It’s clear to me that Conor and to a lesser extent Rod don’t understand what Jamelle, Freddie, E.D., and myself have been driving at in our various critiques of reform-minded conservatism.  Conor’s misunderstanding is made apparent in this statement from his interview with Scott:

Perhaps we’re getting at what puzzles and galls me so much about recent posts at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about how dissident conservative writers ought to conduct themselves. The notion is that these writers should assess an ideological subset of the American public, discern their sensibilities, and craft all subsequent writing so as not to offend them. What a fool’s errand. There are times when people react badly to hearing the truth plainly stated. It is a journalist’s job to tell them that truth anyway, as forthrightly and accurately as one can put it.

Although I don’t wish to speak for Freddie, Jamelle, or E.D., this seems to miss the point of our critiques entirely.

Our point has nothing to do with insisting that Conor or anyone else soft-pedal their critiques of Limbaugh, et al, although those attacks may well have the effect of making matters worse.  It certainly does not suggest that reform-minded conservatives should refrain from objecting to torture or the conduct of the War on Terror or civil liberties violations by the Bush Administration – quite the contrary, Ron Paul’s growing influence on conservatism shows that it is possible to passionately dissent without forfeiting the ability to move conservatism in your direction.  Nor do I think we are suggesting that Conor or any other specific reform-minded conservative is to blame for the current state of the Republican Party.

No, the point is that reform conservatives need to recognize that there is an ideological problem with conservatism as currently constituted as an amalgam of libertarianism, hawkishness, and religious fundamentalism that leaves modern conservatism incapable of governing well or ethically.  It is all well and good to criticize the Bush Administration or to take issue with talk radio, but until reform conservatives recognize what caused the Bush Administration’s faults and the hyper-vitriol of talk radio, they will be unable to do anything about it.

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In his response to Freddie, Conor writes:

This is sloppy reasoning. It treats conservatism as though it is indistinguishable from the Republican Party and the Bush Administration — as though a political philosophy and an American political coalition are the same things — and it proceeds to make a rather stunning implicit assertion: that if one objects that conservatism isn’t responsible for some ill, one must necessarily believe that no one is responsible for it.

I am broadly sympathetic to this type of argument, but I’ve come to realize that it largely misses Freddie’s point, which I take to be a criticism not of any specific strain of conservatism but rather of the notion that modern movement conservatism is a salvageable governing philosophy.  In other words, as I wrote this morning:

Individually, each of the various forms of conservatism can present a viable philosophy of governance such that no individual strain of conservatism can bear the brunt of the blame for conservatism’s failings.  Collectively, however, the need to keep each strain within the tent leaves conservatism as a movement incapable of governing well on the national level based on the issues this country faces at this moment.

Regardless, Conor’s point above fails for a more basic reason insofar as it is specifically an attempt to defend Douthat against Freddie’s criticism: Douthat himself does not distinguish between the conservative movement and the GOP.  Indeed, in his remarks at Princeton University yesterday, he spent several minutes explaining why he views the conservative movement and the GOP as “interchangeable” terms. 

Again, it may be that no individual strain of conservatism can be viewed as consistent with the activities of the Bush Administration.  But collectively, the amalgamation of all those strains of conservatism into one master ideology is what not only enabled those activities, it perhaps made them inevitable.  For that, those interested in the notion of a conservative “movement” need to be prepared to accept responsibility if conservatism is to emerge from the wilderness as not merely an electable movement, but also a competent and coherent one capable of governing.

Generally, I’m loath to give the Bush administration credit for much of anything, but if there is one thing they got right, it’s in their approach to passing legislation.  President Bush and his advisers realized, correctly, that the partisan make-up of any given vote matters far less than what Beltway insiders normally think.  It doesn’t particularly matter if X piece of legislation has bipartisan support so much as it matters that X piece of legislation is popular.  The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson seems to get this, and makes a strong case for passing partisan legislation:

The rule among politicians in Washington used to be that when the provincials become restless, as they are now, the safest thing to do is run to the center. But as this sour and unsettled summer ends, the political center looks like the white line running down the middle of a busy street — a foolish place to stand and an excellent place to get run over. [...]

