Mr. Hunt's
question:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. If a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State feels this way, don't you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you're following a flawed strategy?
The question refers to Powell's letter of September 13, 2006 which seconds John W. Vessey's objections to redefining our interpretation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. Powell says doing so would add to the world's doubts about the moral basis of our actions, and would put our troops at risk. Indeed, I think that the answer to the question indicates that there is no "moral basis" for policy-making in the Bush administration.
Hunt is asking about the negative impact on world opinion, assuming that is a BAD thing. As you read Bush's response, note that he is entirely deaf to the suggestion that world opinion is a consideration. In particular, he is completely unable to process the idea that acting immorally to achieve a goal might have any consequence besides the goal that is being achieved. I'll talk more about this later.
THE PRESIDENT: If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic.
Here's his gambit. It is a simple one. Terrorists are immoral. We, the US, are good. Hence nothing we do can be anything but decent and compassionate.
Take a deep breath.
Imagine a universe where this would make sense. I think the universe would be something like a primitive comic strip landscape, where black lines and white space do eternal battle. People often criticize the President for a "bad guys" and a "good guys" approach, or talk about his cowboy approach to foreign policy. But even Westerns depict actions as if they took place in three dimensions, with the "good guys" having misgivings about violence. Not Bush. He is a person who doesn't even appear to recognize that our actions could be good or bad. If we dropped a hydrogen bomb on Tehran, to pick a random hypothetical, his "logic" insists it would be an expression of our compassion and decency.
I simply can't accept that. It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective, Terry.
Spoken as if he was completely unaware of the 43,000 civilians killed in Iraq to achieve his objectives. That would be one kind of comparison: two to three thousand civilians killed on 9/11 compared with 43,000 civilians killed by the "military intervention" in Iraq. A quantitative comparison. Why is it unacceptable to make such a comparison? Seriously, under what view does it make sense to say the actions of two groups are incommensurable?
Because one is done by a state and the other is done by a non-state entity? Indeed, we allow the state (in Arendt's phrase) to hold a monopoly on violence. However, we allow this based on an implicit contract, one in which the state derives its sovereign authority as long as it applies violence in a legal and moral way. In order for citizens to hold their government to those terms, they have to be able to weigh the actions of their own state. And that is exactly what Bush is denying - US actions, he claims, are a priori good. If our state decided to deprive us of our rights and put half of us in concentration camps, who would seriously insist we continue to regard its actions as moral, and label non--state resistance as immoral?
Because the US is a democracy and other countries are not? Leaving aside the issue of how elections actually work in the US, this is obviously not true. Democracy is guarantees access to political participation. It doesn't make majority decisions correct. In fact, the Founders were clear about the dangers that might arise from the tyranny of the majority.
Because terrorists are so uniquely evil, and so comparing them with anyone else is failing to consider them as truly exceptional. This seems to me the closest to the actual reasoning that underlies Bush's statements. And, indeed, we're treading close to the territory of religion-like convictions. The kind that for a true believer, no amount of argument or evidence can overturn. So I'll refrain from quoting Patrick Henry or Sam Adams, from talking about the rape/murder that was in the recent news carried out by members of the armed forces, or from even mentioning white phosphorous, because for certain people these are all false moral equivalencies.
But make no mistake about the faith-based nature of that reflex. In order for the scale of atrocities not to matter, you have to have already decided that no matter what we have done, something much larger outweighs it. What could be so large it outweighs 43,000 civilians dead?
My own view is that it doesn't matter what Bush might say in answer to such a question. Short of a threat of immediate global annihilation, I can't conjure up a case that could be made for the kind of genocide Bush's actions have unleashed in Iraq. If the riddle is: what is more important than 43,000 lives, the answer is: that is so messed up.
My job, and the job of people here in Washington, D.C., is to protect this country. We didn't ask for this war.
Okay, I agree, they didn't ask. The UN Security Council can verify this. The right verb in this case is "manufacture" as in "My job is to appear to protect the country by manufacturing wars like this one."
You might remember the 2000 campaign. I don't remember spending much time talking about what it might be like to be a Commander-in-Chief in a different kind of war. But this enemy has struck us and they want to strike us again.
"The enemy" has struck us. There is but one enemy. Iraq = Al Qaeda = Hezbollah = Iran. Any attempt at differentiating between nonAmerican people will be met by peevish and uncomprehending hostility.
