Was what our government did right or wrong?
This is the public debate we are not having in the United States today. Not in the media. Not in Congress to any significant extent by either party. Certainly not by the Bush administration. And often, not even in the blogosphere, on the right or on the left.
We may frame our arguments with the language of moral outrage, with righteous demands for justice or fairness. We may imagine that moral themes form the central basis for the causes we espouse, and for the policies we promote, but all too often we elide the moral dimension which underlies the central issues of our times. The public debates over the occupation of Iraq, the potential war with Iran; Katrina, the health care crisis, economic inequality, immigration, and even global warming all too often fail to grapple with the moral issues which lie at their core.
And it is precisely this failure to confront the moral dimension inherent in our politics which has contributed to the current polarization in our country, and to Bush’s ability to accomplish much of his political agenda, despite the disastrous consequences they have had for our country.
(cont.)
What the Hell am I Talking About?
I’ll be honest. This is a difficult topic for me to write about, and write about well. I daresay it is a difficult subject for anyone. The issue of what is moral, and conversely what is immoral is often easy to explicate in the abstract, at the level of intellectual discourse among philosophers and theologians. But in the real world of dirt and grime, random violence and death, hatred and envy, greed and lust and ambition, amidst all the multiplicity of human emotions and motivations, what constitutes the correct moral response to any given situation often eludes even the best of us.
That is because all too often we conceive of moral issues in a vacuum, failing to consider the societal forces and psychological influences which color our perception of events. Delving deeply into the morality of any human action or event is difficult because most of us have been conditioned from birth to look at moral issues as either black or white, wrong or right.
Think of much of what passes for “morality” or “morals” in America. On the right, an obsession with sexual behavior (bad before marriage and only good afterwards), personal liberty in some cases (e.g., ownership of property, free speech, wealth accumulation), and moral condemnation of, and restrictions upon other forms of liberty (e.g., the use of contraception, abortion, political protest) On the left, often an equally dogmatic approach which seeks to enlarge some individual freedoms and limit others, often in direct opposition to what conservatives promote.
Certainly there are elements of collective agreement. Murder, violence, theft, deceit — these are absolute wrongs that we all agree upon, as do most societies and religious traditions. But regarding behaviors that are less well defined as good or bad, Americans are as likely as not to disagree. Remember, we were the country that nearly tore itself apart over the issue of slavery, and the country that countenanced “separate but equal” as not only legal, but also an acceptable moral standpoint.
Our concept of morality as Americans is framed by cultural conflicts and the varying value we place upon individual rights versus community welfare, freedom versus equality. We may think that our particular version of morality, and the moral choices each of us make on a daily basis, come from eternal and absolute precepts, when, in actuality they are profoundly influenced by our culture, our environment, our personal life experience and also the form and extent of any religious teaching to which we may have been exposed in childhood or thereafter.
To use an analogy, when thinking of what is moral, it is as if we try to fit a three dimensional world into a flat two dimensional space. However, like the Mercator map distorts the true shape of the globe which is our planet Earth, when we attempt to make morality nothing more than an on-off, up or down, yes or no binary process, we invariably fail to perceive correctly the true nature of the moral choices with which we are faced, and, more importantly, the nature of the moral choices which have been made by those whom we see as adversaries, or even enemies.
9/11 Changed Everything (and Nothing)
Americans, as a rule are an ahistorical people. Most of us view our history in the context of myth and legend, to the extent that we are even aware of much of it. In school we are taught America’s past as a series of bullet points in a power point presentation: The Revolution; The Civil War; Manifest destiny; and westward expansion; WWI; The Great Depression; WWII; The Atomic Bomb; The Cold War; The Civil Rights Movement; The 60’s, Vietnam; Nixon and Watergate; Reagan and the Defeat of Communism; the roaring dot.com 90’s; and now Bush and the War on Terror.
