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There has been no shortage of writing about the video that Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe group produced that criticizes Department of Justice lawyers for representing the “Al Qaeda 7″. I’m not convinced that I’m qualified to offer anything more of value on the specifics that have come out surrounding the not subtle charges of impropriety, failure of loyalty towards country in time of war, all the way to jihadist sympathies, so I won’t be trying. But the whole affair speaks to some of the deeper concerns with which I’ve been wrestling of late.

Not surprisingly, everyone’s favourite NRO zealot Andy McCarthy has added his two cents to the discussion, which has kicked up a brand new cloud of dust into which various parties have charged, blades drawn,

Here is the legal profession’s message for the American people: “We’re just more important than you are.” Members of any other profession or institution would be indicted for coming to the enemy’s aid during wartime. Lawyers not only demand immunity from the ordinary duties of citizenship, but they insist that you admire them, or, at the very least, regard them as above criticism for volunteering their services to those trying to kill Americans.

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy seems to have penned the gold standard in response to McCarthy noting,

Finally, McCarthy strangely overlooks the basic fact that much of the litigation for the Guantanamo detainees concerns whether they are in fact the enemy. McCarthy presupposes that we all know that all the folks at Gitmo are terrorists, and the only issue is whether we feel like helping them knowing that it hurts America. But like the soldiers at the Boston Massacre, and like other criminal defendants, the Guantanamo detainees are “the accused.”

At True/Slant, Conor Friedersdorf dug out the real life case that makes Kerr’s final point,

Thus Mr. al-Rabiah. It isn’t just that he was an innocent man thrown into Gitmo, or that he was held even after a CIA analyst concluded that he was innocent, or that National Security Council Staffers were aware of his innocence and actively trying to bring about a review of his detention — Mr. al-Rabiah’s case is apt because after the CIA’s 2002 determination of his innocence, he spent another seven years wrongly imprisoned, regaining his freedom and seeing his children only after retaining the help of American attorneys.

Finally, Kevin Drum notes both Kerr and Friedersdorf’s objections to the Cheney/McCarthy line of reasoning and adds,

The Andy McCarthys of the world endlessly lecture us about how this war is different because it’s fought on one side by non-uniformed terrorists. And there’s some truth to that. It is different. But one of the ways it’s different is that it’s not always simple to know who’s a real enemy combatant and who’s not. And if that decision is left entirely up to the executive branch, you’re practically begging for the same kinds of abuses that you get if you let the executive branch operate without oversight in any other area. Thus, lawyers and judges have a role to play. They aren’t aiding the enemy during wartime, they’re trying to figure out who the enemy really is. Even Andy McCarthy ought to be interested in that.

I agree that Kerr’s point about utilizing the judiciary system to determine who, precisely, constitutes an enemy combatant and who does not is a vital point. But an equally vital point, at least to my mind, is summed by another portion of Kerr’s retaliation wherein he revisits the John Adams analogy that has been floating about (emphasis mine),

When Adams agreed to represent the English soldiers, he was not fulfilling some sort of obligation: No one had to represent the Englishmen. Adams acted — and was criticized then, but celebrated now, for it — because he agreed to represent the soldiers out of a personal conviction that no person should face a trial without counsel.

This is, I think, a point that hasn’t gotten enough attention and strikes, at least by my lights, to the much more central core of what is so disturbing about McCarthy and Cheney’s line of thought.

Drum is right to agree with McCarthy et al that there is something different about this “war”. There is, indeed, a fundamental difference between the participating parties. And it is more than just a matter of being uniformed or non-uniformed.

Even placing aside the ability to determine who really is an enemy combatant and who is not, once we’ve made that determination there continues to be a difference. That remaining difference is, or at least should be, the willingness displayed by each side to comport itself in a particular fashion.

What ought ultimately to bring American and allied forces down on the side of the angles is their willingness to treat the enemy with a modicum of fairness not necessarily reciprocated. Being prepared to offer the enemy legal counsel in a court of law to determine what they’ve done and how they ought to be dealt with as a result is something about which Americans ought to be proud. It speaks to, in some regard, the very foundation of the country. That people from Liz Cheney to Andy McCarthy, Bill Kristol to Mark Theissen, Dick Cheney to George W. Bush have spent the past eight plus years pointing out that the enemy isn’t willing to offer Americans such luxuries and so neither can Americans afford to be soft in this regard doesn’t actually offer the exoneration they all seek.

