[mburbank]

There's WAY too much here for me to respond to, not because I don't think it's worth it, I'm just too busy right now. So. Main points and objections.

" War Crimes Trials are held AFTER the war."
Then there will be no trials (which perhaps you are okay with, but then argue that) because the way this 'war' was framed was so that it is not going to be over ever.

"I'm falling on the side of whenever even a single innocent life is at stake and offers of cigarettes and candy fail."

Even under the kindest of interpretations, this practically guarantees at least some innocent people get tortured. I hope it isn't anyone nice. Under less kind interpreation, it would mean the routine torture of almost everyone we take in, because who knows what information they might have? The argument isn't wether a line should be drawn between them and us, it's where that line should be drawn. I prefer to draw it so that we're the side that doesn't torture captives, as opposed to the side that tortures them less and with better intentions.

"The greatest mistake a person of virtue can make is the assumption that all others already are equal in virtue."

That would be a mistake. But I also think it is a mistake to think that Virtue has anything whatever to do with the actions of others. Vurtue is about deffinition and should exist in a vaccuum. Virtue is about what we decide to be as people and as a nation.

"To anthropomorphize those of such a terribly different culture is to commit such an error. "

I'm pretty sure you didn't mean exactly that, since athropomorphizing is attributing human characteristics to non human things, say animals or rocks. History is full of examples of humans of all stripes doing things terrible enough to make this current crop look like pikers. If what you mean is don't assume the same, similar or even understandable values of people from parts of the world we know next to nothing about. By the same token, we shouldn't assume our values are deffinitively human. Don't get me wrong. I like my values better. I just think that the opposite of anthropomorphization is dehumanization, and that it's our enemies ability to do this (among other things) that makes them our enemy. Again, if we don't draw some sort of line between us and the enemy, we are just baboon tribes killing each other with sticks. Not to anthropomorphize baboons. Or sticks.