He's encouraged by the matchless performance of the U.S. military in the Afghan and Iraq wars, but military historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson, writing in the National Review, suggests that there may be a downside to our quick victories: Not enough collateral damage.

"We are confronted with the paradox that our new military's short wars rarely inflict enough damage on the fabric of a country to establish a sense of general defeat -- or the humiliation often necessary for a change of heart and acceptance of change. In the messy follow-ups to these brief and militarily precise wars, it is hard to muster patience and commitment from an American public plagued with attention-deficit problems and busy with better things to do than give fist-shaking Iraqis $87 billion."

In a similar vein, Hanson believes the Abu Ghraib abuses have been way overblown, providing fodder for apologist Europeans.

"For someone in a coffee-house in Brussels the idea that Bush apologizes for a dozen or so prison guards makes him the same as or worse than Saddam and his sons shooting prisoners for sport -- moral equivalence lapped up by the state-controlled and censored Arab media that is largely responsible for the collective Middle East absence of rage over the exploding, decapitating, and incinerating of Western civilians in its midst."

To see, or not to see
There's been substantial debate on the right over whether the media was justified in saturating the public with the torture images. National Review editor Jonah Goldberg argues that the good reasons CBS may have had for broadcasting the images on "60 Minutes II" were "vastly outweighed by the bad."

"The good reasons are obvious. The people have the right to know. The scandal firestorm sharpens the resolve of politicians and the military to investigate and stop the abuse of prisoners. The bad is that uproar from these pictures drowns out all other messages, explanations and journalistic 'context.'

"Lost is the fact that in America torturers get punished, while in the Arab world they get promotions. Huge percentages of Arabs are illiterate, which means these pictures will tell the whole story, particularly in the hands of the vilely anti-American Arab media. This will harden hearts against us and almost certainly result in lost American and Iraqi lives.

"Of course, CBS had every right to do what it did. But that's irrelevant. Nobody's suggesting the government should have stopped them. I'm suggesting that CBS should have stopped itself. Now we'll all have to live with the consequences -- and some of us will die from them."

Commentator Suzanne Fields, whose syndicated column appears on the right-wing clearinghouse Town Hall.com, disagrees:

"It was our Army that discovered the humiliation at Abu Ghraib Prison, and our media, with its guarantee of freedom of the press, that put them out for the world to see. This is a sign of the strength of Western values, not weakness, and we must make that point over and over, as many times as necessary, to impress it on the consciousness of the world."

Meanwhile, right-wing pundit and syndicated columnist Ann Coulter weighed in on the torture issue with her own thoughtful analysis. Last week on the Fox News show "Hannity & Colmes," she explained the meltdown of the Bush administration's military leadership in a different, perhaps more personal light:

"I think the other point that no one is making about the abuse photos is just the disproportionate number of women involved, including a girl general running the entire operation. I mean, this is lesson, you know, one million and 47 on why women shouldn't be in the military. In addition to not being able to carry even a medium-sized backpack, women are too vicious."

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Read more of "Right Hook," Salon's weekly roundup of conservative commentary and analysis here.

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