In the context of war, bloodshed is strategy. Killing is within the rules of the game, and suffering one of its inevitable consequences. “War,” Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman famously put it, “is hell.” In the midst of so much violent death, imagine how challenging it must be to achieve shock value, if that is the intent? Ask Islamic terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said to be behind a number of the beheadings and other atrocities recently carried out in the Middle East. The spate of barbarism that already has claimed a random collection of innocent victims leaves civilized onlookers sputtering with helpless rage. Such rogue behavior isn’t a fresh approach. It didn’t start with the videotaped decapitations of Americans Nick Berg and Paul Johnson Jr. and South Korean Kim Sun-Il. Nor with the murder and mutilation of civilian security personnel whose burned bodies were hung up on display in Fallujah three months ago. Nor with Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s beheading in Pakistan two years ago. Grotesque brutality as a tactic of intimidation has been around for ages and across cultures. The British used to put the bloody heads of political dissidents on pikes at the Tower of London. Racists dangled the bodies of lynching victims outside towns in the American South in the early 20th century. But today’s technology has expanded the reach of the grisly images that can be transmitted immediately, to the horror of vast and often unwilling audiences. All of which heightens the fury felt by Americans and anyone else who respects human life and dignity. Anyone who understands that while casualties may be a distasteful necessity of war, they should never be a leverage point to exploit and celebrate. How we manage that fury will reveal how committed we are to the values of decency and justice that define the American ethic. The urge for vengeance — in kind, or something near to it — is a natural impulse, but it’s a pathway to moral surrender. If we let our standards and values degenerate into a sliding scale, the bad guys will have won. We should spare no effort apprehending those responsible for atrocity — including Americans when and if that happens —and hold them accountable. At the same time we — our leaders and ourselves — have to uphold the values that we claim to cherish. We have to preserve our commitment to the ideals of justice over mere retribution. We can win the war that matters most by showing the world that American actions, and reactions, are consistent with American beliefs. Gen. Sherman understood: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”