This article generated an interesting discusson when I posted it a week ago. It identifies a common -- and to my mind highly objectionable -- strain in the policies of the Bush Adminstiration both in foreign policy and in domestic politics.
For those of you interested in the topic, I've taken up the same theme, the inseparability of basic princples of democratic governance both at home and abroad -- in a new post at Liberals Against Terrorism. It's a response to David Adesnik of OxBlog regarding the promotion of Elliott Abrams to a deputy National Security Adviser position on the National Security Council, with the government's portfolio for democracy promotion and Middle East policy, including Iran.
originally posted Jan 27 2005 by nadezhda
I had not expected to be writing anything lengthy tonight, but praktike has produced two excellent pieces at LaT (No on Gonzales and Clarification) that I view as being part of a single piece, and I felt compelled to spell out how I see them fitting together.
Praktike makes the case that the Democrats in the Senate should unite to vote against Gonzales, and I wholeheartedly endorse his position. I should make clear, however, that my view all along is that the Democrats should not mount a filibuster. And I find it difficult to imagine they will scrape together a sufficient number of moderate (or morally repulsed) Republican senators to make a difference when it comes to a vote. But my view as well has been that this nomination presents an opportunity for the Democrats even though they won't muster the votes to defeat the nomination.
The Democrats as a group, not just individual Senators, should be on the record -- loudly and clearly -- that what Mr Gonzales' performance as White House counsel represents is neither what they nor their party represents. That the positions he has taken and the actions he has facilitated, if not engaged in directly, do violence to basic principles of constitutional government.
Oddly enough, for all the moral repugnance of torture and abuse, the question of torture is not the real issue. Rather, it is that the basic philosophical underpinnings of those who claim to act with moral clarity on our behalf are in fact radically at odds with America's rule of law. That the manner in which the torture issue was handled illustrates either a profound failure to understand those philosophical principles or a willful and radical jettisoning of those principles for ends that only they have the power to define.
The obfuscation, prevarication, manipulation of information, failure to respond to legitimate queries of the Senate -- this is a long-standing pattern that is consistent with their attitudes toward their responsibilities and the philosophy that governs their behavior across both domestic and foreign policy arenas. The various stratagems of Capitol Hill, with documents and interrogatories and disclosure, seem trivial by comparison but should be put in a broader context. The gamesplaying is not a matter of getting lost in the trees. It's the only way for the Bush Administration to be put on notice that someone is going to be openly watching them closely, and they've already demonstrated they're not to be trusted. Unfortunately in our info-tainment world, the theatrical paper-shuffling is the necessary means by which the opponents' voices can be heard. Who would otherwise pay attention when the outcome is preordained?
For an Administration that talks values and moral clarity, things are getting murkier and murkier. Shining spotlights on their behavior so the true lack of moral character is clear for all to see -- that is the only way to deal with a group whose shared basic instincts are to hide everything. Those instincts are so ingrained that, ironically it sometimes works to detriment, when something would withstand scrutiny and benefit from more open discussion (e.g. some of the decisions about the DoD/CIA operations that got everyone in a swivet this weekend and would have passed muster if handled differently).
The Democrats can win something from each one of these confirmation episodes -- and from every time the Administration tries to stonewall Congressional oversight or claim state secrets to stymie judicial review -- if they turn each event into a basic civics lessons about unrestrained power. Power unchecked by Congressional oversight, power unchecked by the judiciary, power unchecked by principles that are the very cornerstones of our rule of law such as habeas corpus, power unchecked by international agreement or the comity required for a functioning global political system -- unchecked by anything other than what they think is "right."
The Bush Administration's pattern of behavior is all the more dangerous because it is pursuit of power without principle, with no measuring stick for what's "right"
except today's expedience. There is no moral clarity against which their actions can be measured.