It is, rather, the crucial point. It is the essential difference between American forces and Al Qaeda. It is the difference in cloth between a person like the President of the United States of America and someone like Osama Bin Laden.

More than two-hundred years ago, the country’s founding fathers threw off the mantle of oppression via the divinely inspired rule by monarchs and ushered in an unprecedented system of equality and opportunity with the timeless words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Engraved on the United States Supreme Court building is the logical conclusion of such a profound realization, “Equal justice under the law”.

No nation in which all men were created equal could stand to labour under the biased dictates of despotic kings. Rather, a commitment to the generation and rule of laws that would be equally applicable in a universal fashion became the benchmark. To quote Adams once again, the goal was, “a government of laws, and not of men.” The application of such a vision was, needless to say, riddled with shortcomings, but the struggle to achieve a more perfect union continues apace and to this day.

But the seeds were there and the most powerful element of their germination was not just the prosperity they have visited upon their birthright, but the astounding fact that they offer a blueprint for other fledgling nations. It is the inherent portability of the American dream that has made the US the truly indispensable nation. As geo-political and military strategist Thomas PM Barnett has said, “America is modern globalization’s source-code“.

Perhaps no one is more aware of this than Osama Bin Laden. The portability, the flexibility, and the promise of America’s dream of equality and opportunity are precisely what catalyzed his unspeakable attack that, as so many have suggested, changed everything. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers and badly damaged the Pentagon, but the buildings themselves were not ultimately their target.

It was the dream, the spirit and concept of America, the system of laws that enable a way of life that stands antithetically to a his stagnant worldview that Bin Laden sought to destroy. And Bin Laden said as much himself more than a year later in his now infamous, Letter to the American People,

It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:

You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?

I find it difficult to imagine that Osama Bin Laden has ever been stupid enough to believe that his war against the West is truly military in nature. The violence inflicted is a means to an end. Rather than running the fool’s errand of trying to destroy America the edifice, Bin Laden seeks and has always sought to destroy the ideas and values of America.

In their zeal to beat Bin Laden and their belief that this is a different war that requires different tactics and a different kind of determination and focus, Andy McCarthy, Liz Cheney, and their ilk have, in fact, played directly into Bin Laden’s hands. As Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote in April 2006, “Yes, September 11 changed everything, and it’s time to start talking about whether the changes are helping us, or them.”

The more I watch the post-9/11 America, the more I am drawn inexorably towards the conclusion, “them”.

Whether I am considering the recklessness of America’s foray into Iraq — an action that some consider itself to be illegal and that has drastically impacted the country’s standing in the world — or the warrantless wiretapping initiated by executive order and carried out by the NSA. Whether I am weighing the infringement of civil liberties enabled via the Patriot Act or potential rendition and mistreatment of US citizens like Amir Meshal. Whether I am cringing at the horrifying treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib — treatment whose roots, it would appear, went far deeper than the ill-begotten ideas of a few bad apples — or shuddering at the decision to use torture in lawless places like Guantanamo Bay as a means of intelligence gathering — a decision that former Vice President Dick Cheney defends on Sunday talk shows to this day. And now, as I watch Liz Cheney and Andy McCarthy attack lawyers who believe, as Adams once did, that no matter their status as potential enemy, “no person should face a trial without counsel”, I can’t but conclude that America has been pummeled relentlessly, year after year with a comprehensive and insidious attack on the very notion of lawfulness binding America’s actions to a modicum of decency and civility and a respect for liberty and autonomy.

More than just in a single and exceptional instance or two, McCarthy and Cheney, among others, have systematically and in some cases aggressively waged a campaign of dismissiveness to outright animosity against those values and that spirit which have historically made America a beacon of light and of freedom. It is also a campaign ultimately to undermine those very values and the system of laws that causes Osama Bin Laden to describe America as, “worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind”. Given these words from the enemy, shouldn’t these be the very laws, they very values that defenders of America work diligently to protect and reinforce. According to Cheney and McCarthy, apparently not.

Ironically, those who have mounted a defense against and dared to utter objection to McCarthy and Cheney’s degradation have been labeled, as this handful of DoJ lawyers, terrorist sympathizers and, themselves, enemies of the state. Kerr may be right that these lawyers and those others who have objected to the subjection of American values to crude and ugly fear mongering ought not to be considered heroes. But their respective calls to action are, in their very essence and historical context, a defense of that which is timelessly American.