It is a core belief of Washington’s political culture that policymaking by compromise — “meeting in the middle” — is the way to gain and keep the support of the vast, moderate, essentially reasonable group of voters who constitute a coherent political center. My problem with this analysis is that so many of the big decisions that have to be made are binary: yes or no. The terrain in the middle consists only of “maybe” or “kind of,” and I see no evidence that the country is in a “maybe” or “kind of” mood.

Of course, the obvious response is that Bush’s method of passing legislation resulted in Republicans losing both houses of Congress and the presidency.  But I’m not sure if that’s actually the case; Republican losses last year and in 2006 had far more to do with the party’s failed policies and its obstinate refusal to change course on Iraq than it did with institutional minutiae and partisan composition of floor votes.  One could easily imagine a scenario in which various pieces of conservative legislation were wildly successful, and voters rewarded the Republicans with continued control of Congress, even if that legislation was completely partisan.

Plainly put, the “center” does not lead the political conversation, the “poles” do.  It’s simply a fact that during the past twenty-plus years of conservative dominance, the “center” reflected the strength of the conservative movement.  Accordingly, if Democrats want to gain and keep the support “of the vast, moderate, essentially reasonable group of voters who constitute a coherent political center,” the answer isn’t to propose mealy-mouthed “centrist” policies and hope that voters understand the underlying differences between that and a more liberal proposal, instead, it’s to move full-on with the most effective legislation possible, which in health care at least, happens to be the most liberal form of the legislation.  After all, Democrats won’t be punished for partisanship, they’ll be punished for failure.

I had fully intended to take a lengthy hiatus from torture-blogging, but this story just magnifies why I’ve become so frustrated over claims that the program authorized by the Bybee memo is clearly not “torture” within the meaning of the law. 

Andy McCarthy in a telephone conference today:

“As far as mental suffering is concerned that involves the creation on the part of the person the tactic is used on of a fear of imminent death,” said McCarthy. “The few people that waterboarding was actually used on were actually told that they were not going to be killed by the tactic.”

“Even if they didn’t tell you they weren’t going to kill you, after the first or second time you sort of get the point that there is not imminent death to be feared,” he said. “There’s not a prosecutable case.”

This statement was in reference to the fact that the relevant US criminal torture statute requires that an act be specifically intended to inflict “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” 

Not surprisingly, I have a lot of problems with McCarthy’s statements.  But the biggest problem is that he totally misses the point of the very memos he purports to defend.

First and foremost, even if the only relevant standard for an infliction of “severe mental pain or suffering” is the creation of a “fear of imminent death” – even though the statute sets forth three other grounds for finding “severe mental pain or suffering - the Bybee memo explicitly states that “we find that the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death.”  (Bybee memo, page 15).   

Furthermore, the Bybee memo, which again McCarthy is trying to defend as providing the legal justification for the use of waterboarding and the entire interrogation “program,” explicitly states that “Zubaydah has come to expect that no physical harm will be done to him.  By using these techniques in increasing intensity and in rapid succession, the goal would be to dislodge this expectation.”  (Bybee Memo, page 15). 

So, contra McCarthy, the repeated use of waterboarding does not result in a diminished ”fear of imminent death” – the entire justification for repeatedly using it (and other methods) was to increase Zubaydah’s fears of imminent death.  On the other hand, if McCarthy is correct that repeated use of waterboarding would remove the “fear of imminent death,” then that would mean that the CIA’s entire justification for its effectiveness was wrong, since that justification was explicitly that repeatedly using the tactic created an ever-increasing fear of physical harm.

Indeed, the Bybee memo explicitly concedes that waterboarding “constitutes a threat of imminent death and fulfills the predicate act requirement [for a finding of torture] under the statute.”  (Bybee Memo, page 15).  It further acknowledges that ”we are uncertain whether the course of conduct [proposed by the CIA] would constitute a predicate act” for a finding of torture. 

