I’m trying to be fair. I’m trying to appreciate the right steps I believe President Bush has taken in reaction to the discovery that Americans tortured Iraqi prisoners. I’ve said that I was glad Bush expressed outrage right away and then a day later apologized. I made the public mistake of anticipating a tepid reaction from the right wing, but have found it only in the Rush wing, and I accept the correction gratefully. I have tried to keep some perspective on the harshness of the torture we’ve heard about so far, and have taken some lumps for that. I am trying not to be the knee-jerk liberal nee pacifist that I in fact am. And I find my views wobbling like a headlight on the road after a traffic accident.

But I read the news today, oh boy. Now we know how many holes it takes to fill a moral void.

Rumsfeld is wondering what to do with the additional information we have about torture. The fact that he’s wondering means he should be fired. There wasn’t much of a case for keeping him before this: He knew we were torturing prisoners, didn’t act to stop it, and didn’t tell Congress or the President. The effect of his hiring mercenaries and going soft on the Geneva Convention was predictable. Rumsfeld should be fired before he’s allowed to resign “because the continuing political controversy no longer allows me to be effective in my job.”

And, the US should close Abu Ghraib because symbolism isn’t just symbolic when it comes to morality. And we ought to open all our prisons up to the Red Cross. And we ought to unambiguously accept the Geneva Conventions as applicable across the board. And we ought to internationalize the occupation of Iraq, beyond the Coalition of the Willing and the Paid, along the lines that Kerry has suggested. We now need to do everything we can think of to indicate that we understand that because we are fallible humans, our power can corrupt us, and since we are the most powerful country on the planet, we know we need to take special pains to behave well and humbly.

If Bush does not fire Rumsfeld and take the strongest and most dramatic steps to investigate, reveal and remedy the abuses, then Bush supports Rumsfeld and takes the blame for the system that enabled torture, just as surely as he should take the blame if, say, the economy suddenly tanked and he didn’t take strong steps to fix it. If a president is responsible for a system of “torture rooms,” that, in my opinion, is a high crime that is grounds for impeachment.

Even if Bush doesn’t deserve impeachment — and of course reasonable people may disagree — if he fails to take these events seriously enough, impeaching him is perhaps the only way we can signal to the world and, more important, to ourselves that America knows it isn’t above the most basic laws of morality. Symbolism counts.

Tony Judt writes well in the Washington Post about the hollowness of our official apologies. For the military’s own report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib, see Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article. For Cheney’s assessment that Rumsfeld “is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had” and that Rumsfeld ought to get back to business as usual, see this Reuters article.

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