America: it’s okay to be wrong, but it’s time to be right
Start by reading here. Then let me relate a relevant story.
I was not wrong about going to war with Iraq. But I made other mistakes, judgment errors, because just like many Americans, I was afraid. Setting aside partisan convictions and my political activism, I even have to admit that it was perfectly normal for everyone - Democrat and Republican, citizen or elected official, civilian or military general, wingnut or moonbat - to be afraid. After the terrible, gut-wrenching spectre of that Tuesday morning on 9-11, after watching the jumpers, seeing the families desperate for word of their loved ones, hearing the stories of so many good people gone, we would have been inhuman not to feel fear amid our shock and sorrow.
Everyone, even pacifists, could understand retaliation was coming, had to occur, could not be stopped. Not so much for revenge but simply to stop the people responsible, to say to the world no one will do this to us without assuring their own demise, ever again. When the Taliban refused to turn over Bin Laden and Zawahiri and others, everyone knew Afghanistan’s government had to be taken down. Most of the nation would have joined that effort, old or young, woman or man, feeble or strong, if it was necessary or possible.
There was no real question of morality about that. People that evil and guilty of so many murders, just like Hitler, had to be locked away forever or killed. I’d been a pacifist most of my life. I’m opposed to capital punishment. Yet there are moments in history when the admonitions and inspirations of Gandhi and Thoreau and Sister Prejean and Martin Luther King fall short of the need to protect the world from the further destruction done by monstrous men.
Not everyone agrees and that’s okay. I’m sure there are wiser and better people than I and some may have better solutions. But it was not wrong or unethical to feel the need to stop, capture or kill the conspirators and masterminds that attacked all our fellow citizens that awful day.
That certainty, that anger, that fear of what might happen again, at any moment, lasted for many months afterward. Nobody could guess that such an attack would not be followed with others as horrible. Of course we had to anticipate another shoe would fall. With all the rhetoric and videos and threats Osama was making, we waited and hoped he could be destroyed before the rest of his attack plans could reach fruition.
I remember my fears that certain symbolic days would be used by Osama for his next assault. Christmas. Memorial Day. Independence Day. Veteran’s Day. All symbols of the country that Osama would have to feel most opposed to. Yes, terrorists terrorize. Eleven months after that attack, on August 5th, the day before the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, I phoned my ex-wife, offered her money if she’d take my kids out of the metropolitan area for a day and head to the nearby mountains.
I thought I’d had a premonition of an Al Qaeda nuclear attack. In reality, I was feeling a recurrence of The Fear.
But throughout that first year, I’d been cramming like one crams for a Bar Exam. Times ten. In that year, I learned about Osama, Zawahiri, the history and culture of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the rogue nuclear proliferator, A.Q. Khan. And PNAC. I spent a ton of time on a Silicon Investor message board about Foreign Policy frequented by foreign policy professionals, ex-military officers, and more conservatives than you can shake a defense contractor’s dividend at. I spoke with military retirees - my father’s old peers - read the online CIA Factbook and numerous declassified National Archives documents. I killed off more than a few previously held misconceptions.
And by September 2002 I was hearing all those old hands debating the odds of us taking the next fight to Iraq. Most - even the crustiest conservatives, didn’t believe it would happen. Only a few ardent Zionists, the kind who dreamed of nuking every Arab nation, favored an attack on Iraq. Even among most who had no qualms about going to war preemptively saw no reason for anything other than renewed inspections in Iraq.
That’s where the old members of the diplomatic corps were, where a lot of the experienced war hands were, where the veterans of the Gulf War and Bosnia were. While Bush pushed through Congress, through reopened inspections, from September through January, that’s where the consensus remained. And then came the day we’d all waited for, Colin Powell’s long-promised proof of Iraq’s WMD threat presented to the UN.
By then, 17 months after the 9-11 attacks, the fears of Al Qaida’s potential had largely abated. Everything I’d learned indicated no country would be stupid enough to provide them a nuclear suitcase bomb and the capacity of any terror organization to build a nuke or bio-weapon was virtually nil. By then, it seemed obvious that chemical weapons - with numerous risks of failure in application - and a black market ‘dirty’ bomb remained as potential terror weapons that might kill a few hundred. Beyond that, a coordinated series of conventional suicide attacks at multiple locations seemed in the realm of possibility.
And Colin Powell’s hard ‘evidence’ was so shockingly thin that even the old war hands were gasping at the audacious claims that had been made on largely circumstantial evidence. The only perceived threat remaining from Saddam Hussein were unaccounted for old stocks of chemical weapons that most weapons experts conceded were largely degraded and quite likely useless. It became apparent that Saddam’s capacity to unleash somen horror on the world was reduced to hundreds of casualties instead of the tens of thousands formerly feared.
And that’s when I knew, six weeks beforehand, Bush would take us to war in Iraq without a serious casus belli.
Why did I relate this all? Because, to be fair and objective, my own personal travel through the Fear of the Unknown made me recognize that most members of Congress were privy to no more information than I had. And most, being human, Republican and Democrat came to the October 2002 military authorization vote with similar levels of fear. Mine had largely dissipated with the acquisition of knowledge, and I knew that if I’d been tasked as a voting member of Congress to keep the nation safe from a Saddam-sponsored chemical attack, I would have argued that his real threat was to neighboring countries, not to us.
I would have voted ‘No’ unless an amendment had clearly stipulated that Bush had to return for further authorization from Congress if Saddam conceded to inspections and the inspections were proceeding. In retrospect, however, I can understand why many members of Congress would vote ‘Aye’. After all, I’d gone through my own personal period of trauma, gripped by ‘The Fear’. While I had more respect for those voting ‘Nay’ for travelling that same course within a like period of time, who was I to condemn those still in its thrall?
Perhaps some weighed political considerations and tried to chart a politically safe course, but I now believe many acted with honest intentions, based on the White House’s promise of forthcoming proof and based on varying degrees of lingering fear.
From the time of Colin Powell’s presentation to the invasion 6 weeks later, more than a few Aye voters were equally taken aback and began pressing the White House not to go to war. That’s why I’m not an absolutist on that vote. I think many in Congress acted in good faith and were fooled. While I favored those who demanded more evidence earlier and voted No, I was willing to concede that mistake as forgivable, so long as they didn’t compound that error in various ways in subsequent days after Powell’s presentation.
I think many girded for a forthcoming chemical attack against our troops in the first six weeks of the war. After Saddam was toppled, though, it was plain to see that the WMD danger was past. And the following month, when Joe Wilson went public with the claim that the nuke threat was based on manipulated intelligence, that, coupled with the prewar assessment of the IAEC had made it pretty clear to any honest observer that the White House had gone rogue to achieve a desired end that wasn’t based on any real threat to our country at all.
It was reasonable to expect that members of Congress would start doing their best not to repeat their initial decision to give the President the benefit of the doubt so easily again. Especially after the capture of Saddam in December 2003. But 2004, being an election year, saw massive manipulations of public fears and propaganda intensified. More than a few in Congress made the political decision to hold their tongues, aware that the fear-driven tide of public opinion allowed little room for honest public debate. After Election Day 2004, however, even that rationale ceased. From that point on, any hesitation to counter the president’s claims was rooted in dishonesty, partisanship, ignorance or political and personal cowardice.
Given that, go back to some of the key points in the NY Times editorial today:
As Democratic lawmakers try to repair a deeply flawed bill on electronic eavesdropping, the White House is pumping out the same fog of fear and disinformation it used to push the bill through Congress this summer. President Bush has been telling Americans that any change would deny the government critical information, make it easier for terrorists to infiltrate, expose state secrets, and make it harder “to save American lives.”
There is no truth to any of those claims. No matter how often Mr. Bush says otherwise, there is also no disagreement from the Democrats about the need to provide adequate tools to fight terrorists. The debate is over whether this should be done constitutionally, or at the whim of the president.
And:
This year, the administration found an actual problem with FISA: It requires a warrant to eavesdrop on communications between foreigners that go through computers in the United States. It was a problem that did not exist in 1978, and it had an easy fix. But Mr. Bush’s lawyers tacked dangerous additions onto a bill being rushed through Congress before the recess. When the smoke cleared, Congress had fixed the real loophole, but also endorsed the idea of spying without court approval. It gave legal cover to more than five years of illegal spying.
Fortunately, the law is to expire in February, and some Democratic legislators are trying to fix it. House members have drafted a bill, which is a big improvement but still needs work. The Senate is working on its bill, and we hope it will show the courage this time to restore the rule of law to American surveillance programs.
Correctly, they point out what I’ve concluded herein, based on a narrower selection of points related to intelligence collection:
Mr. Bush and his team say they have safeguards to protect civil liberties, meaning surveillance will be reviewed by the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the inspectors general of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. There are two enormous flaws in that. The Constitution is based on the rule of law, not individuals; giving such power to any president would be un-American. And this one long ago showed he cannot be trusted.
LONG ago. In October 2002 and at the UN in February 2003. In July 2003 with the ruin of WMD expert Valerie Plame’s career. And at numerous points since. The Times concludes:
Mr. Bush says the law should give immunity to communications companies that gave data to the government over the last five years without a court order. He says they should not be punished for helping to protect America, but what Mr. Bush really wants is to avoid lawsuits that could uncover the extent of the illegal spying he authorized after 9/11.
It may be possible to shield these companies from liability, since the government lied to them about the legality of its requests. But the law should allow suits aimed at forcing disclosure of Mr. Bush’s actions. It should also require a full accounting to Congress of all surveillance conducted since 9/11. And it should have an expiration date, which the White House does not want.
Ever since 9/11, we have watched Republican lawmakers help Mr. Bush shred the Constitution in the name of fighting terrorism. We have seen Democrats acquiesce or retreat in fear. It is time for that to stop.
Notice what I bolded in that last section. Because, as blunt and correct as the editorial is, there also remains another HUGE pair of questions.
Prior to 9-11, there was no traumatic fear factor in play. The White House could not claim the catastrophe forced haste on their decision-making. Nor could telecoms claim they caved to requests to assist an illegal wiretapping scheme based on the national trauma that followed. So the questions are:
1) Did the wiretapping endeavors and consents by the telecoms begin BEFORE 9-11?
2) If so, will Congress - Democrats AND Republicans - finally stand up, investigate and prosecute the lawbreakers, and restore integrity to our government, or will they prove, once and for all which members of Congress are nothing more than criminal accomplices after the fact?
Those who fail the test this time sell out the Constitution, the rule of law, America’s reputation, our security, and they betray the sacrifices of each and every member of our military. We owe no respect and no allegiance to any member of government who does not vote to hold such lawbreakers accountable. We do not need - as the editorial suggests - an investigation of the wiretapping after 9-11. We need an investigation to answer the question of whether the lawbreaking started earler.
And if it did, we need a Congress that will seek proper prosecution, punishment and future protection to prevent a reoccurrence.
The Congressional mistakes of October 2002 are forgiveable. But the five years since of compounded errors and free passes can only be rectified one way. Congressional members can vote to determine whether the US government will restore the trust of the people of the nation. Or they can vote to end the rule of law, to permanently destroy our Constitutionally authorized government and to end the nation that once was known for a lot of great achievements.
Will they kill the United States of America? If they do, the question Bush asked long ago will be settled: they’re not with us. And then we must fight them with the same certainty that we fight to stop Al Qaida.
There is no middle-ground, no gray area left, no excuses permissible. If our legislators vote to go rogue, they deserve the fate of every traitor. Their judgment day has come.
Update: The Washington Post, as usual, gets it exactly wrong. With a few rare exceptions on their reporting and editorial team, their management and editorial board serve only as useful tools to the enemies within our country.
October 14th, 2007 at 7:59 am
I think you are being a tad too understanding about the motives of our astonishingly toothless Congress, Kevin. To all appearances, their lack of action stems from fear, but it can’t be political fear, since most of the American electorate has moved far beyond both The Fear and Republican demagoguery. In fact, the political danger to Dems now comes from an electorate disgusted with their lack of opposition to Bushism.
Congresspeople read the polls, and on average they are (almost) as smart as the average American voter. So from what does the fear stem? Maybe those wiretaps that started prior to 9/11? From what we now know about the current “administration,” they would not hesitate to spy on Congress members and compile whatever damaging information can be used to keep them in line. This kind of speculation is often labeled tin foil hattery, but really, given the known actions of the gang in question, it’s simply a rational conclusion based on the facts. It’s exactly the kind of thing Nixon was well down the road in implementing, and there’s no reason to believe Bush/Cheney has more scruples than Nixon did.
