Letters to the Editor
John Singer Sargent
Published Letters: 44 Editor's Choice: 2
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Advice, Consent, and Conscience
[Read the article: Enforcing the community's foreign policy orthodoxy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One perspective I see in Glenn's articles on this subject (the ingrown, self-referential and self-interested character of 'official' Washington in general and the foreign policy "community" in particular): What is the responsibility of a functionary in, or adviser to, the 'administration' and the Washington power structure around it, when the actions of that 'administration' may be judged as illegal and immoral?
This question is a fair context within which to consider the debate Glenn, Atrios, and others have raised, and one that is generally forgotten when discussing the actions of persons like O'Hanlon or Pollack -- or any of the foreign policy "community" who argued for, and continue to support the Iraq war.
Unfortunately, if any mention of this perspective is raised in a "Serious" discussion of foreign policy, it's dismissed by the Wise Ones with a nervous cough, as if the person who'd raised it had just broken wind. Foreign policy isn't about morality, they'd say; It's about power, and practicality. We live in the real world, surrounded by geopolitical power players, and what our government does has to mirror those realities.
Some argue, Why shouldn't we rig the game to the advantage of our citizens, our institutions, our country? We can create the legal basis for our actions as we go -- and, please; leave discussions of morality to the theologians. After we've won, we can afford to worry about morality.
The argument for Empire assumes that projecting our power is a self-justifying act. Afterwards, those actions will bring the blessings of our superiority to so many... and this will, somehow, make up for whatever damage we caused on the way.
I've been rereading several books focusing on the mentality of the leadership of the nazi state -- not because America is now the functional equivalent of nazi Germany, but because precisely the dilemma of so many Germans at that time is now our own.
After the nazis were appointed to power and began making sweeping changes in German law and society -- including waging an aggressive war -- persons serving or advising the government had a hard choice: Between what was essentially personal gain, and refusing to support the legal government -- because its actions were illegal, or immoral.
After the war, nazi functionaries, many of them educated, intelligent men, were called to testify before the Nuremberg Tribunal. Reading their lengthy responses to even simple questions is painful: They twist, evade, and equivicate. Their answers are a rationalization of their abandonment of a distinction between right and wrong.
I don't suggest that members of the 'administration', or the government, may be called legally to account for participation in actions which some claim are 'called for under dire circumstances' -- the erosion of Constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights; the waging of an aggressive war based on falsified evidence and untrue statements; acts of systematized violence and torture against individuals at Abu Gihirab, and elsewhere in a network of secret prisons.
However, the foreign policy pundits, analysts and advisers who argued in favor of invading Iraq -- and those who support the 'administration' and its war today -- should be publicly singled out... not as a punishment, but because the 'administration' is utterly wrong and has committed what would have been declared crimes at Nuremberg -- and all justified on the same basis.
They should be called out publicly because their acquiesence to, and vocal support of, these horrorific acts makes them the American equivalent of those functionaries at Nuremberg who dissembled in the dock, who had purchased their comfortable lives by supporting acts they knew to be illegal and immoral.
The most burning question asked after the end of the Second World War in Europe was How? How did ordinary, even extraordinary and intelligent people willingly participate in a system which committed crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination, even today? How did they abandon their consciences, their moral centers?
For those in the foreign policy "community" who support the 'administration' or the Iraq war, I strongly recommend reading Sereney's Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth. Or, reviewing Nuremberg Trial testimonies available online through the Yale Library. Very strongly.
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Living Down To Expectations
[Read the article: The rigid pro-war ideology of the foreign policy community]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As Glenn noted:
When Fred Kagan, the the think tank version of Bill Kristol, wanted to unveil his AEI Surge plan in December, he did so at the Brookings Institution, where he was feted beforehand by Ken Pollack and praised afterwards by Michael O'Hanlon, who on that day gave Kagan's Surge his official blessing.
I don't think anything further needs to be added.
These people ... clubby, smarmy, self-absorbed, and despicable.