Jeff Goldstein Nails It
Dave Price
Kos:
Saddam tortured, we torture. Saddam used WP chemical weapons against insurgents and civilians, we use WP chemical weapons against insurgents and civilians.Jeff:
In Kos’s world, there is no difference between US military and the regime of Saddam Hussein—between humiliation and rape rooms ; between the sanctioned use of WP against entrenched terrorists and the use of nerve agents and WP on Kurdish civilians; between fighting to free a people and fighting to keep them subjugated.Have we forgotten what Saddam's reign was like? Is the difference between him and us really that hard to distinguish?
The kind of equivalence argument Kos is making should truly disturb people, because it not only trivializes real torture and real war crimes, but more insidiously also degrades and despoils the very process of debate that is the lifeblood of free democracy by blurring the definitions of the concepts the debate is built on. What is torture? What are chemical weapons? Why, they’re whatever we say they are, and we’ll say whatever benefits us politically. In some sense, this is what Orwell was trying to warn us against: the death of objective truth, and the terrible consequences that follow.
It wasn’t always like this: Thomas Dewey declined to make the intelligence failure that led to the Pearl Harbor attack a campaign issue, saying he’d rather lose the election and win the war than the reverse. Wouldn’t it be nice if Democrats would stand up and say that about George Bush and Iraq, rather than trying desperately to pin some kind of failure or perfidy (real or imagined) on the Commander-in-Chief even while our troops are fighting? In some ways, we are surely lesser men than our fathers and grandfathers, who fought fascism at terrible cost mostly for the benefit of others, and never thought to score cheap political points by asking whether FDR was really any different than Hitler.
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I have always despised the moral equivalency arguments of the Left (as well as those of Holocaust deniers and World War II "revisionists" who equate Dresden with Auschwitz). There is not and has never been any moral equivalence whatsoever between America and her totalitarian enemies.
"Americans are criminals for using germ warfare in Korea!", bellowed Nikita Krushchev, and the Communists spread that lie far and wide. No doubt, the crowd at Kos believe that one, too. I'm very glad I never waste my time in sewers like Kos.
Thomas E. Dewey showed himself to be a true American when he said that he would rather lose the election and win the War than win the election and lose the War. That is exactly where I stand. Winning the War is the first priority. All else depends on it.
A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman thinks of the next generation.
We will always have the true nutbars -such as fake moon landing, or "Bush lied" hoaxers- amongst us.
Of course Kos likens the two. He's never lived under one of them.
And this sort of thing, IMO, is why the "language oriented" fields seem to attract lots of people who trap themselves in this sort of thinking.
Foobarista: I don't think it's a matter of language, it's more a cognitive thing having to do with categories. I.e.
1. We classify things into categories, in the simplest case binary categories - it's A or it's B.
2. We make value judgements based on the categories. A is bad, B is good.
For sure hot-button words will trigger categories, and from there the value judgements follow, but I think it runs deeper. For example, we discover that some food is dangerous - so we avoid it altogether, as opposed to avoiding until it's marginal risk equalizes with other things we do.
Moreover, however it is we do moral calculus, versus risk/return, the two don't coexist easily. If we find out a doctor has saved hundreds of lives, but secretly molested one or two children, essentially no one thinks it's acceptable to trade one off against the other.
Having said that, I've heard research by ethics professors in Business Schools about the Enron debacle. Apparently, one of the factors underlying these ethical lapses is that the culprits tend to move from small problems (she calls them false "grey areas") to larger ones. So as an empirical matter, one has to be very careful about crossing boundaries.
Under that calculus, there is a big difference between someone who does *no* torture versus someone who does *some*, a central banker who will *not* print money to help out a government, and one who will sometimes, etc.
What seems to me to be very important is what sort of conclusions and actions you derive from statements like those of Kos, not that the statements by themselves are bad.
I'm reading the Honor Harrington series right now.
I see such amazing parallels. Weber is a fantastic writer.
"SMA: I don't think you can attribute this line of thought to the left - "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to predate by a little."
He also said: "Go and sin no more."
Anyway....!
The Left is constantly taking certain words of Jesus completely out of their theological and apocalyptic context and twisting them in order to advance their One-World political agenda. I'm against that.
Now if Kerry talked like that, I'd worry.
Well, I was comparing Dewey to today's opposition Dem leaders there, not to Kos, in making a more general statement about the state of political discourse.
You stopped short of what I thought was Jeff's best paragraph:
Heh.
“Toxic chemicals and their precursors, except where intended for purposes not prohibited under this Convention, as long as the types and quantities are consistent with such purposes” etc.,
and a toxic chemical as,
“Any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals. This includes all such chemicals, regardless of their origin or of their method of production.”
So, how does white phosphorus fit with this definition? Well, upon contact with skin, it reacts chemically by burning at 5000 degrees and continues reacting until it burns through to the bone. I’m no chemical weapons expert or chemist, so I could be wrong, but it seems fairly clear that this amounts to death or permanent harm through “chemical action on life processes.”
In any case, international law and what is or is not technically a war crime notwithstanding, which is a more horrible death – death by exposure to nerve agents, or watching one’s body melt away? Let’s not split hairs. Are moral arguments of any value to us, or just what we can get away with legally?
If Kos was arguing that we’re exactly the same as or no better than Saddam - which I'm not sure they were - that’s of course patently absurd, but it’s also beside the point. As Americans we should hold ourselves to a much higher standard than simply not being as bad as Saddam. And what exactly is torture? It seems the Bush Administration has gone to great pains to define torture according to what is convenient for its own ends. Orwell certainly was “trying to warn us of the death of objective truth, and the terrible consequences that follow.” Terrible consequences indeed. Dave’s invocation of Orwell while using the exact arguments that contradict his own, apparently innocent of any awareness of the fact, is truly breathtaking. Maybe two and two do equal five; it seems to be getting harder to tell.