Sure, the war that I helped sell and cheered on led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings (at least), the long-term displacement of millions more, and the complete destruction of another country that had done nothing to us.  But I'm not interested in clouding my mind with any of that.  I don't care about that.  That can be talked about once I'm dead.  After all, as the great humanitarian Joseph Stalin taught us, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and as the great scholar and torturer Condoleezza Rice explained, we should just gently shut our eyes and think about the massive slaughter and destruction we caused in that country as mere "birth pangs" on the road to something beautiful.

Back in 2003, I said -- with bloodthirsty sadism rabidly drooling from my mouth -- that the real purpose of the war, what made it the Right Thing to do, was that we needed to make large numbers of Muslims "suck. on. this" in order to show them we mean business, and we randomly picked Iraq because . . . . we could.  But now -- to justify the enormous amounts of blood I helped spill and the incalculable amounts of human suffering I helped spawn -- I'm going to pretend that I was motivated by a magnanimous, noble desire to Spread Freedom. 

It was only a matter of time before American elites abandoned their faux regret over Iraq.  For tribalists and nationalists, America can err in its execution but never in its motives.  There's no question -- as this glorifying, propagandistic Newsweek cover story reflects -- that it's now official dogma that this was the right thing to do, or at least that we produced something great and wonderful for that country, as was our intent all along (leaving aside the what is actually happening in Iraq).  It's nothing short of nauseating to watch those responsible glorify what they did without weighing -- or, in Friedman's case, affirmatively dismissing as irrelevant -- the extreme amounts of death and suffering that they caused, all based on false pretenses.  But this is why Tom Friedman is the favorite propagandist of "Washington insiders"-- because he feeds them the justifications they need to feel good about themselves.  Forget all those innocent dead people and destruction you caused; it all worked out in the end.

 

UPDATE:  Several people argue in Comments that this effort to portray the invasion of Iraq as a good thing is motivated not only by a desire for self-cleansing on the part of those responsible, but also to enable future, similar wars to take place.  I don't know whether that's the motive, but it's definitely the effect.  That the invasion of Iraq has been so widely perceived as a horrific debacle had the effect of minimizing the likelihood of future invasions.  Having it now depicted as something that worked out and produced Great Results necessarily makes it easier to justify future wars in that region.  After all, if attacking and invading Muslim countries we don't like in order to change their government is the good and right thing to do, shouldn't we keep doing it?

 

UPDATE II:  Freedom is on the March:  we shouldn't burden our minds worrying about this, though; just do what Tom Friedman does and leave it to the historians while patting ourselves on the back.

It's not actually a unique event of oppression or suffering to have to sit and listen to a speech where someone criticizes you and you can't respond that very moment (but are able, as Roberts just proved, to respond freely afterward).  Even in the State of the Union Address, it's completely customary for the President to criticize the Congress or the opposition party right to their faces, while members of his party stand and cheer vocally, and -- as the reaction to Joe Wilson's outburst demonstrated -- "decorum" dictates that the targets of the criticism sit silently and not respond until later, once the speech is done.  That's how speeches work.  Only Supreme Court Justices would depict their being subjected to such a mundane process as an act of grave unfairness (and, of course, Roberts' comrade, Sam Alito, could not even bring himself to abide by that decorum).

What makes Roberts' petty, self-absorbed grievance all the more striking is that this is what judges do all the time.  It's the essence of the judicial branch.  Federal judges are basically absolute tyrants who rule over their courtroom and those in it with virtually no restraints.  They can and do scold, criticize, berate, mock, humiliate and threaten anyone who appears before their little fiefdoms -- parties, defendants, lawyers, witnesses, audience members -- and not merely "decorum," but the force of law (in the form of contempt citations or other penalties), compels the target to sit silently and not respond.  In fact, lawyers can be, and have been, punished just for publicly criticizing a judge. 

As is true for any large group of people, the range of behavior varies greatly, from unfailingly polite judges to pathologically thuggish ones, but the core dynamic of the judicial process is that judges wield absolute power and everyone else is essentially captive to their whims.  That is why the overriding attribute of those who interact with them is one of extreme, royalty-like deference, both formally (standing when they enter, addressing them as "Your Honor," having them sit always on an elevated platform, decked in their flowing, magisterial robes) as well as informally (watch any court proceeding and see lawyers petrified of somehow offending the judge).  To say that, for many of them, this endless deference affects their expectations and sense of entitlements is to understate the case, as Roberts just proved.

Supreme Court Justices, in particular, have awesome, unrestrained power.  They are guaranteed life tenure, have no authorities who can sanction them except under the most extreme circumstances, and, with the mere sweep of a pen, can radically alter the lives of huge numbers of people or even transform our political system (as five of them, including Roberts, just did, to some degree, in Citizens United).  The very idea that it's terribly wrong, uncouth, and "very troubling" for the President to criticize one of their most significant judicial decisions in a speech while in their majestic presence -- not threaten them, or have them arrested, or incite violence against them, but disagree with their conclusions and call for Congressional remedies (as Art. II, Sec. 3 of the Constitution requires) -- approaches pathological levels of vanity and entitlement.  The particular Obama/Roberts/Alito drama is an unimportant distraction, but what this reflects about the mindset of many judges, including (perhaps especially) ones on the Supreme Court and obviously the Chief Justice of that court, is definitely worth considering.

