Perhaps we need a psychologist to take a look at Rep. Peter King’s reaction to President Obama’s counterterrorism speech. Rep. King says he was offended by the tone of the speech and that the president should stop moralizing and “apologizing for America.” The president defended our counterterrorism policies as legal and effective, but he went on to say, “To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance.”
“Es impossible,” responds Rep. King, “America can do no wrong.”
KING: “Listen, every soldier, every cop who is faced with a decision to make, life or death, does the best he or she can and I think our country has done more than any country in the history of the world to limit civilian casualties so that just offended me, that whole tone of it. […]
As far as the policy …. I think this policy basically has worked … and perhaps we can fine tune it, we can put more emphasis on clandestine activity of actually gathering intelligence rather than relying so much on drones but for me i don’t think the president really addressed that in the speech. I think he was coming at it from a more from this moral tone which I just think was misplaced. I don’t think it’s called for.[…]”
In fact, [King] said “we should be proud” of U.S. counterterror policy and “defend what we’re doing and stop apologizing for America.”
If the president apologized, it was with considerable nuance.
“Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars. For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives. To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places –like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold. Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes.”
This is consciousness of guilt. It’s self-awareness. It’s a healthy attitude. The president publicly wrestled, and thereby invited us all to wrestle, with the trade-offs in war.
“Indeed, our efforts must also be measured against the history of putting American troops in distant lands among hostile populations. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of civilians died in a war where the boundaries of battle were blurred. In Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the courage and discipline of our troops, thousands of civilians have been killed. So neither conventional military action, nor waiting for attacks to occur, offers moral safe-harbor. Neither does a sole reliance on law enforcement in territories that have no functioning police or security services – and indeed, have no functioning law.
This is not to say that the risks are not real. Any U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies, and impacts public opinion overseas. Our laws constrain the power of the President, even during wartime, and I have taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. The very precision of drones strikes, and the necessary secrecy involved in such actions can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites. It can also lead a President and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.”
The impossibility of finding a perfectly moral counterterrorism policy must be considered along with the impossibility of having no counterterrorism policy at all. This leads many to call for a retreat from foreign entanglements, but that is a process with its own complications, and one that must be managed carefully.
The why of terrorism is a question that must be asked. For people like Pete King, it’s precisely the question that must never be asked. We can never have the tiniest culpability for anything, lest these terrorist attacks against us be (at least partially) justified. There can never be any moral ambiguity about anything.
Why is it so hard to acknowledge that, while there is a significant moral difference between deliberately killing innocent civilians and inadvertently or unavoidably killing them, it is wrong to kill innocent civilians? Why can’t we show remorse or regret or take any responsibility for the senseless tragedies we create?
It’s precisely our self-awareness of the wrongs that we commit that gives us the moral compass we need to navigate forward, always hoping that we can lessen the need for conflict and reduce the number of hard moral choices that we need to make.
Otherwise, we just feed into a self-perpetuating loop where they kill those who should not be killed, and we kill those who should not be killed, and they respond in kind. There’s nothing moral about that. It’s endless war. We can’t have that.
Here, the president explains:
“The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”
We must “discipline our thinking” or we will never end this perpetual war. For me, this is the most important insight offered by a sitting president since Eisenhower said, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Eisenhower didn’t say that the military-industrial complex should be dismantled. In fact, he had just explained why it had become necessary and how it was protecting us. But what was good and necessary wasn’t unambiguously good. It was also dangerous. Likewise, the moral ambiguities involved in our counterterrorism policies call out for a way out and a way forward. Our policy could never be for an endless Cold War, and the danger was the the institutions and programs we built to fight the Cold War would resist dismantling when the time came to end the war. The same is true for counterterrorism. Obama knows that the aim must be to end this war. That is why he wants to repeal and amend the authority he was granted to wage it. It’s why he wants to refocus our efforts on ending it.
Rep. Pete King is a blind man, consumed with fear, and unable to see the plank in his own eye.
