In his new book, “Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights,” Schulz argues that rising global terrorism requires the left “to rethink some of our most sacred assumptions.” A vigorous defense of human and civil liberties, while essential to spreading democracy worldwide, is not enough to stop terrorists from blowing up airplanes or shopping malls, he says. And that presents the left with a problem, because some of the tools needed to fight terror, such as stricter border controls or beefed up intelligence work — and, perhaps, war against states that support terrorists — chafe against traditional leftist values.

But protecting America’s borders as well as its treasured freedoms is a daunting task. There is ample reason to decry (as Amnesty has) the deeply invasive potential of the PATRIOT Act, the secretive rounding up and prolonged detention of more than 1,200 Arabs and Muslims nationwide, and the alleged coercion — some would call it torture — of terror suspects by the U.S. government. Of equal concern is Washington’s current distaste for multilateral diplomacy, which puts crucial alliances at risk at a time of mounting global turmoil. But it’s not enough, Schulz says, to launch defiant rhetoric at a barreling, unilateralist Bush administration, even when its policies threaten to bulldoze the very cornerstones of democracy.

He raises some hard questions: If there’s reason to believe the New York City subway is a prime terrorist target, should we really object to surveillance cameras in the name of privacy rights, especially if use of the evidence they obtain is limited? If democratic elections would bring a radical Islamist government to power in Pakistan that might distribute nuclear weapons to terrorists, should we still call for democracy there over military rule?

Like many on the left, Schulz doesn’t have ready answers. Saddam’s horrific human rights record was well-known — Amnesty International documented it for more than two decades. And yet, Amnesty takes no official position on the U.S. intervention in Iraq, and Schulz sticks to careful, noncommittal language when it comes to defending human rights with military power. “The job of the human rights world is not to make military decisions of one sort or another,” he says.

With the new terror threat roiling the globe — which some argue has given brutal regimes freer license to crack down at home — Amnesty may need to recast its framework for defending human rights. U.N. sanctions failed to undermine Saddam’s rule throughout the 1990s, and they raise complicated humanitarian concerns, typically compounding economic pain for populations already pinned beneath the heel of dictatorship. “In the long run,” Schulz admits, “it may not be wise of Amnesty to have a policy that it takes no position on military intervention.”

Still, he remains deeply troubled by the PATRIOT Act and the Bush administration’s aggressive doctrine of preemption. “I think history gives us good reason to think this is exactly the wrong strategy to pursue,” he says, “if the goal is to prolong American power, and, presumably, its values.”

Salon reached Schulz by phone at his home in New York.

Why has the political left failed to articulate an adequate strategy for fighting terrorism since 9/11?

Because of an abhorrence — a quite understandable one — for the Bush administration’s policies, there has been a tendency for the American political left and the greater human rights community to downplay the genuine, serious threat of terrorism around the globe. Presumably the human rights community is committed to protecting Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, namely the guarantee of security of person — the right to life. But there’s been a failure to give the necessary attention, analysis and strategizing to the effort to counter terrorism and protect this right to security. Far more energy has gone toward offsetting the very real, damaging human rights violations committed not just by the United States, but by many governments, in the name of fighting the war on terror.

But why else do you think that is? In the book you point out that human rights advocates, as much as anyone, should despise terrorism, and be willing to act against it. Is the human rights community simply too disorganized to combat terror, or is there a deeper ideological problem?

Human rights organizations are basically set up to put pressure on governments, not on more amorphous entities like terrorist groups. The traditional tools we use are generally not going to be effective with terrorists. I doubt Osama Bin Laden is going to be moved by 50,000 members of Amnesty International writing him a letter asking him to refrain from terrorist acts. In the face of a new kind of force in the world that is detrimental to human rights, the human rights community has been slow to adapt to that new reality, in both its understanding and its tactics. There’s a cultural lag at work here.

It’s a serious problem. It means that human rights advocates are seen solely as harping critics. We certainly need to be that; it’s a very important role. But if we fail to engage with the very real, hard decisions that governments have to make about protecting the safety of their citizens, then we’ll be dismissed as charlatans, or ideologues who are out of step with reality.

A recent Gallup poll showed two-thirds of Iraqis think that the ousting of Saddam “was worth any hardships they have personally endured since the invasion,” and two-thirds said they believed that the country will be better off in five years than it was before the invasion. Do you support the invasion and occupation of Iraq?