No major military attacks waged by Bin Laden have successfully occurred on American soil since September 11, 2001. But, in some senses, none have needed to be successfully waged. The attacks have continued from within and without Bin Laden having to lift so much as a finger.

Liz Cheney, Andy McCarthy, and their fellow travelers believe that some Americans are rightly accused of aiding and abetting the enemy in time of war and I believe they are correct. They need only look in the mirror to confront the conscience of the guilty parties.

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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.

Scott: The collateral damage argument is probably the strongest in this case, certainly. That’s why I acknowledged it vis-a-vis Sullivan’s comments.

That being said, choosing to assassinate someone as opposed to engaging in conventional warfare with a group someones doesn’t leave me with nothing in the pit of my stomach, just a different something and, in many regards, of equal weight. But let’s not walk around acting as if there is nothing in the pits of our stomachs because, this time, we chose to assassinate someone.

It is still a decision that we should be torn up about and the likelihood that any conflict in the foreseeable future will shift to solely assassinations of strictly military targets as opposed to general warfare seems pretty dim to me.

Mike: Of course it is a dim possibility but we can dream.

As for ill-feelings caused by assassinations, I actually have little or no problem with them. Hamas does very bad things. They target civilians. I’m glad to see this leader removed from the planet. On the other hand, a Hamas militant who is shot while throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers…that saddens me because often those are just young kids caught up in a bigger thing than themselves.

This may again go back to American sympathies being greatly different than Canadian ones. You will recall that you received some pretty stern feeback from both conservatives and liberals on your post awhile back that theorized bringing a gun to a rally was a sign of our violent American culture (I’m over-simplifying your position here – but you get my point). Americans in general are pretty okay with assassinations of shady individuals. Those kinds of actions are what sells movie tickets and Vince Flynn novels and keeps 24 on the air.

Scott: Could be.

But if your end point is to boil all of this down some kind of cultural relativism, then it seems like something of a waste and really just bailing on a difficult conversation.

I’m not suggesting you need to feel bad for the Hamas official who was assassinated as a person. I don’t have all of the information on him, but odds are he was a deplorable human being. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t recognize that the decision to assassinate someone ought not to cause fairly serious consternation as a matter of principle.

The practicalities of the situation are going to win out for most folks (less collateral, bad man), but the principles of the situation (enabling a powerful entity like the state free reign on killing human beings without the check of public due process), I think, ought to at least weight heavily on us as well.

Mike: I think you tend to over-complicate things Scott. In my experience, quite often cultural relativism trumps most other human impulses. It’s certainly the building block of Israeli foreign policy after experiencing the Holocaust.

Now if you’re worried about how much thought takes place prior to these decisions – i’m sure there is plenty. But it is much more of the logistical variety (“Do I bring the 9mm too or just the .22″) than the moral uncertainty kind. Simply, if you declare a group or certain actors to be your enemy that should be the hard part, the moment of moral decision making. Prosecuting a war against said enemy is just follow-through.

Scott: When it comes to giving an entity like a state the power to take another human life, I tend to think there is no such thing as “over-complicated”. And to suggest as such strikes me as a stunning cop out.

That you suggest that the majority of thought over whether to assassinate someone is logistical is precisely the problem to which I am pointing and the attitude you have displayed tells me, I guess, that we at very different ends of the spectrum. People become enemies all the time, but utilizing critical analysis about what then one ought to do simply does not, at least in my mind, end there. I have a hard time seeing suggesting that once you declare someone your “enemy” most-to-all moral calculus as essentially over as much other than willful blindness.

In short, I am inclined to suggest that you are over-simplifying the issue to suit your pre-determined perspective on it. That this seems to be a common enough exercise strikes me as one of the glaring problems with most foreign policy formulations.

Mike: It’s over-complicated in the sense that you keep hammering this point that there should be a great deliberation that accompanies the decision to assassinate and each time that decision is made it should be an agonizing moral dilemma for the parties involved. I’m simply stating that the decision to go to war with the enemy should be the moment of moral hand-wringing. Look at the Powell Doctrine for example.

It states:

A list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States:

1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?

