Abu Ghraib, Second Thoughts About War, and Nick Berg

Over at The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan disgorges his long-simmering disgust at American torture. Self-doubting excerpt:

Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naive in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against "evil" might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes. […]

[W]hen the results are this horrifying, it's worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and war methods.

One thing I found very interesting while researching the conservative reaction to Abu Ghraib, was how it triggered a real crisis of confidence, as expressed in columns by David Brooks and George Will, which in turn sparked a solid week or two of cons-having-second-thoughts-about-the-War articles. What finally brought this festival of second-guessing to halt? I'm sure William Kristol and Mort Kondracke would like to believe it was their don't-go-wobbly columns, but in fact the biggest single factor was the videotaped decapitation of Nick Berg. Here's Brooks on PBS, just days after describing the Iraq War as "clearly an intellectual failure":

[T]he killing of Nick Berg apparently by Zarqawi personally rallied a lot of people. I mean, it reminded people of what this thing is all about […] I think it firmed up resolve for a lot of people that said, yes, we're humiliated, yes, a lot of things have been—but the enemy is still out there and it is really, really bad and we need to buckle down.