I love forests. New England, my new home, has no end of them. This time of year the trees are beginning to quake with fall color. Red and yellow branches are beginning to lash out of the green canopies that shroud this land. Soon the leaves will briefly dominate the hills in a quiet fire, then fall to the ground like ash, waiting for the embrace of snow.
My wife and I just completed a westward journey across the state of Massachusetts. We wound up in the small town of Stockbridge, near the New York border along the road to Albany. Stockbridge, Massachusetts is considered to be an American icon. It was dubbed as such by another American icon, Norman Rockwell, who painted American icons during America's most iconographic era. He spent many years in Stockbridge. The people and settings there were the subjects of many of his canvases that celebrated the American spirit.
We visited his museum. Every single painting on its walls were the originals of reproductions I'd seen hundreds of times. One painting that had been etched in my mind, long before seeing the original, was his depiction of a snowy Main Street in Stockbridge at Christmastime.
We walked around Stockbridge and took in Mr. Rockwell's view of America. There remain the small stores and quaint colonial houses from his Christmas painting. We stood across the street from them to find the viewpoint he occupied to create his famous masterpiece. Just behind us on that corner was St. Paul's Episcopal Church. I guess it's still a church -- I don't know -- the steeple is crowned with a copper chicken, not a cross. Perhaps the congregation dwindled down too far for the building to remain a church. I couldn't bring myself to ask how the chicken made its way up there. I'm sure it found its way to the top of the pecking order well after Mr. Rockwell's time.
- - -
As Autumn breaks, the chill of winter has begun to descend from the north. With the frost I have found myself contemplating a long, cold winter.
It's been five years since 9/11. During that time I have seen my country's lights pulse brightly and then dim, its shades drawn. The political landscape is enervated. I had hoped that we might find a new voice, a new beginning, a newfound patriotism; something that a new Rockwell might anxiously render on canvas to national acclaim. It hasn't happened. On 9/12, I placed myself outside the two governing parties of our country and took stock. It's five years later, and here's where I stand.
Our president might aim for moral clarity, but he offers little else. He recites well-worn bromides, assuming that he will be vindicated in the years to come. He stays the course, because he set it. We need more in a president. For all of President Bush's bold moves, it is striking how little vision there is behind them. There's been incompetent followup to get through the details; no comprehensible articulation of this country's worth and values; and little willingness to risk alienating his base to win this fight. Now his policy on torture has derailed whatever moral authority he had. I don't see a man who is leading. I, for one, do not feel led. Instead I feel dragged around by his transparent coterie of advisors. I feel numb.
One look at the other party offers little consolation. Democrats like Gore decry the Bush administration for fear mongering, who equate fighting terror with voting Republican. But then there's Gore's movie, and his own bromides on global warming. And there's Gore to begin with, still with us after losing six years ago to Governor Bush on the heels of the golden Clinton years. Still barking away, somehow considered still relevant in this era.
My option as a voter appears to be a false choice. Either I can vote Republican, lest we ignore the war on terror, or I can vote Democrat, lest we lose the planet to the sun. Our political culture is coarse and cramped with soundbites that have overshadowed eloquent debate. There are no Daniel Websters anymore, riveting packed galleries in the Senate chamber with soaring rhetoric expounding on the great issues of the age. No Lincoln-Douglas debates. After Martin Luther King was assassinated, Robert Kennedy stood on the back of a truck in Indianapolis quoting Aeschylus on the meaning of grief to angry black Americans. No more.
There are few genuine debates taking place in congress. There is little eloquence. There is mostly position-taking and attack. We find mostly 'where's the beef' and 'gotchya' politics. We've come nowhere after five years of war. If anything, we've devolved.
Now we're looking down the barrel at a nuclear Iran -- a nuclear religious death cult. What we need to counter this threat is a fresh approach, employing all of the weapons in our arsenal: military, diplomatic, economic and moral. We need a better international diplomat and politician than the President. Successful leaders are shrewd; they shape public opinion to their own ends. At this late date President Bush needs to throw a few curveballs. It may be unconventional, but he could have answered Ahmadinejad's letter from a few months ago, much like Lincoln answered Horace Greeley and other critics. The same with Chavez's blistering speech at the U.N. The President should articulate a tighly reasoned, forthright defense of Western values. He should do something stunningly bipartisan, and ignore the political fallout -- perhaps appoint Bill Clinton to some important task in the Middle East.