Answering all of those questions is when the morals should be involved (especially #1, #4, #6 and #7). But once we can say yes to all of those questions we go on to the corollary to the Powell Doctrine which states that, “…when a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing US casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate.” Wouldn’t you agree that assassinations of key opposition leaders qualifies as ‘decisive force’?

What it appears you are looking for Scott is some sign that every time Mossad kills someone the people of Israel will all feel a deep emotional response. You are ignoring the reality that they made their moral decision a long time ago and maybe, just maybe they are at peace with that decision now. Sure, I’m willing to concede that someone at Mossad HQ might have asked for forgiveness from God for ordering a man’s death, just like President Obama may pray for forgiveness every night for commanding a military that kills men and often civilians by accident.

If your worry is over the glibness that t-shirts like the one you showed demonstrate..that’s war. There will always be people who are happy to see their enemies killed and even take joy in it. This is as old as human history. Part of it is also about desensitization, a phenomenon that has also existed for a very long time. It’s how people get through wars. Wanting to inject emotion, apathy and moral uncertainty into every death may be an admirable goal on some level, but it doesn’t help the people involved do the hard work of fighting a war.

Scott: You’re confusing emotion with morality. I have already clearly stated that I’m not suggesting an emotional response is necessary, just a recognition of the morality at play in ordering an assassination, which might be decisive but is not necessarily morally acceptable in all cases.

Mark, I’m curious to get your take on this.

Mark: It’s pugilism – you’re both landing blows, but no cheap shots, although I think you’re talking past each other a bit.

If you’re asking where I come down on the issue, that’s where I wound up running into a dilemma in my response. I’m quite torn on it. On the one hand, I think you’re right to decry the celebration over this coming from some circles.

On the other hand, I have a hard time seeing how this celebration is a new development – I view it as functionally equivalent to the way in which crack warriors – samurai, ninja, knights, etc. – have been celebrated as virtuous over time, just in the age of the T-shirt. Assassinations are also not only surgical, but personal in a way that drone strikes and laser-guided bombs are not. As such, they arguably make us care more about war – this particular assassination of one Indisputably Bad Dude seems to have drummed up far more outcry than the average accidental bombing of an Afghan wedding in addition to drumming up the type of celebration that concerns you.

I think that personal element – despite the surgical nature of assassination – on some level actually does force us to confront what War really is in a way that impersonal attacks do not. The trouble is that when actually faced with what War really is, humans seem to wind up having no problem with it. The near-deification of the assassins coming from some circles is in some sense just a way of expressing that yes, this war is worth fighting. The hue and cry coming from other circles though is likewise just a way of expressing that no, this war is not worth fighting.

When war is fought impersonally, not only do people care less, but those who do are ultimately merely debating methods rather than whether or not the war is worth fighting at all. Personal killings like this, however surgical, bring that core issue much closer to the surface, and force us to put all our cards on the table. The purpose of war is to kill your enemy. Surgical assassinations do exactly that – and only that.

I know the above is quite muddled. That’s because I’m genuinely trying to sort out what I think about this issue. I do know that I think the assassination was an acceptable act of war. What I’m not sure about is what I think about whether the reactions thereto are healthy, merely normal, or outright unhealthy.

Scott: Muddled, sure. But the above is, essentially, all I’m really looking for. A recognition that the act of assassinating someone ought to cause reasonably serious deliberations about moral ramifications of the decision and that making the decision does not let us off the hook of those deliberations anymore than making the decision re:drone attacks just because it is surgical.

We might decide that it is worth it. I think one can make the case that the Dubai assassination was the right thing to do. But it ought not to be a light-hearted affair and the fact that there is and has been a light-hearted reaction to the decision and its outcome does not make that reaction okay or acceptable.

Mike: So how do you recognize it? A public ceremony? A letter to the press expressing regret? What is the mechanism through which that moral recognition is shown which will be adequate for you?

I’m asking this because you can’t tell me with any certainty that there isn’t a moral recognition from the parties involved. Can you tell me how well those Mossad agents sleep at night? What about the Israeli people on whose behalf that assassination was carried out?

I just don’t know what you are looking for Scott. Do you think that the t-shirt proves there is no moral recognition, or is it the absence of some public display that bothers you so much?

