Fighting for an ideal

PRESIDENT BUSH SPOKE FORCEFULLY on Thursday about the threat from within to Islam, and what the United States is doing to protect Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia. Yet the president is strangely reluctant to take even the smallest step to protect Muslim prisoners being held by U.S. forces in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. His rhetoric will be exposed as even emptier than usual if he keeps squandering opportunities to back it up.

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Senate approved an amendment defining how U.S. troops treat those they capture during wartime. The measure would help prevent a recurrence of outrages such as Abu Ghraib and remove the suspicion of torture at Guantanamo Bay and other facilities where the United States holds Muslim detainees.

Bush aides have warned he may veto the defense appropriation bill if it contains the amendment, which is sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and was approved on a 90-9 vote. The measure would make the Army Field Manual’s specification of techniques to handle detainees standard procedure for U.S. soldiers and would prohibit “cruel, inhumane or degrading” treatment of prisoners.

That should be the norm. Yet White House spokesman Scott McClellan claimed it would somehow limit the president’s ability to carry out the war on terror.

Nonsense. The McCain amendment -- also supported by another military veteran, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) -- would recommit the U.S. to adherence to the Geneva Convention’s treatment of detainees. The administration’s claims that “unlawful combatants” are not entitled to Geneva Convention protections are specious both legally and morally.

The photos from Abu Ghraib and the tales of mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq and Afghanistan have badly stained the U.S. image. The contention of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) that those we brand terrorists are not entitled to treatment accorded prisoners of war drags this country down to the lowest level of those we fight.

In his speeches and public statements, the president routinely takes the high road, which makes his administration’s opposition to the McCain amendment all the more frustrating. Although Bush’s address Thursday to the National Endowment for Democracy was mostly a recital of tired themes, the president showed his sensitivity to the Muslim world by quoting from the Koran. (He cited an injunction against killing innocents.)

By far the more eloquent statement of U.S. goals and policy came from the Senate floor on Wednesday. Speaking for his amendment, McCain explained why the Geneva Convention matters to America’s captives and America itself. He and his fellow prisoners of the Vietnamese three decades ago “took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them,” he said. By passing this amendment, Congress could show those fighting in Iraq and elsewhere “that they need not risk their or their country’s honor to prevail.”

The House of Representatives should sign on to the Senate amendment, understanding that it can help prevent atrocities such as Abu Ghraib and lessen the danger that captured U.S. troops will be mistreated. And then the president should sign the bill and show that he, too, understands that how we fight this war is just as important as winning it.