The heart sinks when reading the headline from today’s New York Times: “ 3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine. The soldiers told a human rights group that prisoners had been beaten and abused to help gather intelligence and for amusement.”

For amusement.

Americans aren’t supposed to commit such heinous acts; we’re supposed to be better than that. It’s the terrorists who torture for amusement. Right?

I can’t help but think that this kind of moral corruption stems from the fundamental dishonesty of this war; that it was predicated on a premise its most informed proponents knew to be very probably untrue, the existence of weapons of mass destruction. A war predicated on lies is immoral, and that immorality seeps down to every level. How can soldiers act honorably when they’re acting at the orders of a dishonest president? (It’s to their great credit that most of them, probably the vast majority, do.)

I suspect that history is going to be very tough on this war, and that it will be seen as the time when, even more than Vietnam, America really lost all its illusions about its own place in history, its self-proclaimed moral standing. I am having a hard time being proud of my country these days, and the reality of that fills me with a sadness greater than I can describe. One gets the feeling that more and more of the country would like a new leader who fills us with an honest pride, not a chest-beating, macho, “mission accomplished” false pride. That’s a start. But what happens for the next three years?