Protect the Innocent

Yesterday suicide bombers, one woman, two others disguised as women, blew up 70 people at the end of services at a mosque in Iraq. We have to fight, here or overseas, against terrorists who have no honor at all. Daniel Henninger, WSJ:

We are past the point of legal abstraction. We know the nature of the enemy's tactics, the use of loaded airplanes and the pursuit of WMD. Suicide bombings -- human beings used as weapons to kill civilians -- have become the portable gas chambers of terrorism. The use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction, insofar as mass media distribute the dead, dismembered victims into our living rooms morning and night, causing some to give up....

The central issue raised in the speech by U.K. Defense Minister Reid involves the tension between what up to now has been illegal in war and what in the future should be illegal, if the purpose of law is to protect the innocent against barbarism. My view is that the likelihood of the U.S. or the U.K. "losing its soul" if it upgrades the rules to suppress a shame-free terrorism is about nil. Yes, September 11 changed everything, and it's time to start talking about whether the changes are helping us, or them.