Senator John McCain no doubt has many shortcomings. But his battle with President Bush over Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on treatment of war prisoners is a defining moment.
Clearly, the Bush/Cheney view is that America is an exceptional country because its preponderant might, superpower status and manifest destiny confer upon it alone the right to depart from the rules by which all others must play. This narrow logic of national interest that brought us unilateralism and pre-emption now brings us the idea of exemption from the international rules of war.
McCain's view, like the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is that America is exceptional precisely because it has strived, unlike other great powers in the past, not to exempt itself from rules of law and codes of conduct in the name of its own interests simply because it has the power to do so. Haven't all the great philosophers of the West argued that restraint is the wisest aim of the free and powerful?
McCain stands upon the the diminishing swatch of moral high ground the US still holds as the protracted folly of the Iraq occupation continues unabated five years on -- a comparable period of time in which we had mobilized millions and defeated Japan and Germany in WWII.
I guess it takes someone who stayed at the Hanoi Hilton to understand how Abu Ghraib and the secret CIA interrogation centers have eroded American sympathy in the world. Maybe it will take a fomer prisoner of war to get us out of the prison of war.