Amnesty International took no position on the military action itself. We had been highlighting for more than 20 years the human rights violations by Saddam Hussein. No one who cares about human rights can help but be grateful that he is no longer in power.

But the way in which the United States went about the overthrow, particularly in its thumbing of its nose at international institutions, and without an international sanction for the invasion, did in the long run, I’m afraid, enormous damage to the international support structure for human rights.

But over the last decade didn’t the international system prove unable to undermine Saddam’s brutal regime? Is it fair to say that the repeated call by the Europeans and Russians to let the U.N. inspections process continue rang rather hollow by 2003?

Remember that the European stance, perhaps with the exception of Germany, was not that military intervention of some sort could never be authorized. The fundamental stance of many critics of the Bush administration at the U.N. was that there ought to be more time allowed for the weapons inspectors to do their necessary work. In the book, I do criticize the French and the Germans and the Russians for failing to offer a viable, effective alternative to [military] intervention as a way to put an end to Hussein’s human rights violations.

But the issue here is whether or not one country, or a very small group of countries, can, in a hurried fashion, simply ignore international institutions that prop up human rights, along with the many other multilateral enterprises — not only in the absence of international sanction, but with what appears to have been [direct] opposition.

The NATO-sanctioned intervention in Kosovo speaks to this. Granted, it also took place well after many human rights violations had been committed there, but it was a united action, which has since been supported by a relatively united attempt to rebuild Kosovo. So a greater degree of patience and respect for those international processes regarding Iraq might well have resulted in a far broader coalition, and there’s a good chance the consequences of rebuilding Iraq would’ve been far less drastic, for all involved, than they are now.

Why did the Bush administration ultimately carry out its Iraq policy the way it did? Do you subscribe to any of the more cynical views commonly voiced by the left, for example that the war was simply a big oil grab?

I think it reflects a rather wholesale disregard for international institutions, for a multilateral framework in which to conduct U.S. foreign policy. I don’t think it’s only about oil. That may be part of it, but fundamentally it’s about American power. The United States has articulated in the National Defense Strategy (PDF file) — with its precursor being the Project for a New American Century (PDF file) — the desire to make sure American military power is preeminent, and will stay that way 100, 200 and 500 years from now. That will be accomplished by asserting American unilateral military power — and economic power, though the two in some measure go hand in hand — wherever it’s needed around the globe.

Paradoxically, I think history gives us good reason to think this is exactly the wrong strategy to pursue if the goal is to prolong American power, and the values for which America presumably stands.

At the latest antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco on Oct. 25, which were largely organized by the radical group International ANSWER, protesters used slogans such as “End the imperialist occupation,” and “Bring the troops home now.” Do you think these are tenable positions, or is this the type of insular politics you criticize in your book?

I think you need to articulate the position you’re asking me about a little more clearly than just a slogan.

Well, what happens if we do pull the troops out of Iraq now?

Look, this may be frustrating, but Amnesty International doesn’t take a position on pulling the troops out or keeping them in. What we do believe is that there has to be a rebuilding of the judicial infrastructure in Iraq, and much of the work we’re doing there is designed to educate and train, and to rebuild a system that will allow the people who had crimes committed against them and their families to seek redress — and ultimately allow there to be a functioning system of justice when the troops are withdrawn. Amnesty has not called for the withdrawal of troops. And we certainly didn’t call for them to be put there in the first place.

Our job, and the job of the human rights world, is not to make military decisions of one sort or another. It’s to say, once we’re in there, “Here are the standards that must be met by the occupying troops, and here are the kind of government institutions that must be built. And if you’re not doing that adequately, whether it’s in Afghanistan or Iraq, then you’re not doing your job.”

But isn’t that somewhat of a contradiction of your view that human rights advocates need to articulate a constructive strategy for both battling terrorism and defending human rights, including whatever the necessary military tools? You can’t establish a functioning judicial system in Iraq if you don’t establish security first.

Of course not. All I can tell you is that Amnesty has not called for the withdrawal of troops. You’re absolutely right that security needs to be established. Human rights can’t function in a situation of chaos and anarchy. We believe that. And that will involve, under the current circumstances, a military presence for some period of time. In fact, in Afghanistan we’ve called for that military presence to be extended beyond Kabul so that security can be established across the country, precisely so that a new judicial system, and a larger system with respect for human rights, can be established.

Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, supported the Iraq war on human rights grounds. Recently he said in the New York Times, “What always drove me crazy about the [war] opposition was that it was never about Iraq. It was a referendum on American power.” Shouldn’t Amnesty in fact take a position on the use of military power if its primary goal is ending the human rights abuses of regimes such as Saddam’s?

In the long run it may not be wise of Amnesty International to have a policy that it takes no position on military intervention. Certainly I have argued within Amnesty that in the face of genocide, such as in Rwanda, the organization is utterly remiss not to take a position in favor of military intervention.

Again, for better or worse, Amnesty did not take a position on military intervention in Iraq, and doesn’t take one now regarding the withdrawal of the troops — though we certainly aren’t calling for their withdrawal. There does indeed need to be basic security before any support for human rights can be established.

Recently several Democratic U.S. senators spoke out in favor of the PATRIOT Act. According to the Washington Post, Joseph Biden, D-Del., said popular criticism of the legislation has been “ill-informed and overblown,” and even Russ Feingold, D-Wis. — the only U.S. senator who actually voted against the legislation — said he supports “90 percent” of its provisions, and that the rest are “fixable.” What’s your view of PATRIOT? Can we stop terrorism without it?

There’s little evidence at this point that the PATRIOT Act is a critical factor in defending the country against terrorism. The Justice Department has acknowledged that they have used it exceedingly sparingly, and that when it has been used, it’s been against non-terrorist criminal elements. This isn’t to say that there aren’t parts of it which are reputable, about which civil libertarians and human rights advocates should have no complaints.

It’s clear that the major element of the PATRIOT Act that’s drawn criticism is its short-circuiting of the traditional process of seeking subpoenas from an independent court for retrieving personal information. I’ve seen no evidence, from Feingold or anyone else, that sidestepping the traditional process of going to court — where you have to show at least some degree of evidence as to why such information is relevant to the pursuit of a suspect — is a necessary provision. The Justice Department itself, by saying it has rarely used the provision, appears to be acknowledging it isn’t necessary.

That knocks out a fundamental argument in favor of PATRIOT in the first place: You have to be able to prove that some derogation of traditional rights is not only effective, but necessary to pursuing the protection of security — that without the suspension of these rights, the public’s safety will be considerably jeopardized. Thus far I haven’t seen such evidence.

What about with the alleged al-Qaida cell broken up in Portland, Ore., or the Lackawanna terror case in New York?

I’ve seen no evidence that those cases would not have been effectively pursued and cracked, absent the PATRIOT Act. The key issue here is whether or not the attorney general, in effect, can make decisions unilaterally, without having subpoenas approved by a court. As I read the long New York Times account of the Lackawanna case, I didn’t see any element of that case which depended on bypassing the traditional subpoena route. Judges almost always agree to the government’s subpoena requests [in these types of cases]. So from a pragmatic point of view this looks like a most unwise, and at the very least unnecessary, short-circuiting of that process. I don’t think John Ashcroft has tried to make the case that there were major cases over the last two years that would have posed a great threat to American security had the PATRIOT Act not been in place. Nor have I seen any evidence that using the traditional court system is inadequate, not just in terms of the subpoena process, but once the arrest is made, when the individual should be promptly told of the charges against him, and provided an attorney.

In the book you say that supporting human rights does not require being pacifist. When is the use of violence appropriate?

I personally believe that in the face of genocide the world community should intervene militarily. That situation clearly trumps national sovereignty. I think it was the Clinton administration’s greatest shame that it blocked the United Nations from intervening in Rwanda. I think the intervention in Kosovo is defensible on human rights grounds, and there may be others.

But there are also profoundly destructive human rights situations, such as Zimbabwe today — where the free press is being stifled, where political opposition leaders are being tossed into jail — that don’t necessarily warrant military intervention, at least not at this point. In Zimbabwe’s current case, the international community should use all the other tools that are available to it to try to bring pressure on the Mugabe government.

Do you feel the same was true of Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion?

To the best of my knowledge, neither Amnesty nor any other human rights organization had documented active genocide going on in Iraq. There were profound human rights violations going on, and I think there’s an arguable case that those violations may very well have justified some sort of international military intervention. That’s a case I’m certainly prepared to discuss.

Was there a more clear case for military intervention with Saddam’s slaughtering of the Shiia in southern Iraq when the U.S. pulled out after the first Gulf war? Or with Saddam’s gas attacks on the Kurds?

