In this week’s Newsweek, John McCain wrote an excellent essay on torture, and why America should NOT resort to it. I make no secret of my politics: I’m a died-in-the-wool Democrat (with some independent/libertarian/socialist leanings), but I must say, given the dearth of quality presidential candidates, likely Republican candidate McCain is looking pretty darned good to me.

It has been saddening and disheartening to hear the Bush administration talk about degrees of torture being acceptable – that it is somehow okay to sort of torture people, as long as you don’t actually kill them or leave big physical scars. I’m enough of a pacifist to feel that we should look to “the better angels of our nature” and rise above our prejudices and biases and strive to be better, to be more fair, to be more just, to acknowledge the posssibility that in fact maybe might doesn’t always make right, that because your enemy is behaving like an idiot you must as well. As McCain says so well:

The enemies we fight today hold our liberal values in contempt, as they hold in contempt the international conventions that enshrine them. I know that. But we are better than them, and we are stronger for our faith. And we will prevail. It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others—even our enemies.

Those who return to us and those who give their lives for us are entitled to that honor. And those of us who have given them this onerous duty are obliged by our history, and the many terrible sacrifices that have been made in our defense, to make clear to them that they need not risk their or their country’s honor to prevail; that they are always—through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss—they are always, always, Americans, and different, better and stronger than those who would destroy us.