Bob Woodward appeared on 60 Minutes last night to pimp his new book, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008. Woodward explained the president’s lack of understanding about what he unleashed on Iraqi society.
WOODWARD: He has a meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts and he just said, ‘I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them,’ namely liberating them.
PELLEY: But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and through the occupation. He didn’t understand why they might be a little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?
WOODWARD: His beacon is liberation. He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.
An order of magnitude more than ‘tens of thousands’ of innocent Iraqis have lost their lives in Iraq and several million have become refugees.
Ironically, it was Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) who had a ready explanation for why the Iraqis are less than impressed with their liberation.
Sen. Pat Roberts on Thursday opened up confirmation hearings for CIA director nominee Gen. Michael Hayden, and, in doing so, made remarks that immediately raced through the blogosphere.
The Gulf Times reports: “Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, gave a strong defence of the administration’s programme to eavesdrop on international telephone calls of suspected terrorists without court approval. He said this and other programmes needed to remain secret to be effective.
“’I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead,’ Roberts said.”
At the time, Sen. Roberts’ comment was compared unfavorably with Benjamin Franklin’s quip, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” And, in this comparison, Ben Franklin is still the man with more wisdom, courage, and patriotism. But it’s astonishing that the Republicans could turn out such a talking point in favor of unconstitutional violations of our liberty at the same time that they are confounded by the same logic in Iraq.
It’s the very fact that the people will support the curtailment of their rights during a time of crisis that made it necessary to enshrine certain of those rights as inviolate in the Constitution. Think about it. The Ninth Amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” We created the Bill of Rights to address just those sort of rights most likely to be legislated out of existence in a time of national crisis. The Ninth Amendment was necessary to prevent people from arguing that any rights that did not fall into that special category were nonetheless still rights retained by the people.
It’s almost a cliche to say that you can bring liberty to people at the point of a rifle. The phrase is overused and made to do more work than it can handle. Some people have been liberated at the point of a rifle. But you must bring security and the rule of law. You have no civil liberties if you have no functioning court system and you can’t leave your house without fear of being murdered because of your ethnic background or religious beliefs.