Well, the attack on the Kurds was in 1988, but you were asking about 2003, and to the best of my knowledge there was not active genocide going on in Iraq in 2003. I do think in those instances, the attacks against the Kurds and later against the Shiia, were situations that might very well have justified military intervention. Absolutely.

There’ve been credible news reports from Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay that U.S. officials have used coercion — what some would call torture — to interrogate terror suspects. Is there ever a case where this can be justified to any degree? In particular I’m thinking of the capture of al-Qaida mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, where there is near certainty that he has valuable information which could unlock terrorist plans and potentially save many lives.

The judgment about whether something spills over into cruel, inhumane, degrading treatment has to be made on a case by case basis, and not just by Bill Schulz; there are international courts that determine this. I don’t know what techniques are being used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, nor does Amnesty International. That, of course, is part of the problem here: It’s very difficult to make judgments without information. Some of the descriptions from the New York Times and the Washington Post of the types of interrogations taking place would, I think, be described by an international court or a human rights commission, as cruel, inhumane, degrading treatment — as torture. For example, being shackled in painful positions for a long period of time.

On the other hand, the reports of prisoners being misled into thinking they’ve been transferred to the New York City police department or some foreign government, techniques of disorientation and duplicity … I think that those probably don’t fall into that category. In the book I cite that the FBI has [dozens] of interrogatory techniques that have proven effective without using physical coercion.

Why has there been so little outcry from the American public about the rounding up of roughly 1,200 Arabs and Muslims in the United States after 9/11, or about the reports of coercive techniques used on suspects and prisoners?

The government has led the general public to believe that these actions are necessary to keep it safe. Even though we know that of the 1,200 [domestic] detainees not a single one of them was charged with anything having to do with terrorism. Only about 100 of them were charged with any crime other than visa violations, and those crimes had nothing to do with terrorism. Human rights groups have frequently requested access to these prisoners, and we’ve consistently been turned down.

I think the government has certainly implied that the stress and duress techniques [of interrogation] are yielding significant information which is helping protect the public. I have no idea whether that’s the case. It’s very difficult to tell. So much of this is veiled in secrecy, not just from human rights groups and the media, but from the courts themselves — some of it with the courts’ connivance, as in the [Federal Appeals] court decision that the courts have no jurisdiction in Guantánamo.

It’s an entire system of incarceration without oversight of any kind, except that of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC took a remarkable step and broke a decades-long tradition of never speaking out publicly: They criticized the indefinite detention at Guantánamo, with no access to lawyers for the detainees. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the only oversight agency that’s had any access to Guantánamo, and it hasn’t had access to Baghram airbase in Afghanistan, or to wherever prisoners have been transferred in Egypt, Morocco or Syria, or elsewhere. I think if you’re going to undermine the most fundamental rights in the U.S. justice system, and the Geneva Conventions, as the United States has clearly done in Guantánamo, at the very least you have an obligation to allow appropriate parties access to those individuals to make a judgment as to their conditions and treatment.

Freedom from torture is a non-derogable right agreed to under every international human rights treaty, including the Convention Against Torture, which the United States has ratified. The president himself has issued a statement that torture is absolutely unacceptable. So in this respect all we’re asking is that the U.S. government hold itself to its own standards.

What if there is another major attack on U.S. soil? What would that portend for civil and human rights?

I think there’s no doubt it would have a very damaging impact. It would provide an excuse for even deeper forays into violations of human rights, and in the long run that would be tragic and utterly self-defeating.

With the war on terror, we’re faced with convincing millions and millions of people around the globe who may be yet undecided about whether or not to opt for support of extremism rather than democratic values and respect for human rights. We have to win the loyalty of those people — to say nothing of maintaining the loyalty of those predisposed to supporting the United States in the first place, whether it’s the moderate Muslim world, or our European or other allies.

It’s utterly critical for the human rights community to take the threat of terrorism seriously and do whatever it can to articulate and carry out a strategy for diminishing that threat — stopping violent attacks is part of that. But promoting human rights is a profoundly important weapon in the struggle to defeat terrorism. It’s a far more important one than the Bush administration has acknowledged.

Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.

Because incumbents can’t run for reelection promising “change,” and because “hope” during a lingering recession was also off the menu, the Obama campaign’s 2012 theme of  “forward” — a word that often follows “plow,” mind you — was the best available alternative. That said, and substituting the economy for terrorism, Obama is implicitly if not explicitly advancing the same theme Bush did in 2004: America suffered a tough blow, but the situation could have been worse and, more to the point, under my stewardship the nation is steadily regaining its footing.

