There's a danger in the line weelittledrummer takes there -"I can't believe that this stuff really outrages anybody. war ain't nice and you are in one."

It's true enough that atrocities of one sort or another are pretty well inevitable in a war. But it is important that they should always be a cause of horror and disgust to people at home, and denied official sanction. When that ceases to be the case there is no barrier against them overwhelming the fragile defences society has against them.

There's an element of hypocrisy in this, but when Oscar Wilde described hypocrisy as "the tribute vice pays to virtue" he wasn't just being flippant, he was stating a truth.

When we stop feeling shock and horror at atrocities like Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay, and learn to accept that that is just the way things are in war, we open the way to the next step, which isn't a rejection of all war, it's for things like Auschwitz to become acceptable and accepted.