Bush's one-dimensional, 'I'm-a-man-of-principle' approach is failing. We have to mix things up like Nixon going to China, or Roosevelt being a traitor to his class. The challenges of this era demand it.
If anyone harbors any doubt about what the next real war proffers, read the Rand report Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack by Charles Meade and Roger Molander. It games-out a hypothetical nuclear terrorist attack on the Port of Long Beach, California. Long Beach is the second busiest seaport in the United States. It's in the Los Angeles region, handling 30 percent of U.S. shipping imports. The attack studies the short-term and long term effects of a ten kiloton Hiroshima-sized atomic device ground-bursted from within a shipping container on a pier. It examines the policy issues that would result, identifying the high-priority concerns for different stakeholder groups.
In a nutshell, all hell will break lose. The ripple effect into the global economy borders on apocalyptic. Just from one "small" nuke in a western port.
There has been a lot of debate here on ways to deal with Iran. Many think we should preempt. I think it might work, but only if we had the right leadership. I see no such leadership in Washington -- neither from the President or from Congress. It's a fool's errand to believe that the present leadership can marshal the political, civilian, military and international resources required to prevent the Party of God from nuclearizing. In essence, I think it's too late. The necessary isotopes can be purchased as well as produced within Iran. This has been true now for years. The game of prevention is over. Proliferation is here.
At this point, because we have weak government, a tail-biting political system and hollow allies, we're not in a position to take out Iran's nuclear program, let alone its regime. I've come to believe that if we preempt, utter disaster will ensue. And if Iran promulgates nuclear terror, disaster will also ensue. Preemption is not a strategy -- it's a last ditch Hail Mary pass.
Since I believe that's the case -- that we're on the verge of a terrifyingly new world, no matter what we do -- I think we should take the moral high ground. That means letting Iran take the low ground. Europe is too weak and corrupt to block Iran's threat. We're too sapped, too bereft of creative leadership. This isn't a nihilistic suicide wish on my part. It's a reality observed as coldly as anyone who advocates preemption. Given the absolute fog that shrouds Iran's nuclear program, who's the expert? Whose data is sound enough to stand the Iraq Test? Only great leadership might overcome this problem. We don't have it.
If preempting Iran is not a viable option in this political climate, a strategy of containment, fence-mending, alliance-building, and homeland protection may be the best we can do. Sometimes you have to wait on events. Diplomacy is all about patience and maneuver, requiring the kind of leadership strengths our president and congress lack.
My conclusion is as kitsch as Rockwell's paintings: I believe our spirit as free people can overcome the odds. It's not entirely rational, but it's where I find hope. There's plenty of room for doubt. But I have more faith this country can reinvent itself in the aftermath of a catastrophic attack -- far better than it can lead the world into a series of bungled, unsupported, desperate Hail Mary passes to stave off the inevitable. After 25 years, five presidents, a dozen congresses, countless U.N. sessions and the maturation of a hollow European Union, the free world has long since dropped the ball on nuclear proliferation. Now it all leads to Rand. Frankly, I can't see past Rand. I don't think anyone can.
For our country to lead again, we will apparently need to have our genesis forced upon us. Our response to what inevitably lies ahead may turn out to be our finest hour. It will be a call for greatness -- in ourselves, and in a new generation of true leaders. In order to regain greatness, we will have to take on monumental risks and sacrifices. We will have to do more than face-down our demons; we will have to personally fight them and rebuild a nation that short-circuits them. It will be then that we might redefine the meaning of kitsch patriotism, if the 21st century has a place for it at all.
That's the only way we'll be able to chase the chicken down from Rockwell's steeple.
(Pause).
(Pause).
Brilliant, if bleak. I share your assessment.
BTW, as a lover of our own Adirondacks, I would say the Berkshires a very near equivalent in loveliness, but where the heart is no doubt influences one's judgment.
I think the Autumn needs to bring us to the point of clarity you express. Well might we dwell and dwell again for a time in the foliage, the mountain airs, the coming cold. So as to fortify ourselves for the inevitable winter.
Remember that the cold and ice and death and withering is as essential for the future Spring as the sun and the turning of the Earth.
Rockwell never pretended to be avant-garde; he hesitated even to call himself an artist, preferring to call himself an illustrator.