This counterfactual campaign theme — vote for me not because of what happened, but what might have but didn’t — is a common thread for Bush and Obama. It’s not an uplifting message, but it sufficed in 2004 and Obama is counting on it working again in 2012.

Politics 101 further dictates that when an incumbent’s reelection is in doubt, he must go negative against the challenger. Obama political operatives in the White House and at the Democratic National Committee long ago made it abundantly clear they were willing to do just that. Team Obama may not go negative against Romney to the degree the Bush camp did against John Kerry in 2004. (By mid-summer 2004, 75 percent of Bush’s TV ads were negative attacks on Kerry.) But don’t be surprised if attacks on Romney’s record and even character are plentiful, harsh and relentless. In 2008, America saw candidate Obama’s toothy grin; four years later, expect to see President Obama’s fangs.

Expect the Obama camp to emphasize two major critiques of Romney: that he is a flip-flopper willing to say anything or reverse any position to win; and that he is an economic royalist whose personal and public life suggest a person incapable of understanding the lives and struggles of average Americans. Again — note the unusual parallels with 2004.

Although Romney is a Republican former governor and Kerry was at the time his state’s Democratic junior U.S. senator, the two Massachusetts pols make for similar targets. Each man is an extraordinarily rich preppie and Ivy Leaguer. Each represents the liberal wing of his respective party. Each has shown a propensity for ruining an otherwise valid point with sloppy, backfiring language. And each has a reputation for lacking political spine.

The flip-flop frame is candidate character assassination of the first order. Like the lone negative number in a string of multiplied positives, the critique that nobody can trust any statement or claim made by a politician has the potential to negate every accomplishment or promise. If it sticks, it can be fatal, as Kerry learned in 2004.

Obama and the Democratic National Committee know their electoral history and, sure enough, last November — a year before the election and two full months before a single Iowan had caucused — the DNC released a four-minute “Mitt vs. Mitt” ad and its accompanying website with the damning tag line, “the story of two men trapped in one body.” The site is a brilliant homage to the Bush campaign’s 2004 windsurfer attack ad and the devastating, 11-minute ad the Republican National Committee produced chronicling Kerry’s “evolution” on Iraq.

And then there is what might be called “the Willard factor”: Romney as Richy Rich, the Monopoly Guy with the Bain Capital background and the Swiss bank account. His bio would be political gold to Romney’s opponent any election cycle, but it’s gold-plated platinum in the first full presidential campaign following the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the long overdue national debate over income inequality.

Again, the wealth-personified line of attack mirrors the out-of-touch, Martha’s Vineyard yoke the Bush team put around Kerry’s neck in 2004. Right on cue, in the first public event of his reelection campaign, last week Obama attacked Romney by name and invoked the economic disconnect card with relish. “He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money the rest of us will automatically prosper as well,” said Obama of Romney, adding that “corporations aren’t people – -people are people.” (For the record, Kerry is actually wealthier than Romney, who would become one of the richest men ever to occupy the White House, should he win.)

Obama will also try to shift the national debate toward areas of strength, as Bush did. Historically, this meant the same strategy, but with inverse implications for each party: The so-called mommy party Democrats would encourage voters to focus on more favorable kitchen-table economy issues — healthcare, jobs, education — and away from less favorable “daddy party” Republican issues surrounding foreign wars abroad and culture wars. Because Obama is net-positive in foreign policy approval and net-negative on the economy, rather than mirroring by inversion, Obama will try to duplicate Bush’s shift-in-emphasis in 2004. GOP complaints that Obama is politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden reveal Republican fears that Obama is going to play the terrorism card in 2012 just like Bush did eight years ago.

The 2004 parallels extend beyond message. Obama will be amply resourced and enjoy a field technology by virtue of his campaign’s state-of-the-art Web, donor, volunteer and social media innovations. Remember the Bush reelection campaign’s vaunted “72-hour” voter turnout model? That seems like an Edsel compared to the Ferrari the Obama team will be sporting this summer and fall. Among the perquisites modern presidential incumbents enjoy is the option to test-drive the best mobilization machines before anyone else.

