The Fluctuating Moral Compass
Two temptations for the state during wartime are torture of the enemy and the killing of civilians.
What's interesting is how in five decades the perception of the morality of torture and killing civilians has reversed: during WWII any physical pressure was prohibited while the wholescale slaughter of civilians was greeted with equanimity.
Part of this is due to the nature of the combat. One was "total war" involving conventional armies and identifiable countries. The second is limited to a band of networked terrorists, single players without a flag.
With German P.O.W's, we used brain power instead of brawn. We used deception and bugging. We planted German-speaking Americans posing as fellow prisoners. But there was never a question of making them stand for hours or sleep deprivation let alone "waterboarding". Now there's much greater toleration for physical means of gaining information, at least in the Bush Administration if not the media. (Most of the techniques, I understand, were derived during the Cold War from the Soviets; if America rarely originates bad moral practices, it's perhaps not a stretch to say she is not too shy about adopting or adapting to what the enemy uses and then hanging on to them. Part of that is due to our self-perception as 'good', caused by our Puritan founding and 'city on the hill' imagery. If we're doing it that means, definitionally, it isn't that bad. Back in antebellum times slavery was seen as bad where it was not practiced and good where it was. Made that's less our Puritan upbringing than simply human nature.)
The practice of indiscriminately killing civilians was begun by the Axis Powers (the Germans began it in the First World War). It became so acceptable that we could, seemingly without much angst, drop a nuclear bomb on Japan. Now, not only is the nuclear option pretty much unthinkable, but probably part of the calculus in staying in Iraq is that we consider ourselves responsible for the wholescale death that will occur in an unchecked civil war. Perhaps this is part of what Colin Powell meant when before the war he said: "if we break it, we buy it".
Nowadays no matter what America does she will be criticized by the MSM. If a WMD had made its way to a terrorist via Hussein, the press would've crucified Bush for not having gone into Iraq when the signs were obvious that he should've (i.e. weapons inspectors thrown out; continual defiance of U.N., sanctions failing to work...etc...).
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