However, Rockwell is not kitsch. Velvet paintings are kitsch. Plastic pink flamingos are kitsch. Madonna on a neon cross is kitsch - as is Madonna when she is not on a neon cross. But not Norman Rockwell.
If Iran wanted to tube the world's economy, all they'd have to do is stop pumping oil.
If they really wanted to tube the world's economy, they would stop pumping oil and launch a modest conventional strike against Saudi Arabia's oil production.
I don't believe your fear of Iran is rational, Cicero.
Thats like saying if Walmart wanted to tube America it could just stop selling things. Well, yeh, but how long can Walmart exist without selling its products? Answer- a lot less long than consumers can hold out.
Iran is utterly dependant on oil for its survival, it has no other exports of note. We dealt with the OPEC embargo in the 70s. It wasnt fun but we survived. There is so much waste, extravagence, and excess in Western society vis-a-vis oil that in a global crisis a surprising amount could be wrung out.
I mean, if gas were 20 bucks a gallon, i would carpool or take public trans, and the vast majority of us could as well. Yeh, inflation would fly up, but it would be a war like situation, we would survive on domestic and friedly sources. Iran on the other hand would be instantly penniless.
Thats why i've advocated, if it comes to a military showdown with Iran (which seems sadly likely) not to do what everybody now assumes is the 'smart bomb' way of warfare and target CIC and military targets which are easy to abandon or hide (as the IDF just learned). Iran is expecting us to hit the WMD and leadership sites and they believe they can weather that storm (heck, Serbia almost did right?). Instead we should do what they think we would never do and target one of their big oil pipelines. After that message is sent, make it clear that unless Iran gives in they will never produce another drop of oil and lets see how far their nuke program gets while they cant even keep the lights on.
Btw- I call it the 'Iron Eagle Option' after the oustanding film of the same name- criminally shut out of Academy consideration.
The upside is you can bomb pipelines and nobody gets hurt. The irony is however many Iraqi pipelines Iranian dollars and bombs helped blow up is payed back in spades.
I think Iran's destiny lies with their new pals China and Russia. Any complaints about Iran's behavior should be addressed to them.
Cicero,
What can I say - that was incredible... I am posting your post on NoisyRoom.net - hope you don't mind. You have stated exactly what I feel - these days, I wake up wondering when San Francisco will be hit since they are just over the hill from us here in Reno and Lake Tahoe. It's just a matter of time. I am reregistering as an Independent - I am fed up with both parties. Criminals with no backbone... We sit here, pointing fingers and spinning while enemies on all sides meticulously plan America's demise. Hard to tell whether it will come from South of the border (Chavez and or Mexico), Iran (most likely), N. Korea, China, Russia, Cuba, the Middle East in general or from within our own borders - or all of the above. Grim times lay ahead for us - we have no solid leadership and Bush has not shown the spine to take the enemy out. It's like watching a bad rerun of WWII, only with Hitler on steroids...
Cicero,
You're right. Moral clarity is what we need, and the will to put that moral clarity ahead of our own immediate interests.
There was a moment of moral clarity during the Bush administration. I remember it well, because I had expected him to launch a major attack on Islam in response to 9/11, and he didn't. President Bush's speech on 9/20/01 illustrated a balanced course for responding to the attack. Go back and read that speech, and imagine what the world would be like now if he had stayed that course, instead of straying from it.
One important American moral principle was that we never attack someone else first. We are willing (and able) to take the first punch, if need be, to establish that we are not the aggressors. Even during the nuclear stand-off years of Mutual Assured Destruction, the moral principle was that we would launch our missiles only after we were sure that a devastating attack was on its way to destroy us.
Yes, we're entering a dangerous time, when a rogue state, or even a well-organized criminal or fanatic gang, could cause millions of casualties. What does moral clarity demand for that situation?
Above all, morality is about what I allow myself to do. It's not about what I am willing to allow you to do.
Would I steal from you, if I knew for sure that I would not be caught? No, because that's not who I want to be. Would I be willing to kill you and your family, if I were convinced that you wanted to kill me? No, because I would rather take a chance on dying (if I can't prevent you from acting on your desires) than become that kind of person.
This is not becoming a doormat. I know lots of ways to defend myself from attack, and to prevent attacks in the first place. It's saying that there are certain things I know I am capable of doing, but I know they are wrong, so I won't do them.