The sole reason given in the Bybee memorandum for why waterboarding and the entire course of conduct proposed by the CIA would not be “torture” under the meaning of the law was that the interrogator would lack the specific intent to cause “prolonged” mental harm as required under the statute.  Bybee reaches this conclusion entirely on the basis of the fact that SERE training does not result in prolonged mental harm to those who undertake it.  There are obvious flaws in this analogy, which defenders of the program almost always fail to consider – ie, that SERE is a voluntary program, and that the program proposed by the CIA was likely to be far more intense than SERE training since the CIA’s stated goal was to gradually wear down the detainee’s “expect[ation] that no physical harm will be done to him.” 

But the bottom line here is that I continue to be frustrated by the manner in which Bush Administration defender have far more certainty that the CIA’s program was “not torture” than the very memo upon which they purport to rely and seek to defend.

(Updates below and continuing as more reactions come in…)

You can read the memos here.  Sullivan has some initial thoughts up here:

I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross’ debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect.

Michael Scherer:

The legal memorandum for the CIA, prepared by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, reviewed 10 enhanced techniques for interrogating Zubaydah, and determined that none of them constituted torture under U.S. criminal law. The techniques were: attention grasp, walling (hitting a detainee against a flexible wall), facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and waterboarding.

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So given that Iraq had largely peaceful provincial elections this past weekend, in which voter turn out was much higher than in 2005, where a certain proportion of the seats up for grabs were allocated to women who ran in the election, and where no one seems to be disputing the results, let me propose a highly contingent hypothetical.

If this is a trend that continues and increasingly results in a lowering of violence that both adds to the stability of Iraq and enables American troops to come sooner rather than later, and if the democratic process in Iraq presents the conditions under which a greater degree of civil society is able to take greater hold better integrating Iraq into the global economy and thereby raising the general quality of life for Iraqis and imporiving the degree of stability in the region, would we not count that as a positive development for Iraq and the world generally?

Now, let me say that in posing that question I’m not intending to be an apologist for the Bush administration and its decision to invade Iraq. It remains clear that the decision was based on the manipulation of information and the public, that it was accompanied by significant infringements of civil liberties, that it has contributed to dire economic consequences, and that the most heinous interrogation techniques and treatment of enemy combatants have been utilized in the overall “war on terror”. There is much that has been wound up in the invasion of Iraq and the corresponding war on terror that is despicable and to be condemned.

However, some time ago I made an argument for a sort of developmentally based interventionism wherein said intervention should only seek to remove undue barriers to the development of nations,

To my mind, the key in formulating an acceptable approach to interventionism is to decouple notions of modernization and evolution from ideas of westernization. It seems relatively evident to me that cultures and nations do in fact go through a process of evolution: these entities are dynamic and change over time. I would also be willing to suggest that the deeper structures of that evolution are the same across cultures and nations – which is to say that cultural and national evolution is, in fact, a teleological affair: it has a directionality. But I’m also inclined to suggest that each unique instance of culture and nation will instantiate that evolution in different surface structures. The evolution of China will not look the same as the evolution of America, or India, for that matter–though the direction of their evolution will roughly approximate one another. It is in regard to these surface structures that I think we need to pay the most attention when talking about intervention.

The break from neoconservative interventionism, then, is a move away from remaking nations in one’s own image. Rather, responsible interventionism is action directed at removing unwarranted impediments to the deeper forces of evolution. I say unwarranted because, of course, there are challenges that any culture or nation will face in manifesting its own evolution. But it is also the case that there are often brutal and corrupt forces that stand in the way of such a natural evolution, often against the will and desires of peoples within those cultures and nations. Such impediments seem to stand out in terms of their overt use of force and suffering to impede an evolution against which they stand to lose power and influence.

While it is true that the Bush administration’s  foray into Iraq is perhaps a text book case of how not to do this, I have to wonder if the potential evolution of Iraq demonstrates that, even accidentally, such interventionism can achieve its end goal.