At least 100 detainees died in U.S. custody, many as a result of interrogation practices and detention conditions.  Gen. Barry McCaffrey put it this way:  "We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A."  Other than a handful of very low-level scapegoats, none has been punished, or even investigated, but rather immunized in multiple ways, both formal and informal.  Army Gen. Antonio Taguba concluded that the abuse was the direct result of the orders of top-level Bush officials and said:  "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."  Most of the people subject to our lawless "war on Terror" detention system were completely innocent.

Iran is a horribly oppressive regime and many of these judicial processes may (or may not) be sham trials.  But they have a citizenry which effectively demanded accountability for torture, a government which relented to citizen demands, and a judiciary which compelled at least some judicial scrutiny and adjudication for these crimes.  One can only imagine what it must be like to be a citizen of a country that feels obligated -- even if just to placate populist anger -- to at least maintain the pretense of that the rule of law applies to all.

 

UPDATE:  And just by the way, Agence France-Presse's Olivier Knox reported today: "AIPAC writes every member of US Congress urging 'crippling' sanctions on Iran."  But remember:  any suggestion that belligerent U.S. actions towards Iran has anything at all to do with Israel would be deeply inappropriate, probably even anti-Semitic or, at the very best, an idea which all decent people would agree has a "revolting provenance."

All of this underscores a vital point:  the Obama White House is hamstrung by its own embrace of the Bush/Cheney Terrorism template in advocating for its own policies.  The pollsters' Memo stresses, for instance, that the primary justification Obama officials offered in defending their Mirandizing of the attempted Christmas Day bomber -- Bush did it too with Richard Reid -- is ineffective and makes them appear "weak":

Voters resist the argument that the Obama administration simply handled the Christmas bomber in the same way the Bush administration handled the "shoe bomber" case; this sounds political, and produces a weak response.

How can this response be anything other than weak and muddled?  Democrats generally and Obama specifically have spent years telling the country that Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies were lawless, immoral, inept and counter-productive.  Yet the minute there's a controversy over Obama's Terrorism policy, his first justification is:  we're only doing what Bush and Cheney did.  He can't stand on his own two feet and forcefully justify civilian trials or Mirandizing Terrorist suspects; he has to take refuge in the fact that Bush also did it -- as though that proves it's the right thing to do, because Bush/Cheney is the Standard-Bearer of Toughness on Terrorism.  If you're going to embrace the core Bush/Cheney model on Terrorism and point to what they did as though that's the guide for how things should be done -- and if you're going to run to them for refuge and protection -- and if you're going to reverse yourself and capitulate at slightest sign of political pressure (FISA, detainee photos, civilian trials) -- is it really any surprise that people will begin to conclude that Bush and Cheney had things basically right and that Democrats are"weak" (not because of specific policies, but because of their fear of arguing for and sticking with their own positions)?

This is the same point made, albeit in a different form, by Stanley Fish in today's New York Times, who argues that there is a growing nostalgia for George Bush among many media figures and the country generally (which, at least with regard to media elites, I've noted before as well; there's zero evidence it's true of the public generally, and Fish's attempt to prove otherwise is unbelievably lame).  Still, today's poll proves the public is far more receptive than before to arguments coming from the Cheneyite faction, and Fish, persuasively, points to this as a major reason why:

Bush’s policies came to seem less obviously reprehensible as the Obama administration drifted into embracing watered-down versions of many of them. Guantanamo hasn’t been closed. No Child Left Behind is being revised and perhaps improved, but not repealed. The banks are still engaging in their bad practices. Partisanship is worse than ever. Obama seems about to back away from the decision to try 9/11 defendants in civilian courts, a prospect that led the ACLU to run an ad in Sunday’s Times with the subheading “Change or more of the same?” Above that question is a series of photographs that shows Obama morphing into guess who -- yes, that’s right, George W. Bush. 

I wish everyone would read that first, bolded sentence every day.  This is a point I've been trying to make in different ways for many months.  It is obviously impossible to maintain that the Terrorism and other national security policies of George Bush and Dick Cheney were radical, heinous, evil and wrong if the successor administration -- one from "the other party," filled with people who spent years vehemently condemning those policies -- end up adopting most of those same policies and the core approach itself.  Inevitably, that behavior will come to be seen as vindication (now that Obama is in office, he sees those policies are necessary), and worse, converts what had been viewed as extremist, highly controversial right-wing policies into unchallenged bipartisan consensus.  