If you want moral clarity in our country, then people have to stand up and talk out loud about these things, and discuss what those limits should be. What are the limits that we impose on ourselves, not what limits do we want to impose on others.
You want moral clarity? Go back and watch those old Westerns, carefully, paying attention to the moral sermon. It's not about who's the better and faster shot. It's about self-control, moral clarity, and the ability to do what's right, even at substantial risk of harm. (And in the real world, not on the silver screen, sometimes you stand up for your moral beliefs, ane you get clobbered.)
The real false step in the last five years was the US invasion of Iraq, exactly because we struck first. We lost our souls at that point, because we said that safety was worth more than morality. And now we have less safety, and we are hungry for the moral clarity we have lost.
Now the stakes have gotten even higher. What would it take for us, as a country, to have the moral clarity to respond correctly to the loss of Long Beach to an anonymous container nuke? What would be the correct response? We should think about that, because it may well happen.
Cicero, I'm glad you're asking these questions, and raising these thoughts. Because we need to think about them.
Beard,
You're joking, right? Surely you can't be truly unaware that Iraq was repeatedly violating the cease-fire that ended hostilities in GWI.
Oh, so that's why we invaded Iraq? I had the distinct impression that it was because of the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The slogan was, "We can't wait until the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud."
Of course Saddam was being naughty. So are lots of people around the world. Saddam was a Bad Guy, but he wasn't a genuine threat to the USA, or even to our allies.
But the American people were duped, based on their fear of another 9/11 or worse, to violate their principles, sacrifice their moral clarity (if any), for a bit of illusory safety. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin rings very true here: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
So look around. Do you feel safer than you did before 9/11? Or freer?
The slogan was, "We can't wait until the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud."
C'mon Beard, you're smarter than that. The full quote from Dr. Rice:
She was talking about uncertainty and the trade-offs between action and inaction. If anyone was duped it was because they weren't listening.
Let's not get distracted by arguing over minutia. Cicero's point in his post is a deep and important one, and that's what I was trying to address in my response [#8].
Beard, you're saying that those that disagree with you are immoral (#8) and deceptive (#10), but let's not get bogged down in the details. Nice.
Beard,
I was for the invasion of Iraq. I think the outcome of Iraq could have gone more positively if we had played it competently. I knew that preemption in Iraq was a gamble -- one that I believed was worth taking. It was also a test of both the policy of preemption and the leadership that executes it.
The present leadership did not competently engage the full nation-building process of Iraq. Not enough troops, not competent at building alliances, not competent at convincing the majority of Americans to its necessity. To use a sullied word, not enough nuance. This administration's incompetence has convinced me that any other preemption is not viable.
I don't limit the incompetence to the President, either. We had a stonewalling congress. There's no real leadership on either side of the aisle when it comes to terrorism. And Europe is in its own muddle, trying to wrest away from 50 years of American protection during the Cold War. Things just are what they are. I'm not even mad about it. The cookie crumbled.
I don't believe my opinion here is popular on this matter. It sounds hopeless. But it's actually hopeful -- but not until we clear the decks.
The 9/11 pill was not bitter enough. It was plenty bitter for me. But not enough to inure the free world to a new reality. No, we still debate whether or not this is a war; whether or not we should've declared one. We still have tax cuts, cheap gas and SUVs. No change in energy policy. Just keep on shopping.
That's not leadership. It's nothing. It's getting by with status quo. It's incompetent, un-serious and dangerous. President Bush makes a lot of bravado about the seriousness of this war, and yet he thinks narrowly. He would've been great being president in the Clinton era. Good times would've suited him fine.
Under the circumstances, we are not able to preempt in Iran. Under different, more competent circumstances, we might have been able to.
Never attacking someone first might be a political reality. America is reluctant to commit her sons and daughters to battle without a dramatic and morally clear causus belli: Sumter; The Maine; unrestricted submarine warfare/Zimmerman telegram; Pearl Harbor; Kuwait. What have been our most unpopular wars? Polk invaded Mexico under an extremely shady pretext, and was vilified by his Whig opponents, including Congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Many didn't buy the domino theory in Southeast Asia, or see in the Gulf of Tonkin anything remotely similar to Pearl Harbor. And now Iraq -- unfound WMD's, an unproven connection to Al-Qaeda, and now accusations of torture.
That was the gamble in Iraq, which I signed on to: that the causus belli would be found once we were there. The tragedy is that it turned out to be otherwise, and now we've cried wolf. And now that we're faced with a situation that warrants preemption, we can do nothing.