The details needed to fill in the gaps of our collective ignorance are generally the purview of academic elites or those with a penchant for the self study of our nation’s history, and even then, bias and personal belief can color what gets emphasized and what gets ignored. And of course, our collective knowledge of other peoples and their historical narratives is even shallower.
Overlaying all is our collective worship at the altar of American exceptionalism. That is, the belief that America has been ordained in some fashion to remake the world in our own image, one where democracy, individual liberty and free markets bring joy and happiness to the masses of people who had the misfortune of not being born in the US of A. A belief that puts blinders upon even otherwise intelligent individuals, causing them to assume that the “American dream” not only is the only one worth having, but that countless people the world over are just as enamored with that dream, and with our culture, as we are.
The doctrine (or mass delusion if you will) of American exceptionalism has always been with us, and has never completely vanished, even in times of great strife and social unrest. It was tarnished a bit after Vietnam and the Watergate affair, and there is no doubt it was seriously threatened during the Great Depression. But each time it appears to have fallen out of favor, it reappears in a revised and often stronger form.
Think back to America’s space program in response to the Soviet Union’s sputnik satellite. We ended up putting a man on the moon, an accomplishment which was seen at the time as sheer, unadulterated American technological and ideological superiority. Or what about the Peace Corps begun by President Kennedy, or LBG’s vision of a “Great Society” and his administration’s “War on Poverty?” These programs were just as much an example of a belief in the special destiny of America, and the special nature of the American people, as were Reagan’s conservative programs of increased military spending and corporate welfare in the 80’s.
Indeed, the entire neoconservative movement is premised upon the idea of American exceptionalism, culturally, politically and militarily. One can argue it is the strongest version of it since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. And it arose, not as a result of the 9/11 attacks, but years before, in the decade of the 90’s when we were told that history had ended and liberal democracy had won the ideological wars forevermore.
What 9/11 changed was the opportunity for neoconservatives to put the plans for an American Empire base upon military intervention and “democracy promotion” in the Middle East into action. By the grace of five justices of the Supreme Court, and the willingness of an ill-informed President with a Messianic complex to turn US foreign policy over to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the neoconservatives were well placed to take advantage of 9/11 to advance their agenda. The Doctrine of Manifest Destiny had returned in all its triumphalist glory.
What happened next was the collective failure of our political and media elites address that agenda, not in a pragmatic or political context, but within a moral framework. A mistake which they are still making 5 years later.
Two Case Studies: Iraq and Katrina
The twin disasters of Iraq and Katrina are instructive, despite their many inherent differences, because both highlight the inability of our political elites to consistently address and explain the immorality of the Bush administration’s actions. To an even greater extent, both of these signature “catastrophic successes” by the Bush administration also demonstrate that most of the mainstream media’s is incapable of covering these “stories” as deliberate moral failures on the part of our President and his advisers.
Iraq. In the run-up to the Iraq war, during the Fall and winter of 2002-03, very few voices were heard on television or in the press regarding the morality of President Bush’s plan to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. The debate focused instead on the danger Iraq posed, and/or its involvement in the 9/11 plot.
Fear was the principle byword used by the Bush administration to sell the war: fear of Iraqi sponsored terrorist attacks, and the fear of “weapons of mass destruction” (those “smoking gun” mushroom clouds) which could be used against us at any time unless we acted immediately to destroy Saddam’s regime. Indeed, Bush and Cheney had to be dragged kicking and screaming into seeking UN resolutions by Tony Blair and Colin Powell (their qualms, by the way, were not moral ones, but were based on legal concerns about unilateral US and UK military action without the legitimacy that the UN Security Council resolutions authorizing force could provide).
Revenge was the other theme the Bush administration adroitly advanced to justify a war. Not that the terms vengeance or revenge were ever explicitly employed. The Bush spinners were to coy and cunning for that. But their continual statements that Iraq sponsored terrorists, sheltered Al Qaeda members and may have met with Al Qaeda operatives all implied that Saddam Hussein had a hand, directly or indirectly, in the 3000 lives that were lost on September 11, 2001. Words like “justice” and “righteousness” were used to tie the proposed Iraq invasion to the greater “War on Terror” which President Bush announced in his now infamous “Axis of Evil” Sate of the Union speech on January 29, 2002.
