Axis of Moral High Ground

It appears that the diplomatic and rhetorical stand-off between Britain and Iran over the plight of 15 British sailors captured in waters between Iraq and Iran has been resolved, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apparently “pardoning” the 15, and advising that they would be released shortly. You will recall our President’s desperate efforts to escalate this minor standoff (a previous standoff like this resulted in the release of the British troops involved, unharmed) into a casus belli to save his own failed presidency by calling the captured (and soon to be released) sailors as “hostages” ini the hope of bringing his rolling world war to Iran.
Well, well. What has happened here? Iran now comes off as reasonable and magnanimous. IRAN.
The same Administration that had made Saddam Hussein into a martyr through its ham-handed insistence that he be executed, and then by handing him over for execution to our supposed enemies, Moqtada “Baby” Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and then making 9-11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed look sympathetic (or worse, look like a joke) because of our government’s criminal insistence on using torture to extract confessions… after our CIA “Black prisons” and the legal black hole of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib… we have now made Iran appear to be setting the gold standard for treatment of captured prisoners. And for what?
My Bush out of office countdown calendar tells me that there are 656 days to go in this Administration. One begins to wonder not merely if we can make it with any semblance of this nation’s moral authority intact (that ship has sailed), but if we’ll recognize this country at all. Time will tell.
This will likely be a very long 22 months.