It's only natural that many people in the country say to themselves:  how bad could George Bush and Dick Cheney really have been in these areas if their core policies are being adopted by Obama?  Apparently, there must not be anything wrong with indefinite detention, military commissions, renditions, state secrets, etc. because Obama has embraced them as well.  And once those conclusions are fostered, it's hardly a surprise that Bush officials such as Dick Cheney will once again be listened to as a credible authority on such matters; if he, after all, had the basic approach right, why deviate from it at all?

Independently, and even more important, think about how rhetorically difficult it is for the Obama administration to defend civilian trials when they themselves are subjecting scores of detainees (in fact, most) to military commissions or indefinite detention.  It's a completely confused, unprincipled, self-negating approach that can only produce muddled, unprincipled and therefore weak defenses.  Nobody in the administration can possibly argue (as Democrats used to vocally argue) that military commissions, indefinite detention and denial of civilian trials are un-American and counter-productive, because the Democratic administration is now doing exactly that.  So if you can't argue that, how can you possibly defend civilian trials, or rebut the GOP claim that accused Terrorists should be placed before military commissions or indefinitely detained?  You can't -- you have no argument -- and that's why Obama is losing this debate.

There's a difference -- a fundamental one -- between (a) being pragmatic in trying to implement one's principles and (b) having no principles at all and and glorifying that unanchored emptiness as "pragmatism."  Once you enter the realm of (b), you are not only guilty of having no principles (a sin in its own right), but you're incapable of finding a way to effectively justify what you're doing, because you have no coherent principles to which you can credibly appeal.   In virtually every realm (health care, financial reform, national security), and especially in Terrorism/civil liberties, that has been the great political failure of the Obama administration. 

* * * * *

I spoke at NYU School of Law last week, and in the various questions that were asked, these are the issues that were raised repeatedly.  I'll post a couple of the relevant excerpts in just a few minutes.

 

UPDATE:  Here are several 3-5 minute excepts from the NYU Law School event I did last week, moderated by NYU Law Professor Stephen Holmes, that are relevant to this discussion:

On principles v. pragmatism:

 

On civilian v. military tribunals and the "Soft on Terror" attack:

 

On the prospects of winning these debates:

This was a really great event -- virtually all smart and probing questions -- and so I'll try to post the rest of the excerpts elsewhere a bit later today.

 

UPDATE II:  All of the video clips from the NYU event are now posted, here.

On combating propaganda:

 

On progressive activism under Obama:

 

Vindicating principles in a two-party system:

 

Obama's awareness of his political problems:

 

Does the rule of law matter?

 

 

On principles v. pragmatism :

 

On civilian v. military tribunals and the "Soft on Terror" attack:

 

On the prospects of winning political debates:

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing Congress this basic information. . . . Some defenders say al-Qaeda lawyers are simply following a great American tradition, in which everyone gets a lawyer and their day in court. Not so, says Andy McCarthy . . . . The habeas lawyers were not doing their constitutional duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants. They were using the federal courts as a tool to undermine our military's ability to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield in a time of war.

So any lawyer who represents accused Terrorists and argues that the Government is violating constitutional limitations in its Terrorism policies is -- all together now -- an "al Qaeda lawyer" (even if those detainees were innocent, as most were).  Worse, these "al Qaeda lawyers" -- which includes large numbers of long-time members of the U.S. military -- are "undermining our military's" efforts to keep us safe.  That sounds like treason to me.  It's great to see the leading newspaper in the nation's capital serving as the primary amplifying force for this McCarthyite smear campaign.  Does it get any more reckless and repugnant -- or primitive and stunted --  than that?  Does The Post have any standards at all?

The answer to that last question is a resounding "yes"; Thiessen is promoting their standards.  That's exactly why Fred Hiatt hired him and Bill Kristol (and why they fired their one vocal opponent of torture and other Bush crimes, Dan Froomkin) -- because they knew exactly this would happen and wanted it to happen.  It makes it very hard to do anything but cheer when one reads things like this about the Post.   Personally, I would never root for a newspaper to go out of business, but The Washington Post does far, far more harm than good, and it does that deliberately. 

* * * * *

Note, too, how Thiessen cites Andy McCarthy as his "expert" justifying this smear campaign and only identifies him as "Andy McCarthy, the former assistant U.S. attorney who put Omar Abdel Rahman, the 'blind sheik,' behind bars" -- as though McCarthy is just some random expert Thiessen found to quote.   He doesn't bother to disclose that McCarthy is the one who originated the very smear campaign that he's being cited to defend, nor that McCarthy is Thiessen's colleague at National Review.  Anyone reading Thiessen's column would be misled into believing that McCarthy is just some objective legal expert who is defending a McCarthyite attack that he has nothing to do with.  So in addition to disseminating a repellent smear campaign, Thiessen's Post column also violates the most basic journalistic disclosure requirements.  

Congratulations, Fred Hiatt:  every time people are certain you can't possibly bring the Post any lower, you manage to prove them wrong.