I take no pleasure in any of this.
"So look around. Do you feel safer than you did before 9/11? Or freer?"
Well, actually, yes I do.
I feel much safer than I did before 9/11. The primary area of insecurity I feel today that I also felt on 9/10 is that I'm still worried about the possibility of an American civil war, primarily because - for example - 30% of Americans believe Bush acted with malicious forethought to create 9/11 ('MIHOP' or 'LIHOP'). More than that probably believe Bush stole at least one election, and there are lots of people who've told me in all sincerity that they believe Bush will cancel the 2008 elections and declare himself President for life. Were it the Right that felt this way and not the Left, we'd already have war in our streets but fortunately much of the Left is just silly and unserious twaddle. Nonetheless, the divisions in this country worry me, but no more so than they did say 7 or 8 years ago. Things haven't gotten worse on that front, its just easier to see now. Sooner or latter, barring some major change, the culture war will be a real war. But I feel like I have less to fear from outside this country than when I voted in 2000. If you feel less secure now than you did before 9/11, my conviction is that you just didn't realize how much trouble we were in going into 2000.
And as for my personal freedom, I enjoy more freedoms today than I did in 1999. The one area of my freedom where the government's intrusion worries me is the McCain/Feingold legislation, which worries me only in a theoretical since because at no point has my freedom been personally threatened. I worry though to what extent that most important gaurantee of free speach - free political speach - is under attack, and I'll never forgive this President for signing that blatant attack on the First Ammendment into law. But the rest of the nonsence that hysterical people get in a frenzy about doesn't worry me in the slightest. It's clearly motivated by political feeling, namely that they hate Bush and fear all that they believe he stands for, and not any real sense that their freedoms are under attack.
A little less snarky now . . .
I respectfully disagree with Beard (#8) that we need to be prepared to make a moral judgment in the event of an anonymous nuke. Moral debates don't tend to convince anyone of anything other than one's own moral superiority. And when the wingnuts and the moonbats call each other names on the day after, there will be more wingnuts on that day. I would argue that regardless of moral persuasion, we should be prepared to argue costs and benefits, risks of action and inaction, and the persistence of uncertainty.
Cicero by and large speaks for me as well.
The problem that I have - and I believe that Cicero will agree with me - is that much of the unserious, lame, and unthoughtful policy criticism coming from the opposition makes it just about impossible to have a useful discussion of these topics. We are no longer able to communicate. We don't have leaders and orators because we don't have listeners.
For example, I don't know how many times I've found myself disagreeing strongly with some particular criticism, only to find myself accused of blindly supporting the President. I find myself just left speachless at that point, because I've been a vicious critic of the President. Consider the implication of Beard's question, "Do I find myself safer and freer than before?" Leaving aside the obvious problem that my feelings have nothing to do with it one way or the other, my answer is qualified in ways that largely jump outside the normal bi-modal thinking dominating the airwaves. It rejects the premise of the question. That's the problem I find myself in again and again.
The narrative that this country finds itself in is that you must choose between one of two choices. Mostly, those are false choices. Boiled down to thier essence, you have 'It's all Clinton's fault.' and 'It's all Bush's fault'. And I don't mean merely the War on Terror. The pundits of both sides demand I look at the economy and indeed everything else in the same way. I'm really not interested in silly games like that. I don't want to play anymore. The questions are too important to continue to neglect them, but neglect them we must until Americans get tired of this game of 'gotcha' that they are playing. Everyone has thier pet myths which they pamper unquestioningly: 'We deserved it.', 'We were all unified after 9/11.', 'Bush's 9/20 speach shows moral clarity that he alas departed from.', 'If only we didn't disband the Iraqi army.', whatever. Simple narratives suitable for a simple story, but having little to do with reality. When the discussion returns to reality, then maybe I'll want to be a part of it.
In many ways, I agree with Cicero and celebrim. Most dramatically, that most political discourse is silly sloganeering. But always remember Sturgeon's Law, originally stated as "80% of everything is bullshit", but later modified (by him) to 90%. That means if you are getting more than 10-20% sensible discussion, you are ahead of the game.
It's clear that both the Right and the Left have painted themselves into intenable ideological corners. The "right answer" (if such there be) has to cut across ideological positions. Once someone sufficiently visible and courageous comes up with something pretty close to that, there will be a political phase change. Many people will simply shift to that position, and leave the party stalwarts simply mystified about what happened. (Of course, the chance of such a leader being crucified first is pretty high, too.)
So, I don't worry about the amount of closed-minded sloganeering out there, and I suggest you don't either, particularly since it won't do you any good to worry about it in any case. Look for pieces of the puzzle, and help assemble them into something that will point the way to that "right answer". (Personally, I spend a little time here and a little in a liberal blog, in both cases looking for useful fragments.)
Cicero: I interpreted your initial post as a call for moral clarity, along with the competence to put it into action. Looking back, I don't find a perfect quote to summarize that statement, so maybe I was projecting. But still, the need for moral clarity, on a foundation we can believe justified, and capable of leading to competent action, is for me a piece of that puzzle we are looking for.
(More coming, addressing specific points.)
PD Shaw [#16]: I disagree utterly with your statement. It is when things get nasty that you need moral clarity and moral strength most of all. Of course, you need to make judgments under uncertainty, you need to appreciate the risks of both action and inaction, and you need to weigh costs and benefits.
But let's be careful about costs and benefits. When someone rejects the need for moral judgment, and then calls for balancing costs and benefits, it suggests that they have a limited idea of which costs, and which benefits, are allowed into the equation.
The way that utilitarianism leads down the slippery slope is that it inclines its practitioners to restrict their attention to costs and benefits that they can measure and quantify easily. This leads them to make invisible to themselves the other values that are also part of right living, for example, respect for life.
To be slightly grotesque, you hear people saying what a terrible thing the Iraq war is, because of the almost 2700 deaths. But, of course, that is only counting the American deaths! The wife of a friend of mine is Iraqi, and let me tell you, those other deaths weigh on her, even if they don't weigh on many Americans.
Marcus Cicero [#14]: We certainly disagree on the advisability of preemptive attacks, though your original post suggests that you'd changed your mind. As I said before [#8], I think by attacking Iraq preemptively, we abandoned a key moral principle of this country. You have outlined a number of other cases where it was also violated, and the American people responded, sooner or later, with revulsion. I hope we will have the chance to do so again.
Certainly, Iran with nukes is a scary prospect. Let's ask first, why they are so utterly intent on getting nukes. I doubt that it's all ideological fervor to obliterate Israel. Let's think about the differential treatment of Iraq (which didn't have nukes, and we knew it) and North Korea (which does, and we know it). Guess who gets to keep running their own show, and who is in a cage? If you were leader of a small-to-middling country with aspirations of regional leadership, wouldn't you want some nukes? I sure would. It's clearly the only way to get respect in the 'hood. We (and I explicitly mean the current administration of the USA) have made sure of that.
And if you led the third of the three states in the "Axis of Evil", wouldn't you be pretty sure you were in the cross-hairs, and had better get some heat while you can? We sure got that message across!
So, OK, we know why they want nukes. That doesn't make them a bit less scary.
But exactly how scared should we be? From your reading of the Rand report, it sounds like you've pinned your "fear-meter". Maybe you should go back and read the Rand reports from the 1950s and 1960s about the consequences of global nuclear war, when we were worried about the survival of the human race.
Could Iran with nukes destroy the United States? No. We're just plain too big. Russia could do it, perhaps, with thousands of nukes, but Iran simply can't. Many thousands of deaths, possibly millions, is a terrible tragedy, and the economic and political consequences would be horrible, but with proper leadership, as you say, the USA would survive.
We toughed it out through the Cold War, when we knew we might die of nuclear blast on any day, or worse, of fall-out over the next months and years. We need to find ways to live with this threat, holding on to our core values. There may well be serious losses, so our core value better not just be survival.
Personally, I think we should reclaim the moral high-ground position (which I read you as advocating), that we will not strike another country until we are absolutely certain that they have struck against us first. We will absorb the first shot, if need be, before attacking. No preemptive attacks.
Then, we need to think hard and carefully about (a) how to protect ourselves from crazies with major weapons, and (b) how to reduce the number and potency of the crazies out there, instead of increasing both. I believe there are answers to these questions.
"I hold that while man exists, it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind; and therefore, without entering upon the details of the question, I will simply say that I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number."
Abraham Lincoln
I think by attacking Iraq preemptively, we abandoned a key moral principle of this country.