And we will give our folks the tools necessary to protect the country; that's our job.
It's a dangerous world. I wish it wasn't that way. I wish I could tell the American people, don't worry about it, they're not coming again. But they are coming again.
Could I make it any clearer than that? After they kill Matt Lauer's family, they're coming for yours! Give us any tools we ask!
Here, I want to draw on my experience growing up in Chicago, where this would be called a "protection racket." You have a small business, and in comes one of the local mob or gang's collection guys. They are not threatening you, but they make it clear that if you don't have their protection, some sinister outside force will wipe you out.
Now, it doesn't really matter if the protection and the threat are from the same outfit - sometimes they were, sometimes the threat was from a rival outfit. I have no idea which one of these two cases applies to the Bush situation, but it is one of them. Which is a historical inversion: in the past, organized crime was on the other side of things at the Department of Justice.
And that's why I've sent this legislation up to Congress, and that's why we'll continue to work with allies in building a vast coalition, to protect not only ourselves, but them. The facts are, is that after 9/11, this enemy continued to attack and kill innocent people.
I happen to believe that they're bound by a common ideology. Matter of fact, I don't believe that, I know they are. And they want to impose that ideology throughout the broader Middle East. That's what they have said. It makes sense for the Commander-in-Chief, and all of us involved in protecting this country to listen to the words of the enemy. And I take their words seriously. And that's what's going to be necessary to protect this country, is to listen carefully to what they say and stay ahead of them as they try to attack us.
With this, our President concludes his answer. And I think that this is the most sly, and also most revealing portion of his statement.
It begins by continuing to talk about a singular "this enemy," who then morphs into several enemies "bound by a common ideology." This switch implies to me that he seriously believes that Baathist remnants, Shiite clergy, Wahabists sympathetic to Al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents, all do share a common ideology. But if thinks so, he certainly doesn't "listen to the words of the enemy."
No, we know by now that he doesn't, but he has to pretend that he does, because he is trying to gain unchecked authority to do both torture and eavesdropping. Both activities entail getting information and taking it seriously. But if he embraces this incredibly simplistic view of the situation in the Middle East, it is clear the goal isn't more information about "the enemy." He is empirically impervious to actual intelligence on that topic.
So why does he need to effectively remove our signature from the Geneva Convention? Why is he trying to remove even the minimal oversight of the FISA court? We can only speculate about his true motives, but on the most general level it is not controversial to say that he is waging a larger war on checks to his own power.
Which brings me back to the main topic of this diary, morality.
Above, I've noted two separate arguments he makes thats can't be reconciled with most moral schemes, either religious or non-religious. First, he insists that his ends justify any means. There are moral schemes where a greater end justifies questionable means, but note that Bush isn't saying that. He is saying that HIS ends justify any means, and you're not allowed to even measure which is greater. Second, his actions are exempt from any form of moral evaluation because as the Executive of the "decent and compassionate" US, his actions are automatically justified. These two arguments amount to the roughly the same thing.
These are the ravings of what can only be described as moral megalomania. For Bush, morality is just one of the tools that pesky gadflies might use to check on his power, like International Law, Constitutional checks and balances, and public oversight.
You know who should really be upset about this? The very people usually identified as Bush's base. This view of morality as totally subordinate to his own decisions, of any state's authority as exempt from moral justification, and of his own moral omniscience should be infuriating to people who believe in clearly defined moral absolutes.
But I think that absolutely everyone should be very worried about what is an effectively amoral worldview being so clearly expressed by the leader of our country. As most readers here know, the news conference continued with a belligerent and pissy response to David Gregory's excellent question (link is to the Olbermann video and Jonathan Turley's interesting speculation on Bush's motives). In that exchange, the President basically threatens to cancel the entire program if it isn't done his way. This is entirely consistent with his answer to the other question - the "good" in terms of the "War on Terror" that he sees coming from interrogations isn't what he is pursuing. He approved waterboarding, and so he is pursuing personal victory and vindication, even at the expense of what he perceives to be information that could prevent a terrorist attack.
Morality is a complicated subject, and there is no single moral worldview that I would say every president should have. But here is one that no president should have: "For your protection, I need the aggregate to myself all power, including the power to decide good and evil." Indeed, I would say this kind of delusion is a pretty clear disqualification from holding office.