The people who consistently employed moral arguments against the administration’s Iraq war plans were anti-war activists. However, spokespersons for the antiwar movement, like Janeane Garafolo, Susan Sarandon and Nelson Mandela, were effectively marginalized as fringe extremists and Bush haters. The only program on television which invited anti-war activists to debate war proponents, The Phil Donahue Show on MsNBC was canceled, not because of poor ratings, but precisely because of its perceived anti-war bias. No one else in the mainstream media made much of an effort to question the coming war on moral grounds. Indeed, most of them, especially the cable news pundits were out and out cheerleaders for the war, whether on the conservative Fox News channel, or on the supposedly more “liberal” CNN and MsNBC. Questioning the war as morally wrong was seen as unpatriotic and potentially injurious to the “bottom line” (i.e., profitability) of the media conglomerates which produced and broadcast these news programs.
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, with few exceptions, were no more courageous than their media counterparts. Those few who did speak out against the war often did so on the grounds that not enough troops were being allocated, or that UN resolutions did not authorize unilateral military action, or that Iraq would detract from the military’s efforts in Afghanistan to find and eliminate the remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership who had escaped earlier attempts at capture and were now reorganizing and re-arming in havens in located somewhere in Northwestern Pakistan. Almost alone among members of the Senate was Robert Byrd, who’s impassioned, if ultimately futile, speech against waging an illegal and immoral a preventive war against Iraq fell on deaf ears and was not prominently covered by any of the TV networks, broadcast or cable. That an octogenarian, who had once been a member of the Klu Klux Klan in his youth, became the primary voice of opposition in the Senate to Bush’s war based on moral grounds was the ultimate irony.
Even now, four years later, moral arguments against American troops waging war in Iraq are rarely advanced in public debates regarding Bush’s policies. Indeed, oddly enough, it has been the right which has raised moral claims to defend the continuing occupation of Iraq; namely, that eliminating the regime of Saddam Hussein was a “right act” (as the ancient Stoics might have said), regardless of the consequences of that policy to our troops or to the many killed and wounded Iraqis.
That this argument is based upon the an American conservative moral framework, which makes individual liberty the highest good, is left unstated. Liberty, democracy and freedom are seen as values which override the great loss of innocent Iraqi lives, the wholesale destruction of private property, the lack of security and the elimination of necessary infrastructure (utilities, hospitals, schools, etc.). The fact that this so-called freedom has been imposed upon the Iraqi people by foreigners, that the democratic government we helped create has been unable to govern, and that a murderous civil war among the various ethnic, tribal and sectarian groups in Iraq has broken out, is glossed over or swept surreptitiously under the rug by those who claim that the war was justified because liberating Iraq was a moral good.
This is not to say that no one on the left raises moral arguments against the war, but that those who do are still dismissed as (1) part of a fringe movement outside of the mainstream of American public opinion on the war (Howard Dean, Sean Penn, Air America Radio, etc.), (2) narcissistic attention seekers (Jesse Jackson and Cindy Sheehan), (3) Democratic politicians hoping to curry favor with the far left (Russ Feingold and Dennis Kucinich) or (4) political opportunists (Barack Obama, Tom Vilsack). More often dissatisfaction with the war is permitted to be expressed only in terms of the vast corporate corruption and waste of federal funds, the casualties being suffered by our troops, the incompetence of the administration, or simply the failure to achieve victory (Keith Olbermann being the principle exception which proves the rule).
