NRO's Rich Lowry just got back from Iraq, where he learned a new word : "The word that one hears again and again here, but is so rare in the domestic political debate, is “complex.” The war is changing at least every six months, and every area of the country — even every neighborhood in Baghdad — has a different dynamic. An officer at Forward Operating Base Justice in northwestern Baghdad explains that one translator who works there has to take three or four different taxis to get to the base, with a different faction ready to kill him from neighborhood to neighborhood." I think Rich is being disingenuous here. Liberals have, by and large, consistently grasped the essential complexity of the Iraq project, and have been relentlessly mocked for it by "with us or against us" conservatives. I'm glad Rich is coming around, though, even if it took four years. Thing is, Rich, this word, "complex": it applies to all different kinds of stuff! Please consider this as your magazine tries to get...

Bret Stephens performs the favorite conservative trick of defending the use of torture by defining methods of torture which he favors as "not torture": "For the record, count me as one who does not object to the interrogation to which KSM was reportedly subjected, including waterboarding. This is not because I take the use of waterboarding lightly (although I have a hard time concluding that a technique, however terrifying, to which CIA officers are willing to subject themselves experimentally can properly be counted as torture). It's because I take the threat posed by KSM seriously." Waterboarding is torture . It was devised by torturers as a method of torture. CIA officers subject themselves to this torture as part of their training to withstand torture. Bret Stephens supports torture. "As with the militant anti-abortion movement, which believes that every abortion is murder and thus that every abortionist is a "murderer," the Times editorialists and their fellow travelers would...