Scott: That’s a good question to which I don’t have a pat answer. What I can say is that the t-shirt and the kinds of responses by folks like Marty Peretz leave me concerned that there is a sort of after the fact moral glibness at play that may well point to a similar tendency before the fact. If the response was more akin to Andrew Sullivan’s, “this is an awful thing to do, but ultimately justifiable on numerous levels”, I wouldn’t have written about it. In some senses all we have to go on is the after-the-fact reaction, which is most certainly fallible, but not insignificant either.

What I would suggest, I guess, is that I have larger concern about the kinds of critical analysis that not only go into formulations of foreign policy before the fact, but during, and after the fact in general. Things like the use use and defense of torture, my own country’s potential tacit implication in those kinds of issues in Afghanistan, the response to this assassination, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the like. These things concern me vis-a-vis foreing policy and I think that they potentially point to the kinds of defficiencies writ large that I’m outlining with regards to this assassination.

I think a failure to continue our moral calculation after the decision that someone is an enemy and we’re at war can and has lead to some horrific things that undermine the very values for which we claim to be fighting and make the world a worse place overall. As you said, this is not a soccer game, it’s war. War is a very serious affair and there have been indications of late that the actions of many participants have not reflected that gravity.

So what I’m really doing here, at best, is shouting about things I see as potentially pointing to that deficiency and asking whether, in light of those things, we’ve thoroughly thought this all the way through because failing to do so has had some demonstrably dire consequences. And I understand that the response might be, “that’s just the way things are,” and that such a response might be accurate. I just happen to find the, “that’s just the way things are,” conclusion unsatisfactory.

I should note, too, that Powell was the great exception to the below description. So you’re invocation of his doctrine is fair. It would more effective it were still the dominant force in US foreign policy, which, as I understand things, it is not.

Mark: Well let me pose this question to you – what, if anything, makes this celebration of Mossad materially different from say the celebration of warriors in the past?

On some level, it’s certainly almost barbaric, but then again doesn’t war require a certain level of barbarism, not just from the soldiers, but also from the population that supports the soldiers? I guess I’m wondering if the lack of serious reflection on this subject isn’t a necessary consequence of a society’s decision to go to war. In order to win a war, a country must be willing on some level to dehumanize the enemy, to view the war as a battle of absolutes, of good vs. evil.

Scott: It’s not necessarily different, per se. But the context in which it occurs, specifically the moral context, is different. And so our response to it necessitates a different calculus.

Mark: I guess I’m not sure I see what you mean by the moral context being different. Is it that the clinical nature of this required in essence a sneak attack? Such attacks have been celebrated in cultures for centuries, whether we are talking about commando raids or the Battle of Trenton.

I should say that I’m quite certain at this point that the positive reception for the assassination is on net a moral evil that, from a libertarian perspective, is also problematic because it is a celebration of the State in all its naked brutality. I’m just wondering if it’s also a necessary evil that must occur if a society is to maintain the determination necessary to fight and win a war.

Scott: I’m saying that the moral context of our actions is not static.

Our terms of morality evolve over time. Actions that were considered morally acceptable in the past are not necessarily morally acceptable in the future. But it’s not a black and white affair, there is nuance. So I’m not saying that State sanctioned vigilante-ism in the form of assassination, if we view those assassins in the historical context as warriors and the celebration of warriors, if not immoral and therefore evil. Rather I am saying that is presents a different moral conundrum than it has in the past that makes the celebration of it less acceptable in a contemporary context.

The moral context of 16th Century Japan is not the same as the moral context of 21st Century Israel/America, and not just on a cultural basis. We understand ourselves and our actions in a different context and therefor apply different analysis and response to them.

Mike: My concern here is that you are choosing the lowest common denominators and focusing on that. That t-shirt is typical of a certain kind of bravado/dark humor that represents a minority here.

I recall going to the gun range when I was a kid and being able to purchase a paper target that had Gaddafi’s face on it. You can also go to gun shows here in the US and find some really redneck tshirts with similar messages. But what % of society is wearing them? That’s why I caution reading too much into these things. That guy carrying the gun at the political rally…he represents a fraction of a % of Americans.

I would liken this kind of stuff to sailors writing messages to Hirohito on Allied bombs before the planes took off. That glibness makes war more palatable. It’s a coping mechanism.

