As I can’t currently comment on the site during the day, I struck up a conversation/debate with Mike at the Big Stick via email about my Dubai assassination post. Mark eventually got in on the act and we thought that the back and forth was good enough to post here for your review.

Scott: I can’t respond to your comments on the site because I no longer have access to the League from work. But if it would be of interest to you, I’d be happy to have a bit of an email exchange to explore things further. I’ve got some work to which I need to attend this morning, but I’d be happy to fire back an initial response to you comment a little later. Let me know if that is of interest.

Mike: Sure Scott – fire away.

Scott: This is less in depth than I had hoped for, but the long and the short of my post can be summed up as follows:

• I’m not condemning Israel, I identified that I was not prepared to forgo the conclusion that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh deserved to die and that the Mossad were the right folks to do it,
• I worry that using tactics like assassination leave us feeling less morally culpable,
• I feel like we ought to be wracked with every bit as much doubt, uncertainty, and moral consternation over the decision to assassinate someone as we are when deciding whether or not to engage in conventional warfare, granted over different dynamics,
• And that a belief that it does as a tactic does leave us less morally culpable in terms of state sanctioned violence can and in this case seems to have lead to an attitude that is counter-rpoductive to actually ending the conflict in question.

In terms of your Hitler example, believing that Hitler should have been assassinated does not absolve us from a critical analysis of the use of assassination as an acceptable tactic in all future instances, which is, really, all I’m calling for.

Mike: I’m more inclined to say that it makes us more morally culpable. When we’re talking about general war quite often the higher-ups are insulated from the decision making. How often does the President or the Sec. of Defense get a call asking permission to fire a rocket at a Taliban position or lob a grenade into a cave where bad guys are hiding? On the flip side, when you arrange for an assassination somebody pretty high up the food chain has to say, “Yes, I want you to kill this man”. To me that’s what makes it real for them.

I also think, as many commenters pointed out, that assassination is actually better because there’s no collateral damage. One target, one dead. If you’re going to wage war, they should all be fought that way.

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I’d like to believe that Jack Hunter is right, but the more I think about it the more I think that the conservative base in this country, barring some cataclysmic event, will never be anti-war in any meaningful sense.  The sort of limited government and distrust of power advocated by folks over at The American Conservative like Daniel Larison will never appeal to the red-meat, America-first crowd unless it’s framed as opposition to the liberal agenda.  So when you have people like Rep. Jason Chaffetz calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan or claiming the mantle of the anti-war right, it’s really little more than an opportunistic gambit.  It can work because the strategy of opposition can work quite easily in this political climate.  It’s the same tactic neoconservatives use to get the base fired up in the first place.

The thing that I find so depressing is that the actual stance of the right toward interventionist war won’t change at all.  While Chaffetz and those sharing his political views may have some luck in the future convincing the American right that it is opposed to Obama’s wars, once conservatives are back in power and faced with their own foreign entanglements, the right will have forgotten entirely any opposition it once held toward interventionism.  Such opposition is grounded entirely in political maneuvering rather than any moral or philosophical framework.

In fact, I’ve argued myself away from my Glenn Beck piece almost completely at this point.  Not only is Beck the ultimate opportunist, the people he may convince of American empire or the danger of American foreign policy would be convinced as easily the next day of the need for more American power and further interventions once it is their own team were making the case. There is no philosophical bond between the current conservative base and the concept of limited government in foreign affairs. Limited government extends only to domestic issues, while the security state can grow unabated.

At best the new anti-war right will be something of a paradox, and doomed to expire.  I think Jack is engaged mainly in wishful thinking here, another problem currently afflicting many on the right.

To steal from and reformat Katrina vanden Heuvel on November 20’s On Point Week in the News segment: if there were as much passionate and vehement debate within mainstream political discourse on decisions to go to war as there has been on health care reform, something would have gone terribly right with our politics and the world would be a very different place. Discuss…

1 a: the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body b: a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings c: an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction

~the definition of Life, from the Merriam Webster dictionary (online).

I cannot reconcile myself with the four pillars of the “culture of death.”   Each pillar finds its support at times by various proponents at many points across the political spectrum, making the discussion of life vs death very difficult to pin down politically.  To me, abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia and war are all acts which end the life of a person (or persons) – either a very young person (or fetus), a very bad (or perhaps tragically innocent) person, an enemy, or a person who is either very old or in a great deal of emotional or physical pain.  They are all living beings in possession of a soul, however damnably bad or temporarily interred to the womb that soul may be.  Soul aside, if you happen to not believe in it, they are still human beings possessed of a potentiality that death will snuff out entirely.

