us, to label them as such? Nothing very much, because our concern is over the behavior of British and American troops, not the behavior of Baathists. Having apologized to the enemy and to the Arab community, what else is in order?

Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa was quick to ask for the dismissal of Sec Def Donald Rumsfeld. Senator Harkin, just a few months ago, was counseling the election of Howard Dean as president of the United States, which tells us something of his own judgment. He is part of a little group of left toughies who are calling for Rumsfeld's dismissal--Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel and other solons. The trouble with leaving it to such folk to prescribe the norms of behavior in Abu Ghraib prison is, according to one commentator, "that one ends up blowing opportunities to effect true reforms."

But we do not need any reforms. Reforms are something we need in Guantanamo, where we have isolated a new species not previously known in the taxonomic order: the man who is not a prisoner of war, not a traitor, but an enemy combatant. If there is reason to be vexed by Rumsfeld, it is surely that he has not encouraged a table of organization that deals with that phenomenon other than simply by sticking him in a corner of Cuba without any avenue of hope or resolution.

But there are no reforms indicated in the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. What was done was against 1) regulations, 2) army convention, and 3) ...