For people supposedly occupying the moral high ground, John McCain and his band of Republican rebels defying President Bush on the issue of interrogation have a strange attachment to confused argumentation.

They maintain that the United States can’t define more precisely its obligations for the treatment of unlawful combatants under the vague language of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to allow the tough interrogations of terrorists, as Bush proposes, lest our troops in turn be tortured upon capture. McCain warns that such a definitional exercise risks “the lives of those Americans who risk everything to defend our country.” What pleasant, alternate reality does the Arizona Republican inhabit?

Perhaps he missed the story a few months ago about the two American soldiers captured by al-Qaida in Iraq. Al-Qaida released a video of them, described by the British newspaper The Guardian: “One of them, partially naked, had been beheaded and his chest cut open. The other’s face was bruised, his jaw apparently broken, and his leg had long gashes. Fighters were shown turning the bodies over and lifting the head of the decapitated man.”

This is savagery immune to a domestic legal debate in the U.S. Maybe McCain and Co. think that the U.S. debate at least will influence our more reasonable adversaries. But since when have we fought a regime – Saddam’s Iraq, Milosevic’s Serbia, North Vietnam, North Korea, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany – that is not barbarously committed to repression and murder?

No one in the U.S. had broached clarifying Common Article 3 in 1967 when McCain was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese, who proceeded to beat him routinely and keep him in solitary confinement for years. The North Koreans were equally disgusting. As a U.S. Senate committee concluded: “American prisoners of war who were not deliberately murdered at the time of capture or shortly after capture, were beaten, wounded, starved and tortured.”

Ah, if only the North Koreans had known how committed we were to giving the widest possible Common Article 3 protections to terrorists, maybe they would have re-thought their detention policies. McCain and Co. have a case of treaty fetishism. That is the belief that a piece of paper will alter the behavior of thugs. But a government will abide by the Geneva Conventions only if it is civilized; and if it is civilized, it is unlikely we will be fighting it, which is why we don’t have to worry about defending ourselves from, say, the Danes.

McCain and his allies, however, apparently have trouble distinguishing between civilization and barbarity. “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a widely circulated letter to McCain. “To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts.” So American troops fighting to establish decent governments halfway around the world can be confused morally with terrorists? What a slander, and how disgusting that a former secretary of state would give it any credence by repeating it.

The irony is that, for all his preening, McCain supports what he would call “torture” if the conditions are right. He has said of a ticking-time-bomb scenario – a terrorist has information of an imminent attack – “you do what you have to do. But you take responsibility for it” (i.e. get sued or prosecuted). In other words, McCain wants to make it legally problematic for interrogators to undertake the very interrogations that he supports.

In real life, the closest we get to a ticking-time-bomb scenario is the one that prompted the CIA interrogation program – the capture of high-level al-Qaida operatives with knowledge of ongoing plots. McCain can’t bring himself to say that he opposes the program outright, so he professes to support it, but refuses to give the program the legal cover necessary for it to continue. And this is the moral high ground?

Rich Lowry is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached via e-mail at: [email protected].