Finally, what most connects Obama 2012 to Bush 2004 is the stability of the electoral map itself. Only three states — two net to Bush — flipped from one party to the other between 2000 and 2004; only nine states flipped between 2004 and 2008. Split the difference and a good, back-of-the-napkin over-under for number of states likely to flip between 2008 and 2012 is six. And thus, like the lead sailboat during a windless race, Obama doesn’t need or want conditions to change much from 2008: He merely has to replicate the map that swept him into office, with the burden of figuring out how to shake up the Electoral College falling to Romney, just as it did for Kerry against Bush. Even Karl Rove’s mapping of the 2012 election concedes this reality.

The 2008 election was memorable; to borrow the title of one best-selling chronicle, it was a “game changer.” But 2012 will not be. In many respects, it will be a game repeater, with Obama playing Bush to Romney’s Kerry of 2004. The president may be asking Americans to look “forward” in 2012, but the best preview of his reelection campaign can be found by looking backward eight years.

Republicans lost their popularity on security issues for one reason: George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a disaster. And yet, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, has assembled a foreign-policy team composed almost exclusively of individuals with the same war-always mentality and ideology that served Bush — and the United States — so poorly. In some cases, the exact same men responsible for Bush’s catastrophic national security policies are advising Romney. The former Massachusetts governor could have included some of the pragmatists and realists from the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, a Romney presidency seems like it would be Bush 43 all over again.

Richard Grenell, who served as United Nations spokesman under Bush, may be gone from the Romney campaign after an uproar over his sexuality, but there are plenty more former Bushies. First off, there are Romney’s “special advisors.” There’s Michael Chertoff, W.’s Homeland Security director. Chertoff oversaw DHS’s failures during Hurricane Katrina, and amassed unprecedented powers of secrecy. Next up is Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department for Bush’s last two years and on the Defense Policy Advisory Board for the president’s entire term. Cohen was an adamant supporter of the Iraq War and advised Bush directly on the issue. Or take Cofer Black, the man who infamously said to Bush in September 2011 about al-Qaida that “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Black went on to become chairman of Blackwater, where he resigned after the company illegally bribed Iraqi officials.

Then there are the 13 “working groups” composed of equally worrisome individuals. The Middle East and North Africa Working Group is co-chaired by Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long, and Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s special assistant and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. The remaining co-chair is Walid Phares, who never worked for Bush but advised Lebanese warlords in the 1980s. Romney has reportedly promised Phares a top job in his administration, despite his virulently anti-Islamic views.

All told, Romney lists 37 holdovers from the George W. Bush administration — the very same administration he and all other Republican candidates barely referenced during their many debates because it was so discredited and toxic, even to the Republican base.

It didn’t have to be this way. There are, in fact, people in Republican circles who are sensible on international affairs. The Cato Institute, in particular, has experts that could dramatically change the direction of American foreign policy. Men like Justin Logan and Christopher Preble were prescient on Iraq and a host of other issues. Similarly, the Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) has a host of solid scholars, including ones like Dimitri Simes and Geoffrey Kemp, who have valuable government experience in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, respectively, and a history of perceptive analysis. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, would have been another good pick.

So why aren’t guys like this being tapped? Why is the GOP sticking with a discredited foreign-policy approach rather that looking to its own past for wiser counsel? “Most of the realists and pragmatists have simply been driven out of the Republican Party,” says Stephen Walt, who writes a blog at Foreign Policy and teaches at Harvard. “The neoconservatives have been driving the agenda since Bush was elected and they remain well-entrenched.”

Another factor is that the Republican Party’s base remains strongly militaristic and reluctant to recognize limits on American power. Jon Huntsman’s failed presidential campaign illustrated that problem. The good news is that nobody seems to be calling for nation-building and occupying foreign countries in the mold of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s the only lesson that seems to have been learned from the last decade of foreign-policy debacles.

Finally, it may just be that the United States has too much power to change course. While the Unites States has undoubtedly made disastrous decisions in the last decades, it is so powerful that it is largely insulated from the consequences of them. If Romney’s foreign-policy advisor list is anything to go by, a Romney administration would have to teach the U.S. all over again about the problems with trying to police the world. Prepare for Bush redux.

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.”  In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.

An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.

Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.

The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.

With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”

Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.

The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.

Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.

That’s quite a fall for a man who frequently spoke of his Christian faith and family values when asked to comment on the mammoth success of his brand in the early 2000s. “When I got saved, God became my art agent,” Kinkade explained in a 2004 video. He went from a childhood in Placerville, Calif. (invariably characterized as “hard-scrabble”) to an apprenticeship selling his work in supermarket parking lots to his apotheosis as the nation’s “most profitable” artist, the Painter of Light™, and multimillionaire. He was profiled in the New Yorker by Susan Orlean.