Certainly the decision to remain at war should be constantly re-evaluated, but I still maintain that once you are war, it’s unlikely that the players are going to always feel the level of moral uncertainty or inflection you seem to want more of.

I think the Obama administration would probably rely on it if they had to start a new war. My understanding is that it’s still popular among the military leadership.

Scott: I’ll admit to being overly cautious here. Your criticism is fair. But I think we’ve seen enough wrong perpetrated in the cause of war lately to be a bit overly cautious.

I would add, though, that rather than just base my critique on the shirts, I did go and seek out something more specific in terms of Marty Peretz’s comments. And I would offer that the positions of a Marty Peretz, former assistant professor at Harvard, former owner of The New Republic, and current Editor-and-Cheif of that same publication, are hardly on the fringe.

Seeing the Obama go back to something more akin to the Powell doctrine would be a welcome event. I wonder if Obama isn’t working out his own doctrine, which I would surely be interested in seeing. I have a lot of reservations about his decisions vis-a-vis Afghanistan that has resulted in some harsh criticism, but I still respect the man and would be, at the very least, curious to see what his own stamp of foreign policy formulation would look like.

Mike: I would guess Obama’s policy would rely a bit too heavily on diplomacy and put the bar so high that military action would be almost impossible.

Scott: I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Certainly there would likely be a recalibration back to a greater emphasis on diplomacy, but Obama has proven himself capable of hawk-ish behaviour. His foreign policy rhetoric during the campaign was an equal mix of diplomacy and use of force.

Mike: I don’t think you can win a US presidential election without mentioning a willingness to use force.

Scott: Ha! Fair enough.

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I’ve been going back and forth with myself for the past few weeks about why the assassination bothers me so much. Especially as someone who has reconciled himself, however unhappily, to the reality that in some instances state sanctioned violence will be a necessary evil in combating certain geo-political players.

One can’t deny how controlled and contained the whole thing was. As Andrew himself said in his original post on the matter,

In fighting murderous Jihadist terrorists, I have to say I find this kind of surgical execution, however awful, to be morally superior to the collateral deaths of so many innocent children and civilians, as occurred in the Gaza war under the rules of conduct the IDF allowed. It’s also morally more defensible than the US drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where civilian casualties are both morally deeply troubling and strategically terrible in a war that I continue to believe is essentially unwinnable.

I can’t disagree with Andrew on any of that, per se. I mean, I’m not prepared to completely forgo the conclusion that this man deserved to die and that the Mossad, if they did indeed carry out the operation, were the right people to make that happen. I can’t disagree with the idea that a method avoiding civilian casualties, innocent children amongst them, is preferable to one that does not.

But it is precisely the “surgical execution” of this operation that gives me pause and makes me shudder. Though I think it is sometimes necessary to use precisely this kind of state sanctioned violence towards certain ends, I correspondingly think that we have a moral obligation to reckon in an unflinching manner with the ramifications of our decision. I believe that no matter what form it happens to take, the use of state sanctioned violence is an ugly thing that ought to cause us grief no matter the seeming righteousness of our cause.

The ugliness of military activity, whether it is in Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere, is always easy to spot. It is, essentially, inescapable. These more traditional forms of military might and use of force are honest insofar as they force us to grapple with the implications of our decision.

But the cool and almost bloodless efficacy of this type of operation — and assassination of this kind — it seems almost designed to lull us into a false consciousness of complacency about the tactics we choose to engage in dealing with, admittedly, unavoidable conflict. And in providing such a respite from the penetrating eyes of innocent children, we morally short change ourselves and others by willfully choosing a path of cognitive and ethical blindness and dissonance.

The natural outcome of such cowardice is a kind of self-serving bravado that cultivates slogans like, “Don’t Mess with the Mossad” and Marty Peretz’s borrowed line,

The Mossad did it. And, as Carly Simon sang about James Bond, “nobody does it better.”

Bravado of the like isn’t just offensive in the cavalier dismissiveness of its attitude, it is, in fact, anathema to the character, disposition, and fortitude required to actually bring an end to the generations old warring into which it faces. Bravado of this variety isn’t ultimately aimed at ending one of the world’s most horrific conflicts; indeed, it not so subtly feeds into it, prolongs it, sustains it.

And those penetrating eyes, we don’t lift them from our conscience, nor scrub their blood from our hands. Deep down we all know that, at best, we put them off to another day.