October 14th, 2007 at 8:27 am
well, kevin i promised to comment more if you would only write something i didn’t think made sense….
i’m no pacifist absolutist, and i think the above is all wrong.in 2001, the retaliation we engaged in WAS a kind of revenge and NOT about catching or killing the guilty parties… and that was clear by the end of october.i know of no admonitions from gandhi et al. that are contrary to going after dangerious criminals.
if i’m wrong about that, please give me some links to back up your statement…. because i think you confuse the need to catch criminals with the “need” to drop cluster bombs from 30,000 feet on people who had nothing to do with 911.and what we did to the people of afghanistan sure as hell is a real question of morality. and there sure as hell is something wrong and unethical with our desire to stop the people who were involved in 911 if it makes us morally blind to our own actions that caused even more death and destruction of the innocent afghani than did 911.
October 14th, 2007 at 8:28 am
ack! what happened to my paragraphs? it looked ok in preview…
October 14th, 2007 at 8:31 am
[…] And as I asserted earlier today, if Congressional members accede to this lawbreaking, they become accomplices after the fact. And then it’s up to us to deny them any right to claim to be a government. […]
October 14th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Mamayage: you may be right that blackmail’s occurring, or other intimidation the public can’t see. Still, it takes courage to stand up anyway. And it’s time for courage to prevail.
Selise, I didn’t mean to suggest any of them stated absolutes. I meant to indicate that pacifists often claim there are no exceptions. I’ve done so myself. Life and world events have convinced me there are exceptions when a fight is the option that yields the least violence overall.
In a perfect world, rogue governments should be the only targets of retaliation and innocents should never suffer for what their leaders do if they lack any choice in who rules them. Going after the Taliban and the Al Qaida leadership could only be done with the military, so civilian deaths are always going to accompany that.
For the most part, I think our military largely took precautions to minimize the occurrences of that in afghanistan. Not always, but generally, that was the aim. Do you recall we were simultaneously dropping food and bombs? Clumsy as some of that was, I think that was unprecedented in the history of warfare.
I agree that cluster bombs, like hardened radioactive casings, do not conform to that aim Every war provides inconsistencies and strocities on both sides. But as a people, I think Americans were rooting only to take out the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
October 14th, 2007 at 9:27 am
i don’t think that a military response was the only way to go after AQ - the inability to imagine alternatives is no excuse for ignoring those who can see alternatives.
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but let’s, for the moment, assume that a military response was necessary… that still doesn’t mean that bush’s war was in any way justified. we didn’t get kevin’s war - we got george/dick/rummy’s war. similar to what i said at the time, just because there is a ginormous tree dropping big branches on my house and in danger of accutally falling over and destroying my house DOES NOT make it ok to give my 5 year old nephew the chain saw and telling him to go to it. we do have a moral responsibility to not make things worse. and we failed in that moral responsibility.
this is contradicted by the wide use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium.
i do recall. i also recall that when it was reported that the food packs resembled cluster bomblets, nothing was done to correct that. i also recall that when the northern alliance and the taliban agreeded to a short (1-3 day?) cease fire in order to allow for the annual polio vaccination of afghani children, we nixed that agreement. i also recall that the following year, no money (exactly $0) was budgeted by bushco for afghan reconstruction.
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the food drops were nothing more than a PR stunt.
not here in MA. there was a insanity of blood lust that came over alsmot everyone i knew or met. i knew people (”liberal” democrats working or studying in a university) who opening advocated mass bombings and killing without regard for whether it was the guilty of the innocent who were killed. when i asked people i knew to be kind, gentle hearted and compassionate if they would be willing to choose a police action instead of war if they were gaurenteed all the guilty would be caught - i was uniformly told “no” and “i don’t care who is killed.” my world view was significantly changed in the days after 911 - but the blood lust and insanity taht seemed to come over people i thought i knew. i still grieve for the world i thought i lived in.
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… again, i’m not a pacifist absolutist. i don’t object to what you’ve written based on pacifist ideology. i just think you’re really wrong. and i object to attempts at justify what we did to the afghan people.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:12 am
I’m not trying to defend anything, really. In my haste to reach the conclusion of a long post I simply conveyed things half-assedly. Yeah, I heard ‘nuke all the Musloms’ and I know retaliation-but-let’s-be-humane was hardly predominant in the populace.
My main point was that fear and trauma are not the best basis for determining policy. Emotions like that too easily swat away the better angels of our nature. That may be regrettable but I think it’s fairly human to react illogically when we’re feeling raw and vulnerable.
It doesn’t make it right, but I think, as we realize our errors, the only way forward is to acknowledge and in some way, atone.
My point was to grant our legislators the capacity to be wrong yet forgiveable if they quit compounding the wrong. Just as we have to grant similar mercy to ourselves, our neighbors…. there is no way to undo the past.
We must not forget things we got wrong, to avoid repetition. But it’s time to be right, to insist on being right, to demand that our reps be right. Or to reject those completely who refuse to be right. If the law dies not apply to them, there is no law at all.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Kevin, I realize you have been calling for some time for citizens to get off our duffs and do something to take our country back, and I agree that that kind of courage is sorely needed. As for Congress, it’s true that regardless of the source of Congress’ fears, this is the time for courage. However, given that their fears seem to stem from more than just the fear of political defeat, I am at a loss as to how ordinary citizens can stiffen Congress members’ spines. Beyond removing them from their seats, what can we do to make Congress fear the People more than it fears Cheney?
The extent to which the same fear that Congress exhibits is found in ordinary Americans was brought home to me in this post by Naomi Wolf at FDL — we are all being bullied into silence and submission. Look at what happened to the Frosts when they defended a wildly popular government program.
This is the second act in the process of turning us all into Good Germans. The first was The Fear and subsequent blood lust described by Selise. As a country, we know we desired revenge for 9/11, and weren’t satisfied with tit-for-tat. We wanted a hundred thousand times the Muslim casualties than we sustained on 9/11. There is enormous cognitive dissonance abroad in the land because most of us grasp at some level how wrong that was, and now that we’ve achieved that level of indiscriminate revenge, it’s hard to find a comfortable way to resolve the wrongness of it. Most Americans have chosen to push for withdrawal from Iraq, the quicker the better. Some have avoided or repressed awareness of the bind we’re in. The less mature among us have gone the other way and have fully embraced the idea that killing all Muslims is a good idea.
Combine this crisis of conscience with an awareness of the criminality that was enabled by the post-9/11 bloodlust, the awareness that these criminals are entirely ruthless about both squelching dissent and maintaining their power, and you have a recipe for paralysis. We are unlikely to see millions in the street demanding change because the millions are both afraid and complicit.
The only way out of this bind that I’ve thought of is everyday defiance. With all the revelations about government spying, for instance, a natural reaction is to look for ways to shield yourself from it. It was chilling to me to read in the Wolf post linked above how many people now go out of their way to avoid revealing their political interests and opinions to TSA. But that’s the opposite of an effective response — we need to make our positions as public as possible and take whatever lumps the criminals think they can dish out. If enough of us do that (and when the lumps come we make sure our fellow citizens know about it), we can reach a critical mass that’s simply too large for the criminal apparatus to control. It’s mass action, but not on the street. To a certain extent it’s already happening with the sea change in political opinion we’ve seen over the last 2-3 years, but needs continued acceleration. If it gets to be a habit among enough Americans it can be an ongoing counterweight to the dangerous precedents that have been established largely unchallenged by the Bush/Cheney gang.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:28 am
completely agree with you here, kevin…. and i try to be willing to sincerely be understanding of that - because i need plenty of that kind of understanding too.
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i just can’t accept continued justification of actions that, to me, seem completely unjustifiable (even if understandable)… because part of putting the past behind us is facing the truth and trying to make amends (where possible). and not just because this is the right thing to do, but also because i think it is what helps us not to make the same mistakes again.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:32 am
mamayaga - amen.
October 14th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
I’m really not arguing against you Mamayaga and Selise.
We are unlikely to see millions in the street demanding change because the millions are both afraid and complicit.
Which is why I say acknowledge and atone, then move forward.
The only way out of this bind that I’ve thought of is everyday defiance. With all the revelations about government spying, for instance, a natural reaction is to look for ways to shield yourself from it. It was chilling to me to read in the Wolf post linked above how many people now go out of their way to avoid revealing their political interests and opinions to TSA. But that’s the opposite of an effective response — we need to make our positions as public as possible and take whatever lumps the criminals think they can dish out. If enough of us do that (and when the lumps come we make sure our fellow citizens know about it), we can reach a critical mass that’s simply too large for the criminal apparatus to control.
That’s precisely what I’m advocating. Monkeywrench. Get all Yippie on their asses. Conform to nothing. Silence and paralysis are also understandable but completely ineffective.
One example: if a few hundred protesters want to really monkeywrench the system, start blocking the entrances and exits of a community’s garbage collectors or sewage treatment plants. Acting locally with copycats all across the country will start getting local government officials more vocal.
And the key to any success has to be the freedom that comes when one moves beyond fear.