I first learned about the dark side of the Painter of Light™ — sorry, couldn’t resist that one — when I reviewed “his” novel, “Cape Light,” in 2002. The novel, first in a series, was produced much as his paintings are: by a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade. He wasn’t the only artist to work in this way; he wasn’t even the only novelist. To the best of my knowledge, his novels — heartwarming, fuzzily pious tales of small-town life — have been coming out ever since, one more facet of a lifestyle brand that, at its most ambitious, included an entire Thomas Kinkade-themed housing development.

My review was just a goof intended to amuse Salon’s readers, but after it appeared, I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries (essentially, mall and shopping-district outlets for his prints) and been fleeced. I didn’t really understand how the financial architecture of Kinkade’s gallery empire worked, and I sure didn’t share their taste in wall art, but these people struck me as decent and sincere. They’d believed in Thomas Kinkade — not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his work, one in which (to quote Kinkade’s introduction to “Cape Light”) “people have the time to savor life’s simple pleasures” and lead “deep, satisfying lives.”

My conversations with these victims made me uneasy. Was there some relationship between the franchisees’ naivete, perhaps even their willful self-delusion, and their terrible taste? Was it hopelessly snobby to wonder that? What about Kinkade himself? He seemed to be at best a hypocrite and at worst a crook. Was there a meaningful connection between his bad conscience and his bad art? German thinkers of the 1930s would have said so, and they had plenty of opportunity to observe bad fascist art up close. Hermann Broch maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is “ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.” The novelist Milan Kundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism. That’s a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings, but Kinkade was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology.

I felt compassion for the ripped-off gallery operators, and at the same time I was aware that quite a few of them had probably also fallen for the similarly sanctimonious, bogus folksiness of George W. Bush, thereby subjecting our nation to one of the worst presidents in its history. Kinkade and Bush struck me as of a piece, probably because they had both borrowed from Ronald Reagan in promising that we could get back to a better way of life that never existed in the first place. In nearly every encounter with the press, Kinkade delivered a diatribe against the art-world “establishment” that had shut him out. They were “elites” touting unfathomable, downer junk to hardworking people who needed uplift instead. Art snobs were the aesthetic counterparts of the so-called liberal elites, a group that surely included me.

At the same time, I must admit that I, too, like a cottage. Granted, I like the stylized, art-deco kind painted on bone china, rather than the insanely detailed and phosphorescently lit specimens in Kinkade’s pictures. And I’m in little danger of equating my new teacup with a Brancusi just because it’s cheerier. Nevertheless, I suspect that my idea of what’s pleasing about a cottage isn’t too different from that of Kinkade’s fans: an aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort not too cut off from the past. It’s as if we’re speaking the same word, but in different languages.

I suspect this is why Kinkade’s paintings have exerted their weird, hypnotic effect on me. They are so preposterous (especially the stream-side ones; he really needed to sit down with an architect and go over the basics of drainage), so awful. And yet I can still detect — beneath that cacophony of hollyhocks and cobblestones and snapdragons — the whisper of something intelligible. I’m pretty sure I know why the hordes of Kinkade collectors love his work, even if I don’t like it myself. Kinkade’s paintings are irredeemably false, like all kitsch, but through them you can just barely glimpse the honest desires they seek to exploit, sinking under the dreck.

Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit,” meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world. From that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that art wallows in shit, but art doesn’t exist for the primary purpose of denying it, either. Kitsch is, first and foremost, a lie; its very existence is founded on bad faith.

Kinkade, like Bush, peddled a falsely simplified image of the world — one without mildew or flooded basements, for one thing — which, no surprise, turned out to be plastered over a whole lot of stinky stuff. The true believers, the ones who bought into these men the most during the 2000s, ended up paying some of the highest prices, from the Kinkade acolytes who invested in his gallery Ponzi scheme to the working-class red-staters who sent off their kids to die in a pointless war. Bad taste, harmless as it may seem, can end up costing you a lot.

Further reading

Los Angeles Times obituary for Thomas Kinkade

Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of Thomas Kinkade for the New Yorker

A 2006 Los Angeles Times story documenting Kinkade’s business problems

Salon’s Janelle Brown visits Hiddenbrooke, a Kinkade-theme housing development in Northern California

Laura Miller reviews “Cape Light,” a novel by Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer