6,000

The dead. Just in Baghdad. Just the ones that actually got to the morgue. Just this year.

It's horrific to extrapolate that out and understand what it means. And Iraq has ten times less people than America, if you'd like to make comparisons.

In this environment, with death in the air and US forces struggling to maintain any kind of authority, moral or otherwise, we've decided to render the Geneva Conventions "quaint" again:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

Now, there was a torture ban signed here, but of course that set out the law of the land regarding detainees as the laws contained in the Army Field Manual. It didn't take long for the DoD to figure out that all they had to do was change the Field Manual.

This is occurring in the wake of Haditha, in the wake of Abu Ghraib, when the need for the United States to specifically renounce torture is at its highest ebb:

But the exclusion of the Geneva provisions may make it more difficult for the administration to portray such incidents as aberrations. And it undercuts contentions that U.S. forces follow the strictest, most broadly accepted standards when fighting wars.

"The rest of the world is completely convinced that we are busy torturing people," said Oona A. Hathaway, an expert in international law at Yale Law School. "Whether that is true or not, the fact we keep refusing to provide these protections in our formal directives puts a lot of fuel on the fire."

So 6,000 men and women die in Baghdad this year (much of which is locked down, like the Green Zone), and their relatives are sick with rage. They need to believe that something better will come to rescue them from this artificially created hell. And the so-called "guys in the white hats," the good guys, refuse to renounce torture, indeed take an end run around international law to make sure it remains an option.

Are we even trying to win hearts and minds anymore?