Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Laura Bush: Upbeat Republicans Revive Bush Theme of Compassion

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Upbeat Republicans Revive Bush Theme of Compassion: "'No American president ever wants to go to war,' Mrs. Bush said. 'Abraham Lincoln didn't want to go to war, but he knew that saving the union required it. Franklin Roosevelt didn't want to go to war, but he knew that defeating tyranny demanded it. And my husband didn't want to go to war, but he knew the safety and security of America and the world depended on it.'"

If Lincoln had gone to war against Kansas, would we praise him now? If Roosevelt had gone to war against Mexico, would we be grateful for his courage and practical wisdom? Republicans say we should feel safer under George Bush's leadership, but he picked the wrong enemy! He doesn't know what he is doing. However sure our president is that he's doing the right thing, no amount of steadfastness can substitute for poor judgment. In fact, his self-assurance makes him unable to see his mistake.

Paul Krugman: A No-Win Situation

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: A No-Win Situation

David Brooks: The Courage Factor

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Courage Factor

Friday, August 06, 2004

What About Iraq? Consequentialist Reasoning

Cathy Young writes for Reason magazine. I like her writing and her arguments, and she's one of those columnists I read when I have a chance. The other day she published a column in the Globe where she said the jury was still out on Iraq. I thought, still out! I also thought she could be right: you can't tell how things are going to turn out.

The problem with this reasoning is that it's consequentialist. Consequentialist reasoning is where you judge the rightness or wrongness of something based on its consequences. By this reasoning, we don't know yet whether going to war in Iraq was the right thing or the wrong thing to do, because we don't have a full balance sheet yet on all the good and bad consequences of the decision. Consequentialist thinking about the war is totally mainstream. Most of the public commentary on the war fits this model. We shouldn't have gone in there because so many bad things happened as a result. We should have gone in there because we got Hussein and we're bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. The battle of consequences continues, and as the election approaches, neither side seems to have much of an advantage. And as Ms. Young observed, the jury is still out because we're still in the middle of the war.

How about an argument that says we shouldn't have attacked Iraq because it was wrong in itself? We don't need a jury to tell us that an unprovoked attack on another country is wrong. We don't need a jury to tell us that you don't attack a country because they might pose a threat to you in the future. If we're going to go to war on that basis, we should start preparations to march on Beijing right now.

So the moral question on the Iraqi war is easy to answer. The charges about weapons of mass destruction were trumped up, and it was obvious before we went in there that they were. The charges about links between Hussein and Al Qaeda were trumped up, and that charge was so laughable I still can't understand how our leaders could have made it. If they hadn't made that charge, sympathetic historians might have said the war in Iraq was an honest, understandable mistake, in light of 9/11. Having suggested the connection, having persuade people it was true, historians will have to see the grounds for war as dishonest, the war itself as a vicious fraud.

I should add before I sign off that I use consequentialist arguments myself. You can't make good evaluations without them. The biggest consequence of the war in Iraq, I've argued, is that it makes defeat in our war against Al Qaeda much more likely. We cannot lose that war and survive as a civilization. This misstep in Iraq will be with us for a long time, and if we do lose the war against Al Qaeda, historians will see the attack on Baghdad on March 19, 2003, as the first step toward defeat. That's a big consequence.

So please don't conclude that I regard consequences as unimportant. Rather, we should evaluate consequences and the thing itself. Sound judgment depends on good reasoning in both areas. We've had a lot of analysis that centers on the war's results. That's no surprise, since the analysts are policymakers and others who evaluate policies based on costs and benefits. Cost-benefit analysis is useful for economic decisions, but it's not your tool of choice for moral questions. A decision about war or peace is the supreme moment in moral reasoning. Our decision to initiate war was a grave moral failure. We attacked a nation that was not capable of attacking us, and we let escape an enemy that had clearly demonstrated its ability to attack us. The only way to correct this failure is to admit the mistake, carefully extract ourselves from Iraq, then pursue our real enemy with all vigor. Are we capable of that?

Bob Herbert: Failure of Leadership

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Failure of Leadership: "The pressure may be getting to Mr. Bush. He came up with a gem of a Freudian slip yesterday. At a signing ceremony for a $417 billion military spending bill, the president said: 'Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.' "

Thursday, August 05, 2004

World Trade Center to Abu Ghraib

World Trade Center to Abu Ghraib

How did we go from the heroism, unity, and sense of purpose that marked 9/11, to the degradation, shame, and cruelty of Abu Ghraib? Do you remember the spirit of that time, less than three years ago? We told ourselves that we had to see our enemies clearly, work with our friends, especially our friends in the Middle East, and draw hope from those who were equally determined to destroy Al Qaeda. We knew that many Muslims shared our determination to put this organization out of business. And we knew that we needed their help.

Now let me ask you: do you think that man lying on the floor is an enemy of ours? I'll tell you something: I don't know who he is. I'll bet virtually no American in the whole prison knew who he was. He was an Arab and they were going to have some fun with him. You know that even if he were a member of Al Qaeda, we would have been wrong to treat him that way. Our enemies may not follow the rules of war, but we should.

Let's go back to the original question: How did we go from the World Trade Center on September 11 to Lyndie England holding a beaten, naked man on a leash? Will anyone admit that when you engage in a war that's wrong you can expect that kind of thing to happen? You have to see the connection between an unjust war and the way we have treated people who aren't even our enemies.

For a longer answer to the question above, see Ugly War at the TheLastJeffersonian.com. The essay explains why America should leave Iraq. America should leave Iraq because it should not have gone there in the first place. To defeat your enemies, you have to go where your enemies are.