It is as if our political leaders and Beltway media pundits are still afraid of raising the charge of immorality against President Bush and his war of choice, afraid of being labeled defeatists or America haters or traitors despite the overwhelming public opposition to Bush’s policies. Or maybe they simply lack the ability to view the war outside the narrow lens of political self-interest and/or US national security interests. That the American people might be open to arguments regarding the morality of what we are doing in Iraq (death, destruction, torture, fostering ethnic cleansing, ad nauseam) seems to have escaped them for whatever reason.
Katrina. Katrina is, in many ways, an even more fascinating case study in the ways in which our political discourse has abandoned moral claims as a basis for criticizing Government policies (or at least the policies of Republican administrations).
The initial media coverage, as many of you may remember, was highly critical of state and local officials, and even the victims of the flooding in New Orleans themselves (in one instance leading to a notable exchange on Fox News between Shepard Smith and Sean Hannity when Hannity questioned whether hurricane victims in New Orleans were really suffering that all that badly). Indeed, it was several days before the media coverage focused on the lack of the federal government’s response, and even then the emphasis was on the incompetence of the FEMA bureaucracy, not on any failure by President Bush to focus his attention on the ongoing tragedy which unfolded right before a national television audience day after day).
The first instance of moral outrage expressed on national television was, ironically, the unscripted and spontaneous statements by rapper Kanye West in his appearance on “a Concert for Hurricane Relief” broadcast on NBC September 2, 2005:
I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food. You see a black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I’ve tried to turn away from the teacher-the TV because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I’m calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help — with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way — and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us! […]
George Bush doesn’t care about black people.
Needless to say, West’s statements alleging racism as a basis for the federal government’s failure to respond quickly and effectively to the situation in New Orleans created a media firestorm, most of which was highly critical of his remarks, but which forced the national media to address the issue of the Federal government’s failure from a moral standpoint. For a few short weeks the media focused on the racism charge sparked by West’s remarks, but as government relief finally began to arrive, and Bush made a number of highly publicized visits to the region, criticism of the president’s handling of the crisis was muted, and eventually faded away.
Yet, the worst aspects of President Bush’s response to the disaster in New Orleans was yet to come. Massive, corrupt no bid contracts were given to companies like Halliburton, contracts which overcharged the government for services either poorly or never provided. The continued desolation of predominantly African American communities. The retention of poor, black New Orleans refugees in what could reasonably be termed concentration camps. The utter failure of many reconstruction efforts and rebuilding projects 17 months after the initial disaster occurred.
Yet, New Orleans, and the federal government’s response to the disaster there, is a story that has dropped off the media’s radar. President Bush did not even mention the ongoing problems in New Orleans in his latest State of the Union address. Only a few national columnists, such as Bob Herbert of the NY Times, even seem to be paying attention to the fact that New Orleans is intentionally being refashioned as a whiter city, one in which former African American residents are not welcome to return:
During the immediate post-Katrina period, there were essentially two visions of a resurgent New Orleans. One, widely decried as racist, saw the new, improved New Orleans as smaller, whiter and more prosperous.
This was openly advocated. Just a few days after the storm, a wealthy member of the city’s power elite, James Reiss, told The Wall Street Journal: “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically.”
Mr. Reiss, who is white and served in Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s administration as chairman of the Regional Transit Authority (he has since left the government), said that he and many of his colleagues would leave town if New Orleans did not become a city with better services and fewer poor people.
New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina is a perfect example of what happens when moral considerations left out of the debate over what we as a nation need to do needs to be done to revive a once great American city and the rescue the lives of its poorest citizens from ruination and despair. Many of our political leaders and the mainstream media have seemingly conspired to deny any discussion of the moral dimension to the Bush administration’s failed response to this ongoing crisis. For a brief time the horror of New Orleans’ devastation flashed across our television screens and our national media attempted, however inadequately, to force us to consider the human suffering which we witnessed, in living color, as imposing a moral obligation owed by our nation, by our government, and by our highest elected officials. A moral obligation that the Bush administration has seen fit to ignore.
Now? The story of New Orleans and Katrina is an afterthought, at best.