This is simply not true. The United States has never disavowed the right of preemption. Ask John Kerry. You may disagree with whether it was justified in this instance, but trying to make the decision into one of moral transgression is never going to lead to anything but shouting.
"We will absorb the first shot, if need be, before attacking. No preemptive attacks."
Well, at least you're forthright about it. Good. I respect a man who has principles, and will defend them. Take that to the electorate, and see how you do.
"The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.
No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America."
John Kerry
I am really sick of this "moral high-ground" nonsense - it is full of unstated moral equivalencies.
We would have to work really, really hard to reach a moral level lower than our enemies - North Korea, the Iranian eegime and their terrorists, Al Qaeda, etc.
Those who talk about the moral high ground always forget the context.
Roosevelt and Churchill intentionally bombed civilian targets, killing 600,000 people. We won that war, and it is now remembered as the "Great War" and as a great moral victory by the west. The west also handed over to Russian communist domination millions of people in eastern Europe. But it was the Great War and we had the moral high ground.
And now we have people wanting to "take the moral high ground against those who routinely advocate genocide", who send their young to die killing innocents, who equip terrorists, and who have clearly stated their goals to dominate the earth and to kill or force convert all of us.
I've got news for you folks: we already have the moral high ground, whether the left and Europe recognize it or not! We have it, and more pre-emptive war won't lose it. We have a duty to the future, and dodging that to be more "moral" is suicidally short-sighted and ultimatgely immoral.
France has already, twice this year, threatened to use nuclear weapons in response to serious acts of terrorism (not necessarily WMD). But we would rather absorb a blow first?
Let's get serious. The issue of letting Iran get nukes does not just involve what the current "government" of Iran might do with them. It involves the subsequent greatly increased probability of Sunni states rapidly and desperatwey acquiring nukes (with their oil billions) in response.
It means a world where a hundred thousand people can be killed by a terrorist-carried nuke, and we don't even know who did it. It means a world without deterrent, or where the deterrent is to wipe out anyone who MIGHT have been responsible (Pakistan, Iran, North Korea and other failed states with nukes - shall we plan to incinerate 250,000,000 Muslims? It involves a world where Israel may be forced to use nuclear weapons, in significant numbers with dirty ground bursts, to stop Iran.
In other words, letting Iran get the bomb is utterly irresponsible and morally indefensible. The lives and freedoms that would be lost in that case far exceed almost any cost of stopping Iran.
George Bush has done many things wrong (although anyone with a bit of historical perspective would recognize that great leaders like Lincoln and Roosevelt made horrible mistakes costing hundreds of thousands of lives). But... Bush deserves the credit for understanding the moral issues of this war with more clarity than almost all of his critics. I would further argue that he has been dealt a terrible deck - the viciously partisan media and opposition party combined with the horribly bad luck of not finding enough WMD's in Iraq (700 rounds of chemical weapons don't satisfy the media narrative) - these were used to destroy almost all of his freedom of action - his domestic and especially international political capital were damaged badly, largely through bad luck. Maybe a Reagan could pull this one out of a hat, but he was pretty well stopped by Iran-Contra, a trivial issue compared to a war going badly and insane demogoguery about the casus belli.
A quick link to bolster my previous comment - V. D. Hanson offers much more historical perspective (although his subject is more the Iraq war) at Pajamas Media
"I am really sick of this "moral high-ground" nonsense - it is full of unstated moral equivalencies."
There is no historical key moral principal that America will not fight a preemptive war. For example, in 1812 America fought a war of naked agression. The key moral principal of this country has always been that we are better than the other side. If you feel the need to argue that, then you've abandoned the key moral principal of America.
One of the reasons I get so sick of the 'moral high-ground' arguments is that they are always based on some myth of past American moral perfection, as if America has never had to march forward into the face of moral ambiguities. It's a false reading of history. Beyond that, ultimately history tells us nothing. It is a conciet that those that forget history are doomed to repeat it. History never repeats itself. Vietnam will never happen again, and neither will World War II - and so we aren't fighting either now. We ultimately don't study history to tell us who we are or what to do in the future. We study history in order to learn how to think, and any lessons we draw from it must be qualified by our understanding that these are the lessons of hindsight and they apply to things which largely have passed from the Earth.