Lincoln said that we had to suffer through the Civil War as punishment for the sin of slavery. What will our punishment be for attacking Iraq? We have already heard our enemies, the ones who planned 9/11, call us war criminals, and know they are telling the truth. We have ceded the moral high ground to some of the worst people who have ever lived, people who are clearly criminals themselves. That's an accomplishment.

When I lived through the Reagan years, I had an instinct, a feeling in my heart, that this was it, this was the apogee, this was like the time that Julius Caesar ruled Rome. Caesar's rule actually came pretty early in the history of Roman civilization, and Rome still had quite a few good rulers to come, including Marcus Aurelius. But after Caesar's friends betrayed him and killed him, things unraveled, and historians could truthfully say that Rome never shone as brightly after that astonishing act of selfishness on the steps of the Senate.

America, Reagan's shining city on a hill, will never again shine as brightly as it did during those eight brief years. I certainly didn't want my instinct to be proven correct. When Reagan said that America's best years were still to come, I agreed with the sentiment, and I wanted it to be true. I certainly liked his rhetoric, and I was not among those who charged him with false optimism. I wanted him to bolster American confidence, and Americans had lots to be hopeful about, lots to be proud of. Reagan did the right thing, as a leader, to encourage the people who followed him. We would praise a military leader for doing so, and we should praise Reagan as a political leader for doing the same.

Yet Reagan's refrain that our best years were ahead of us proved wrong. Events proved the instinct correct after all. I had no idea in the 1980s how the story might turn out. The 1990s brought exactly the kind of prosperity that Reagan predicted: technology driven and based on innovation, it was a prosperity that rewarded free enterprise and entrepreneurship. Not only that, the Soviet Union collapsed, just as Reagan said it would. As a judge of human events and a seer of human aspirations, Reagan built an outstanding record of accurate prophecy.

As far as I could tell, no one in the 1980s thought about the significance of the Reagan years this way. I didn't see any essays from the people who liked Reagan about how America's best years were behind her. The left had long nurtured a reputation for speaking pessimistically about America's future. The conservatives who liked Reagan didn't seem to have any reason to doubt what Reagan himself said about our shining prospects.

Well, no one predicted 9/11, that's for sure. It was easy to predict that our enemies would strike us at home someday, but that particular attack took everyone off guard. What a turning point that unexpected event turned out to be. We could have shrugged it off, or we could have gone nuts. If we had shrugged it off, Reagan would have been right: we would have been the world's shining city on a hill for many more generations. If we went nuts, as we did, we would provoke the outcome that we are already coming to see: despised, defeated, dejected and discouraged, we command no admiration or respect anywhere, least of all in the places where we need it the most.

Let me elaborate a little. How could we have wanted to shrug off something like 9/11? One commentator, on public radio a few weeks after 9/11, told the story of a Roman legion that lost about 600 men a minute during a terrible battle against a powerful enemy. He said that the Romans just shrugged it off. They went ahead and coldly destroyed their opponent. That's how they maintained their power. The commentator did not say that we should forget the people who died on 9/11, or that we should not honor them. He just wanted to say that we should not give in to hand-wringing, anger, soul-searching, and the like. We should just find our enemies, destroy them, and be done with it. Be methodical and ruthless. It's one of the things you have to do to maintain order and protect your citizens.

Well, we didn't search out our enemies, and our leaders certainly didn't search their souls. We went totally nuts, like a blinded boxer who, out of pain and frustration, swings wildly and hits anyone who might be standing by. Bush's defense of his action against Iraq sounds more strained and unconvincing each time he delivers it. If you don't find Bush's defense persuasive, the only explanation for our attack is the blind boxer gone nuts. Or perhaps not so blind. We found a victim we could defeat, and one where we had a score to settle to boot. We went after a non-enemy that was available rather than the real enemy who got away.

So now we're going to spend the next four hundred years looking back, wondering how we could have made such a serious mistake in 2003. It's not going to seem so bad here in the United States. We'll still have our prosperity, some of our freedoms, our ideals and disconnected memories. We'll still have a few friends like Britain and Australia, and others who will tolerate us out of self-interest or because they have no choice. But I tell you, we won't ever command the respect that we had around the world when Eastern Europe expressed its gratitude to us for delivering them from the Soviet Union. We won't ever know the warmth and the genuine sorrow that flowed toward us in the days and weeks after 9/11. We'll be a byword and an object of contempt through most of the world now, because we couldn't see clearly what we had to do after the twin towers fell. We'll become irrelevant, and then defeated, because we couldn't shrug it off.

Lincoln said that America's example gives "hope to mankind, future for all time." What a loss to the world that we couldn't live up to Lincoln's ideal in a time of trial. Reagan always asked, what will people one hundred years from now say about us, when they look to the decisions we made about life and death, war and peace, freedom and slavery? Will they thank us for making the right decisions, for protecting what we had and passing it down? Until the war in Iraq, we had a good reputation. A good reputation is worth protecting: it takes a long time to build, only a short time to ruin it. That's why good people are so careful not to make a mistake that destroys something they've worked hard to create. We used to have a good reputation with freedom loving people, and we gave hope to everyone who aspired to a free life. Now people around the world, though they won't admit it, would like to put a leash on us.

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Bruce Springsteen: Chords for Change

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Chords for Change: "Like many others, in the aftermath of 9/11, I felt the country's unity. I don't remember anything quite like it. I supported the decision to enter Afghanistan and I hoped that the seriousness of the times would bring forth strength, humility and wisdom in our leaders. Instead, we dived headlong into an unnecessary war in Iraq, offering up the lives of our young men and women under circumstances that are now discredited. ...It is through the truthful exercising of the best of human qualities - respect for others, honesty about ourselves, faith in our ideals - that we come to life in God's eyes. It is how our soul, as a nation and as individuals, is revealed. Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting."