Finally, as with every other aspect of this war, Christians must be very wary of anyone's suggestion that we are acting as a so-called "Christian nation" in going to war against Iraq. If we allow our identity as Americans to usurp our identity as Christians, then we are in danger of refusing to look at the actions of our country with the critical assessment necessary to admit that we can be wrong. We cannot allow our patriotism to overwhelm our Christian understanding of the enormous capacity of human beings to sin, nor can we as Christians believe those who charge that serious criticism of our nation is a sign of disloyalty. For Christians, true love of country must be placed under obedience to God; we are required to examine our nation's actions critically, to state what we believe is wrong, to hold politicians responsible for what has been done, and to identify our own culpability in supporting a war (or not protesting it strongly enough) when it increasingly appears to have been waged for the wrong reasons and to be doing far more harm than good for the U.S. and the Iraqi people.

-- Nancy J. Duff is associate professor of Christian ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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Commentary by William C. Placher

Academic debates sometimes consider extreme cases in which torture might be justified: the prisoner knows the secret of where the bomb is hidden, and it will kill hundreds of people when it goes off. Should we torture him to get the bomb's location before it's too late?

But in fact, torture almost never takes place in cases like that. Certainly what went on in Abu Ghraib prison does not fit such a pattern. No one has yet cited reasons to think that the abused prisoners had life-saving information. If there had been reason to suspect that they had important secrets, the task of "preparing" them for questioning would surely not have been turned over to young, untrained reservists who had come to Iraq to be truck drivers. Abu Ghraib did not involve a hard choice between moral principles and pragmatic policies. This abuse of prisoners was morally wrong and pragmatically disastrous, too.

When undisciplined people are given absolute power over other human beings and various signals (how explicit we do not yet know) that no one would mind if they mistreated them, some of the worst features of human nature tend to emerge. Christians who understand the nature of human sin will not be surprised.

Career military officers would also not be surprised. Most of them therefore emphasize the importance of very specific standards on the treatment of prisoners. They know the horrors that can be released if we start to bend the rules. But the civilian leadership of the Bush administration has systematically pushed for bending the rules on the treatment of prisoners -- another reason, perhaps, to regret that so many of these leaders figured out ways to get out of their own military service and failed to learn lessons about the real character of war.

-- William C. Placher is the Charles D. and Elizabeth S. LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and professor of philosophy and religion at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.