The Gonzales nomination presents a major problem because of the lack of a moral standard they can afford to enunciate. They have engaged in behavior that would violate any principles Gonzales might acceptably articulate in response to the Senators' inquiries. A less diplomatic way to put it -- he can't agree today to an enunciation of principles that would mean that what they did before (and are probably still doing) might make a number of officials of the US gov't potential war criminals. Awkward, eh? But Gonzales is going to stay on message and toe the party line -- unlike perhaps another nominee would if pressured by the Senate -- because he's a central part of the group whose fingerprints are all over those actions. The slippery slope gets steeper and slippier the further down you go.
For the Democrats, on the other hand, the Gonzales nomination is also an opportunity for a lesson in "international" civics. This goes directly to praktike's marvelous "clarification" post -- which might better be titled credo -- on the direction the US should be heading in foreign policy and why the BushDoctrine2 enunciates principles that should be forcefully rejected.
Robert Keohane and Anne Marie Slaughter had a superb essay last June in the IHT, "Bush's Mistaken View of US Democracy" -- linked via the blog Delivering Hope. For those like myself who may have missed it when the essay was first published, it merits a close reading. It explains how the two civics lessons -- national and international -- are in fact part of a larger lesson.
The essay also underlines why traditional conservatives, such as Roger Kimball and even Peggy Noonan, are in some ways as horrified by the enunciation of the BushDoctrine2 as any traditional liberal, as I discussed last weekend at LaT. Their essay is a tightly written one, and so the passages quoted are extensive.
President George W. Bush's efforts to build democracy in Iraq are underpinned by a misguided view of America's own democracy. He believes that American democracy works because Americans are innately good people, believing in values of tolerance and respect for others and guided by religious faith.
In his view, Americans don't need checks and balances so much as reminders of basic American values and America's overriding moral mission to bring freedom to the world. Similarly, abuses of power, as at Abu Ghraib prison and beyond, do not represent the failure of the system, but rather the deviant behavior of a few bad people.
[...]
The founding fathers of the United States assumed that unrestrained power is dangerous. It not only enables bad people to commit abuses; it tends to corrupt ordinary, generally decent people. As James Madison said in the Federalist Papers: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary ... A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions." [i.e. our system of checks and balances]
[...]
These are not simply theoretical differences about the core of American democracy. They have profound implications for how we think about and control the role of the United States in the world.
If, in the president's view, the goodness of Americans and the nobility of our mission are self-evident, then the failure of peoples around the world to see the struggle in Iraq the same way we do means that they are "enemies of freedom." Fighters opposing American power, even if they are residents of occupied countries, do not merit the protections of international law. Institutional restraints on the exercise of power by Americans in detention centers and prisons can, in this view, safely be relaxed. Moreover, constitutional protections can be denied even to American citizens, arrested in the United States, when they are suspected of being "enemy combatants."
From James Madison's point of view, on the other hand, the abuses of Abu Ghraib would have been entirely explicable. The founding fathers, and great American leaders ever since, understood that without institutional restraints, voluntarily followed and supported by the top leadership, such abuses are virtually inevitable. This doesn't mean that Americans are "bad" people, just that they are human - like Iraqis, Afghans, Germans, Japanese, and every other nationality and race.
If the struggle against terrorism were to be carried out consistently with the institutional theory embedded in the U.S. Constitution, America's leaders would be well aware of the potential for abuse - even by decent patriots. They would have ensured not only that the Constitution was upheld at home, but that the more limited protections embodied in international law would have been conscientiously applied to people living under American occupation, or otherwise within U.S. control.
Behind the debate about the conduct of the war in Iraq, and the occupation, is a larger divide - between those Americans who believe that their unique virtues should permit them to act above the law, and those who believe that people in authority, necessarily imperfect, must be constrained by institutions and by law. Those who understand and believe in the theory of the American Constitution should reject the Bush administration's political theory of personal good and evil. We must continue to insist that the United States is a "government of laws and not of men."