A fetus possesses the potentiality of full personhood.  Indeed, there is little else a fetus could become save a baby.  The point at which life begins, scientifically speaking, is the moment of conception.  Philosophically, of course, life is easily redefined.  The debate over abortion often falls on this point.  Ironically, outside of the abortion debate few arguments exist about say the beginning of life for a plant (germination) on either side of the political spectrum.

A criminal condemned to death possess the potentiality to change, to find remorse, salvation etc.  They are also, as I mentioned above, quite possibly innocent.  Beyond this, I oppose the death penalty because it oversteps the reasonable bounds of the state – and in a democracy in particular makes citizens complicit in the extinguishing of human life, whether or not they wish to be.

War, is of course, a difficult concept to grapple with because it is not (always) the decision of a powerful entity to take the life of a non-powerful entity (think: mother and fetus; state and condemned; etc.).  It takes two to tango, as the saying goes.  However preemptive, expansionary, or aggressive wars can rightly be called unjust.  They take the potentiality of peace away from another party – the invaded state or tribe or region.

Assisted suicide generally involves the will of an individual over themselves.  I can envision a state of affairs in which euthanasia becomes the accepted function of the state over people deemed incapable of choosing for themselves (as a matter of efficiency, perhaps), which is not a totally unreasonable fear.  (Read Lois Lowry’s The Giver)  Even without such insidious action by the state, is it possible that the act of assisting someone to end their life robs them of their potential future?  A future which could include breakthroughs in medical science to remove their pain, cure their disease, etc. or a future which might bring some unexpected happiness to assuage their depression?  Or for those simply too old to want to go on living, perhaps a natural death on their own without the need of an assistant to act as usher?

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I was watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with my wife this weekend (it always takes us two to three nights to watch a movie, sometimes longer) and I was struck by the celebration toward the beginning of the film.  The streets were filled with happy citizens celebrating the end of World War I.  All I could think was – “Back when wars ended.” – which is a terrifying thought.  Does anyone think we will see a similar day, a day when we can say “The war is over!” and go out into the streets to celebrate?  [Read more →]

I was cold turkey on blogging all weekend for a much needed respite from the internet, and some good quality time with my family – we tried to light a fire when we went day camping yesterday, but it was raining and everything was wet, and the plume of smoke I conjured was not enough to warm us – so I wasn’t able to say anything yesterday in memory of our fallen soldiers.

Memorial Day is one of the more obviously looked over holidays.  Christmas, of course, has become Presents Day, and Easter has become Chocolate Bunny Day, but the 4th of July and Thanksgiving are still fairly well celebrated as they were intended.  And Easter and Christmas have priests and pastors to remind us of their significance, even if schools have seen the usurpation of Christ’s birth and death by that odd couple Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  Secularists and Evangelists now clash over what was once just a Christmas pageant.  The irony of secularization is the reactionary religiosity that rises in its wake.

But I digress.  The point is that a holiday with as ambiguous a name as “Memorial Day” has no Church service to remind us of its purpose, no alternative title (think Independence Day) to remind us of its meaning, and comes just when the weather is getting nice, and people are eager to shuffle off winter’s coils and grill up some red meat.  And so it has become the three day weekend of basketball and barbecues – both fine things in their own right, of course, but not really the sort of things which call to mind the sacrifices of our military men and women.  Hordes of Phoenicians flood my own stomping grounds, filling up the more obvious camping spots, turning the town into a traffic jam, jam-packing the restaurants.  Lots of people go see movies. The air is filled with the sounds of merry-making and the scent of cooked meat.

None of which is wrong in the least, but it is also not really the atmosphere one associates with a memorial of our fallen heroes.  How such a celebration might look is beyond me.  I suppose in heathen times it was likely a big fire, lots of mead, and a human sacrifice or two.  Throughout history and across the world, fallen warriors have always been celebrated with a mixture of revelry and mourning, that strange dynamic necessary to at once admit of a tragedy – War – and also to gild over that tragedy, to glamorize it to some degree, because war is necessary and will always be with us, and if that is the case then so too are soldiers, and even more so the death of soldiers.  We cannot mourn those deaths the same as we mourn the deaths of others, because they are martyrs to Mars, and their deaths are used as much to inspire new recruits as to provide cautionary tales.  This is the way it has always been.

And so our veterans and those who never came back are given pretty speeches at baseball games, moments of silence, and the hickory smoke of barbecue fires.  This is the way it was meant to be.  There is nothing wrong with it.  But it does make you wonder if somehow there is too much mead and not enough human sacrifice going into this last holiday of the Spring.  Perhaps we have placed too much emphasis on the act of holiday itself rather than on the timbers which went into its construction.  Once upon a time holidays were both days of revelry and days of remembrance. The one without the other seems bacchanalian and hollow.  Forgetting our history, or ignoring it, is not a tribute to those who fought and died for us.

Then again, at least we are not obligated to buy each other presents.