Starting in high school, I played a then-popular game called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for many years. Players take the part of characters in a fantasy setting, while one player in the group presents situations, problems and enemies for the others to encounter and deal with. Part of the game, which pits the players as heroes battling evil foes, involves one's ethical alignment. Unlike real life, morality in the game is easily codified.

There are basically two polarities, Good versus Evil and Law (meaning order) versus Chaos. The first pair is self-explanatory. The players' characters are generally the good guys, and the game is played out like a fantasy novel written spontaneously by the group. Law and Chaos, however, are harder to explain. Lawful characters tend to have strict codes of behavior and put the larger goals before personal satisfaction, whether they also happen to be Good or Evil. Chaotic characters are the opposite -- self-centered and focused on achieving personal aims, or mostly interested in gratifying momentary whims. Such people can also be Good or Evil. There is also neutral moral ground between these pairs of opposites. A character could be purely selfish (Chaotic), unconcerned with whether his behavior is Good or Evil. Another could strike a balance between Law and Chaos, and still be Good.

Most of the moral alignments are easy to understand. One can imagine Lawful Evil enemies as fanatical devotees to an evil cause in a fantasy world, or members of a highly-organised crime syndicate. Chaotic Evil foes might be killers on a random murder spree, with no long-range plans. Chaotic Good characters might be portrayed as those who move from place to place, taking on Evil wherever it can be found, like Caine in Kung Fu.

Lawful Good characters, however, are the most difficult to play. The tendency for neophytes is to portray them as naive comic-book hero types. These square-jawed idiots would foolishly believe the promises of bad guys to reform, time after time. Played this way, they would try to talk the most evil, depraved killers into surrendering peacefully, never suspecting that the bad guys are only playing for time. Their own strict adherence to their code of behavior can be used to trick them over and over again. They never break the rules, no matter what, not even to accomplish an important goal or save lives. It often falls to someone else to do what's needed when the moral quicksand of his own code traps the badly-played Lawful Good character. There's a phrase used to describe a Lawful Good character played that ineptly: Lawful Stupid.

Liberals believe the United States should be Lawful Stupid in the War on Terror, as if it were just a game. They still insist that we be guided by the UN, despite the fact that three of the permanent members of the Security Council were in Saddam's back pocket. In the case of Iraq, they demanded that we believe Saddam actually got 100% of the vote in a fair election, and that he really was only able to destroy his illegal missiles a few at a time. Liberals openly sympathise with any opposing nation that happens to be weaker than the US in one way or another... which pretty much means all of them. Worst of all, they vehemently oppose any action of ours that has a chance of harming a non-combatant -- while our enemies deliberately hide behind those innocents as they plan and launch their attacks. Then the Liberals complain because the attacks were not prevented.

Consider their fascination with Guantanamo Bay, or Gitmo, where members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban are housed. Liberals insist that these murderous scum, the kind of people who kidnap and kill journalists and innocent workers on video, blow up schoolbuses full of children, explode car bombs in crowded marketplaces, and fly hijacked passenger planes into office buildings should be treated the same as suspected jaywalkers or litterbugs under the law. They believe every terrorist deserves a speedy trial with full legal representation and protections, just as though they were American citizens, while the war is still being fought. How stupid would that be? Even during WWII, we waited until the war was over to try captured Nazis -- and that was done by military tribunal, not in a civilian law court. (Nazi POWs were kept in camps like the one in Alva OK, which housed nearly 5,000 prisoners by February 1945.)

Despite the fact that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to terrorists because they don't fight under them (part of the qualification), Liberals demand they be treated as honorable prisoners of war, if not as American citizens. Liberals grow faint with horror at the idea that some US soldiers might not treat dangerous terrorists with quite the same care and deference they might show their own grandmothers. While our government works to gain needed information from them and prevent them from returning to the fight (as many released terrorists have done or expressed interest in doing), Liberals are more concerned with making sure they're not uncomfortable in any way. They attack the Bush administration for treating the enemy as... well, the enemy. Much of it is politically motivated, however. Amnesty International, hiding behind a mask of pious neutrality, recently called Gitmo a "gulag," referring to the Soviet mass work camps for political opponents, in which many prisoners were worked to death under brutal conditions. They must have simply forgotten to reveal that Amnesty International's top leaders just happen to be heavy contributors to Democratic candidates.

We're not "Lawful Stupid," and cannot afford to act that way. We know who the good guys are, and who are the bad. We understand that in time of war, rules must sometimes be changed, sometimes bent and occasionally broken. Keeping a few terrorists locked up in Gitmo is nothing. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, allowing possible spies and saboteurs to be arrested and held without trial for the duration. During WWII, Franklin Roosevelt interned thousands of families of Japanese descent (as well as Germans and Italians) to prevent spies from leaking information. Unlike the Gitmo detainees, the people in those situations were American citizens, civilians, non-combatants with Constitutional rights! While few would argue that the suspension and internments were altogether good, no one can claim that they weren't seen as necessary to preserve national security and win the war. Comparing Gitmo to either event is like holding up a lit match to the sun, and complaining that the match is too bright.

As much as Liberals hyperventilate about the rights of prisoners in Gitmo being violated, the fact is that under American and international law, they don't have any. They're not being tortured, as Liberals claim (which would be wrong), but they are being interrogated. Terrorists are often made to stand in uncomfortable positions, yelled at, threatened and deprived of sleep. I've had jobs like that, with lousy pay into the bargain. The latest information is that some Gitmo guards did, in fact, mistreat copies of the Qur'an that the prisoners were generously allowed to have... when the detainees themselves weren't "using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on the Quran," according to an investigation by Gitmo commander Brigadier General Jay Hood. In the most "terrible" incident, a guard "urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into the cell block," where the prisoner stated that it got on his Qur'an. Watch the Left -- the same people who call a crucifix dunked in urine "art" -- celebrate this incident, which was likely an accident, as though they had uncovered the Rape of Nanking.

Everything that happens to the Gitmo prisoners will be revealed and painstakingly dissected for centuries, just as historians still discuss Lincoln's habeas corpus suspension and Roosevelt's internment today. Now, as then, the important thing is that we still have a country in which to hold that discussion. If we play strictly by some abstract rules stipulated by Liberals, while terrorists are free of constraint, we will be fighting this war in the stupidest possible manner. Without a doubt, we will lose. Can we afford to do that? Is this just a game?