A phrase from a Stephen M Levine who blogs at The Old Town Chronicles, in a post immediately after the inaugural, has stuck in my head. What the President announced was a global Monroe Doctrine that is "fundamentally illiberal," because it presumes a global system of men not of order, which is at is base -- for all its talk of freeing humanity from what chains us -- an unnecessarily Hobbesian vision.
This may be at the heart of why praktike rejected the President's words the moment they were uttered. Levine argues:
There have been two predominant responses to Bush’s inaugural speech by the ‘responsible left’. The first points out correctly that Bush’s rhetoric does not match his record. The second agrees with this, but adds that although this is the case, it is better for Bush to be making such speeches in favor of freedom and liberty than not. After all, now Bush can be held to his words. After some consideration I find this latter response to miss the mark. It misses the mark because it does not directly take on the way in which Bush’s vision is deeply illiberal. I think the best way to characterize Bush’s position is by saying that it is a global Monroe Doctrine. The United States reserves the right to perform any geopolitical action that in its view advances ‘freedom’. And since Bush explicitly said (reading chronicles it seems) that the interests of the United States and liberty itself are one, whatever we find to be in our interest is by definition the advancement of freedom. With this we arrive directly at Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty: the sovereign is he who decides the state of the exception. What large swaths of the intelligencia have forgotten is that Liberal democratic civilization is one that hollows out the place of the sovereignty, showing it to be an empty place-holder. What takes its place is a space of contestation, of negotiation of interests in which the essential pluralism of the political can come to the fore.
Does this imply that only an elaborate system of world government can meet the objectives of a liberal world order. Hardly. There are a great many existing formal and informal institutional checks and balances at many levels -- needing constant readjustment in a rapidly changing world, for sure -- that would satisfy the main principles of liberalism on the world stage without a stultifying or dangerous sacrifice of sovereignty. As I frequently note -- it isn't a choice between multilateralism and unilateralism. The globalized world in which we live is already thoroughly multilateral -- but that globallized world will be seriously threatened when the reality of multialteralism is rejected by the most powerful nation on earth. on the basis of some supposed superiority of moral judgment.
If we return to the parallels In the Gonzales case, the leaders of the Administration deemed the "moral clarity" of a small group of men superior to the constraints of a quaint set of rules. So they changed the rules, interpreted and applied the new rules, and refused to let anybody review what they were doing.
That is not to suggest that the spaghetti mess of international and domestic rules that together form a system of detention and adjudication doesn't need refining and adjustment. We are faced with the dreadful dilemma of how to deal with people who are likely to view themselves at war with the US if they are released after apprehension -- who are likely to remain committed, not simply to overthrowing our system, but to inflicting massive damage on our country, its citizens and hundreds of millions of members of societies who are our long-time friends.
But the path the leaders of the Bush Administration chose instead is simply not acceptable and should be labeled as such. There was certainly a period early on during which there was understandable confusion about what to do in a new and rapidly evolving situation in which, in many ways, we were flying blind. Rather than facing up to the problem, however, and devising arrangements that would meet the basic standards of our overall system of governance, they continue to insist on their right to abrogate unto themselves unchecked power of rulemaker and rule enforcer, judge and executioner rolled into one.
The result is that the Gonzales nomination is another performance of kabuki theater, where certain rituals and scripts will be played out. But the Democrats should make sure that the historical record shows that in the midst of this sorry performance there was indeed a position of moral clarity: an insistence on a rule of law, which the Bush Administration has failed to acknowledge.
{UPDATE 1-27-05 10:30PM EST} by nadezhda
For those readers whose appetite has been whetted for more discussion the role of "freedom" and "democracy" in the BushDoctrine2 -- as well as the various possible responses of the reasonable left -- talk continues at The Old Town Review Chronicles, home of Stephen M Levine, whose "global Monroe Doctrine" notion I cited in the main body of this post. Levine continues his discussion with his co-bloggers -- the most recent Levine entry re: On Freedom and Tyranny is especially recommended.
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