The key moral principal of America though is that moral ambiguities or not, we are still the side of right and justice. That's the key moral principal we abandoned 40 years ago or more. And that is ultimately the theme of Bush's Sept. 20 speach. If you can't see the inherent moral ambiguities in his call to action though, then I pity you. The Iraqi child lying dead and mangled on the ground was an inherent part of the call to action. It is part and parcel of deciding that our memes deserve to live more than their memes, and for that reason we must live also at the expense even of thier innocent.
And the difference to me is clear. For the war or against, everyone agrees that the role of that dead child is a tragic one greatly to be avoided whenever it can be. The other side sees the dead - no matter who they are - as a cause of celebration so long as they are our dead. And that is as much as I think needs to be said about that, because all this chit chat is avoiding the only really important question and that is, "What do we want to do now?"
PD Shaw [21,22,24]: I'll bet that's the first time you've cited John Kerry as the authority behind your argument!
Grim [23]: Thanks. But I'm pretty used to being out of step with the electorate, whichever way they are currently flowing.
John Moore [25] and celebrim [27]: You seem to be arguing that because our country has not lived up to its moral principles, that moral principles are not worth having, or aspiring to. That attitude towards morality would come as a big surprise to the Founders of the world's major religions.
John Moore [25}: You never made clear what "unstated moral equivalencies" you were talking about. Your conclusion seems to be that we are better than them. Because God is on our side, presumably.
There's a long tradition of portraying the Other Side as monsters who drink blood and eat babies, and are waiting around the corner to slaughter our women and children if we don't kill them first. Then we can justify striking the first blow, and setting off the conflict, because we are just "defending" ourselves from what they would have done if they'd had the chance.
You want to hear that argument done really well? Track down Hitler's speeches, one to the troops and one to the Reichstag, as he was invading Poland. He just wrings your heart, for what a peace-loving guy he is, trying so hard, but pushed beyond the limits of toleration by those awful Poles, and the other powers behind them. He was just forced to do it.
It's worth reading. Seriously.
celebrim [27]: Sorry, I just can't follow your argument, though you raise a number of interesting points. The tough one for me was:
I can't even figure out what you are saying there. The tenses don't work out.
But more generally, when we ask, "What do we do now?", we need to start by asking, "On what principles do I decide what to do?" (I note that I've changed your quote from "What do we want to do now?". I guess I'm still enough of a Calvinist to think that what we want is much less relevant than what we should do.)
Miss Manners once said something like, "Courtesy helps you deal with people you despise." Similarly, I think moral principles are particularly important when you are faced with extremely difficult challenges and decisions, including and especially decisions under uncertainty. And one particularly important moral principle is: "Don't be lured into doing evil first, by your prediction of the evil that someone else will do." (That's an awkwardly stated special case of the Golden Rule.)
So, I'm advocating being idealists in a non-ideal world, and using morality to face down immorality and evil.
"You seem to be arguing that because our country has not lived up to its moral principles, that moral principles are not worth having, or aspiring to."
No, I'm not. I don't understand where that came from, accept that it probably seemed to you to be a convienent line of attack.
What I'm arguing is that overly romantic views of our persumed past untarnished morality should not inform our present decision making. I'm suggesting that a realistic view of the past shows that there are indeed many moral ambiguities in America's past, but if you can see that and still see something more 'white' than 'grey' (as I think you should) then you should see in the present moral ambiguities something which is likewise more 'white' than 'gray' (much less 'black'), more just than unjust, more good than bad, and not throw hysterics about how in the real world in real practice moral judgement is not trivially simple. Claiming that we are damned because we fail to live up to high idealistic standards that we in fact have never lived up to and are largely a product of a fevered imagination (and which would be probably impossible to live up to even if we wanted to) doesn't do much to advance the discussion.
"Sorry, I just can't follow your argument..."
Which is fine. No doubt I haven't been as clear as I should be, but if you can't follow my argument don't pretend to understand it.
"So, I'm advocating being idealists in a non-ideal world, and using morality to face down immorality and evil."
So basically, you are claiming that there is no tension whatsoever for a Christian inspired government between the demands of the personel mandate of the 'Golden Rule' and its mandate as magistrial authority to be 'a terror to evil doers'? Are you claiming a perfect correspondance between the relations of people and the relations of nation states? Are you claiming the the moral requirements and authority of the state apply equally to the individual, and vica versa? For example, is the authority of execution (and the morality of the action) equally applied regardless of whether the actor is an individual or a magistrial agent of the state?