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The following is reprinted, with permission, from the U.S. Historical Quarterly, Summer 2030.

Two eventful decades later, the searing events of 2010 -- the bitter controversy, the furious accusations, the media frenzy -- are but a distant memory. The passage of time has shrunk that chapter to a footnote, a recollection as faint as the Iran-Contra scandal and the impeachment of President Clinton. Few Americans more than dimly remember that six officials of the George W. Bush administration were tried for conspiring in the illegal abuse of detainees.

Yet the Torture Trials of 2010 deserve at least a brief assessment on their 20th anniversary. Strange though it may now seem, in their day they were a national obsession, fervently supported by liberals and thunderously denounced by conservatives. To liberals, the trials offered the promise of justice, accountability, and ultimately catharsis. Conservatives saw a partisan vendetta, a blatant abuse of law, and the reckless endangerment of national security.

Both sides, of course, proved wrong. Instead of clarifying the country's conscience, the trials muddled it. Instead of scarring the country, they left little trace. This should not have been surprising. Not, at least, to anyone who understands how America deals with the horrible choices of war.

In 2008 and 2009, it became apparent that the Bush administration had, as a matter of policy and in a handful of cases, used harsh interrogation techniques that most reasonable people believed crossed the line into torture. President Obama called the methods a mistake and banned them, but he resisted revisiting the past. His hand was forced, however, when a Justice Department investigation led to the appointment of a special prosecutor.

The upshot was the indictment in early 2010 of a former CIA director, three Bush administration lawyers, and two other former officials for conspiring to break American laws criminalizing torture. (Former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney were named as unindicted co-conspirators.) Trials began later that year. They were unprecedented not just as a matter of law (torture had been made a federal criminal offense only as recently as 1994) but, what was more significant, as a matter of national policy.

Obama's hand was forced when a Justice Department investigation led to the appointment of a special prosecutor.

War crimes, alas, are not unknown territory for the United States. To be sure, America's record is better than most, on the whole a record to be proud of. Like other countries, however, America has been willing to countenance transgressions if they were seen as necessary to win a war, save American lives, or both. The Indian wars of the 19th century, the Civil War, the Philippines campaign, World War II, and the Vietnam War, among others, all offer grounds for remorse and, by modern standards, for criminal charges.

Americans, like other civilized peoples, believe that war crimes are bad but that losing a war is worse. When they feel pressed, they will "do what it takes." Preachers may damn that attitude, realists may praise it, but no matter: Whatever its morality, it is unlikely ever to change.

Americans deal with the gruesome choices of war with the equivalent of a shrug. In the heat of conflict, hard men come forward to do hard things, things that decent people would rather not see or think about but that seem necessary at the time. Afterward these men are neither thanked nor punished. In due course, the country forgets them, their doings of concern only to historians in papers like this one.

How many Americans remember Curtis LeMay? Few even know the name of the general who masterminded the strategic bombing of Japan in 1945. With his ever-present cigar and permanent scowl ("The grimace is a smile," it was said of him), he was the prototype of the hard man. Under pressure from superiors to improve what had been largely ineffectual bombing, he ordered American B-29s to fly low over Tokyo, a city made mostly of wood, and drop more than 1,600 tons of napalm.

"The total toll will never be known," writes the military historian Max Boot, in his superb book War Made New, but estimates range upward from 84,000 dead. So horrific was the carnage, Boot reports, that "the crewmen were sickened by the smell of roasting human flesh that reached their cabins thousands of feet above the burning city."

The victims were almost all civilians, as the United States well knew. Even LeMay, writes Boot, admitted that the Air Force's claims to have been targeting dispersed industrial targets were " 'a pretty thin veneer' for what amounted to the wholesale killing of men, women, and children." LeMay himself later wrote, "We just weren't bothered about the morality of the question. If we could shorten the war, we wanted to shorten it." After Tokyo, far from recoiling, the United States went on to torch one Japanese city after another.

After the war, LeMay continued his military career, ran for vice president as George Wallace's running mate in 1968, then disappeared to die all but unnoticed in 1990. The country accepted his services without judging him, or itself. To this day, America has not confronted its conscience over the firebombing of Tokyo.

Of course, the nonlethal use of water torture or other "enhanced techniques" on a handful of suspected terrorists was a far cry from the mass incineration of civilians. Still, it was bad enough, and American sensibilities had progressed since 1945. Confronted with evidence of torture, human-rights advocates were determined to prevent another bout of convenient amnesia, and now they had laws that provided for accountability. This time, things would be different!

That their hopes would be dashed was foreseeable from the moment when several of the torture defendants hired Brendan Sullivan to represent them. Sullivan was a prominent Washington lawyer who, in the late 1980s, had famously defended Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal. History never quite repeats itself, but this time it came eerily close.

In the North trial, the essential facts (North had lied to Congress, shredded documents, and so on) were not in dispute. Instead, Sullivan put the prosecution on trial. As The New York Times reported, he "portrayed his client's activities as patriotic acts, undertaken with selfless, high-minded motives, and carried out in secret with the knowledge and approval of superiors." North called himself "a pawn in a chess game being played by giants." Some of his actions may have been wrong, he said, but they were justifiable in light of the need for covert action in a dangerous world, they were approved by higher-ups, and he never thought they were illegal.

The jury was sympathetic. It acquitted him on nine of 12 counts, and the three remaining counts were fairly minor (accepting a security fence as a gratuity, for instance). The judge rejected the prosecutors' request for prison time, instead giving North probation plus community service and a fine. Even that judgment didn't stick: The conviction was overturned on a technicality.

North, for his part, received a hero's welcome in certain conservative circles; narrowly lost a Senate bid in 1994; and found a niche as an author, commentator, and radio and television personality. Far from making a moral statement, his trial and its aftermath amounted to a collective national shrug.

It should have come as no surprise, then, when the Torture Trials turned out more like the Oliver North trial than the Nuremberg trials.

It should have come as no surprise, then, when the Torture Trials turned out more like the North trial than the Nuremberg trials. Once again, the essential facts were not in dispute. Again, the country was divided, the atmosphere politically charged, the publicity inescapable. Again, the defense put the prosecution on trial. And again, the defendants were acquitted on all but a few minor charges. Again the defendants went on to brief celebrity, followed quite quickly by obscurity. Again, proceedings that were supposed to have laid down a moral marker produced, instead, a shrug.

What, then, was accomplished? Nothing, really. Polls showed that most of the public believed the exercise to have been a waste of time, a judgment that higher courts seemed to share when they overturned most of what few convictions had been handed down.

In the end, ironically, the muddled, sour conclusion of the Torture Trials brought the country full circle. In wartime, hard men with good motives but flawed judgment had gone too far. Law or no law, trials or no trials, the country found a way to avert its gaze.

That is the American way of dealing with the brutal choices that war thrusts upon an idealistic people, for better and also, to be sure, for worse. Before losing control of the issue, Obama had tried to insist on moving forward rather than looking back. That was exactly what the country wound up doing. That is what it will always do.