From the Comments section of Grammar Police, J. Scott Barnard offers up a terrifying view of moral ambivalence in a discussion of the “Death Squads“ option now being put on the table by the Pentagon: 

Negroponte is a hero of the Americas for his contributions in the struggle against murderous marxists. And if his contributions against terrorists are as effective, we'll all be safer because of his involvement in the middleeast.

I don't want to live in a world where communists who murder Mosqito indians indiscriminately or islamists who blow up men standing in line for a job are coddled by guilt-ridden liberals from the security of their desktops.

Negroponte. American Hero.

I reply with a rant:

J. Scott: I see you read Instapundit. Iran-Contra has everything to do with it. First off, the background briefer was the person connecting El Salvador to the new plans being thrown around.

As I'm sure you know, the death-squads program operated in both Honduras and El Salvador. Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras during this period. Honduras was where the Contras were being trained and where the money from Iran-Contra was going.

The problem with the program is that it doesn't work and pours gasoline on the fire. As we have already seen, locals "informing" on suspected insurgents in both Afghanistan and Iraq have used the U.S. military as an unwitting tool of revenge against people they don't like. Nothing will increase this problem like a Phoenix Project-style assassination squad program designed to eliminate suspected insurgents in Iraq.

Needless to say this doesn't help us combat what the Iraqi Interior Minister described this week as a 40,000 strong insurgency supported by 160,000 helpers, not to mention the many tens of thousands of others who look the other way.

Like all moral questions, at bottom it isn't in our interest to behave like the terrorists who attack Americans and Iraqis. This is exactly what they want: moral equivalence between themselves and the Americans. Then the argument gets real simple for them: "We may use bad methods, but so do they and they are foreign devils." We can't win against that argument. Ever. And if we don't have the support of the populace in Iraq, we cannot win. For all of your yapping about "guilt-ridden liberals," you fail to ask the first question needed: Will this work? The answer, of course, is no.

Finally, however we have to ask ourselves: Is it morally right to engage in torture and semi-random killing in order to reach our goals? Are we to be completely unmoored from our own values in order to subjugate another country? At some point, we must either acknowledge and follow our professed values or frankly admit that they are no longer the principles we follow.

Conservatism used to provide the country with important moral reminders about the fact that our exercise of power at home and abroad must be tempered with a thorough understanding of how good intentions can result in a human disaster. Now it merely consists of Liddy-style posturing to soothe the anxieties of those who dislike change and bad news.

I see now that J. Scott is heaping more effusive praise on the masthead of his blog, Burton Terrace.