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This is an easy one: while I suppose it’s vaguely possible that Republicans could raise reconciliation as an issue in the fall, it’s about as certain as anything could be that it won’t affect any votes. First of all, no one knows what reconciliation is; I mean, shockingly few people know what a filibuster is, really, so it’s pretty clear that no one knows what reconciliation is. Be sure to read this great anecdote from Chris Bowers (and a related one from Matt Yglesias). But beyond that, no one cares. Really.

I can understand why Bernstein, Bowers, and Yglesias feel the way that they do, but not surprisingly I’m inclined to counsel against being too dismissive. Without taking on the issue of whether reconciliation is the correct course of action in this instance — and I’m inclined to believe that it is — the fact that it is procedural or arcane or that there is a perception that no one understands what it is or what it’s for does not mean that it won’t be an issue in the election should the Republicans choose to make it one.

This was essentially the exact same tact that Prime Minhister Stephen Harper and his Conservative chose to take with prorogation north of the border and as polls have shown it hurt them.

Now, the parallel isn’t perfect by any means. Shutting down Parliament isn’t the same as passing health care legislation, Stephen Harper ain’t no Barack Obama, and Canadians and Americans are different political animals. But to rest one’s confidence on the fact that the issue at hand is arcane and/or procedural has, at least my experience, been proven to be more risky than one might think.

What I’ve taken from our lesson in Canada is that regardless the issue, if people feel that governmental actions are undermining the integrity of their government, and by extneion their lives, they’ll get plenty upset. And given the Republicans’ audience and their views on health care, I wouldn’t be so quick to wave a dismissive hand.

Of course, the proof is always in the pudding and we have yet to see whether Harper will pay an electoral price for his decision. The Conservatives last week managed to reopen a three percent lead on the Liberals, though it is owing as much to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s lack of popularity amongst Canadians than anything else. But the Conservatives aren’t anywhere near majority territory anymore, which was the direction in which they were previously headed. And Democrats don’t have the added leverage uncertain timing vis-a-vis their electoral concerns.

At the end of the day, I’m not saying that Democrats shouldn’t use reconciliation. In fact, I’m inclined to believe that they should. But folks like Bernstein, Bowers, and Yglesias — not mention Obama, Reid, and Pelosi — need to come up with a better answer than, “You don’t really care about that, do you?” to angry voters.

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Even though more people think Republicans are not doing enough to reach bipartisan consensus, 54 percent believe the Democratic party should take the first step toward developing bipartisan solutions to the country’s problems, the survey says. Forty-two percent say the GOP should take that first step.

The implicit suggestion here is that the solution to the country’s problems lies in striking the right bipartisan balance in plans and actions moving forward. I am skeptical about this claim.

Let me be clear, I think that Americans think that they want bipartisanship as a means to solving the country’s problems and that that is what these poll results show. But what I think is really at heart here, as the series title indicates, is that a majority of Americans feel their government is broken and they’re angry about it.

I would hearken back to the poll I noted last week around general levels of trust with regards to government and note one of the following findings,

When asked about Congressional job approval, only 15 percent of respondents thought Congress was effective, down 8 percentage points from January and near the low of 12 percent in October 2008, when the economy was on the brink of collapse and the George W. Bush administration was entering its final year in office.

The key word there for me is effective. When I see that a vast majority of Americans feel that their Congress — and I wouldn’t imagine the Senate fairing much better — is ineffective, what I read from that is a feeling that government is doing what it’s suppose to do. It isn’t getting its work done. Now, I admit that I’m reading between the lines here, so take this as you will.

But if we dig deeper into that poll, we also find the following results:

Understands your needs and problems: Obama – 60%, Democrats – 42%, Republicans, 35%

Meaning that a clear majority and a new majority of people polled think that the President and Democrats understand their needs and problems, but that an overwhelming majority feel that government has failed to be effective in addressing those needs and problems.

I would offer that part of what has been holding the President and Democrats back in terms of real, timely action and fulfilling things like mandates and campaign promises has been an over developed concern with achieving bipartisan consensus on various issues. In fact, in a Gallup poll back in September, a majority of respondents continued to credit the President with engaging in sincere bipartisan efforts.

The conclusion here — at least by my lights — is that efforts towards bipartisanship, if they haven’t hurt the effectiveness of government, certainly have not helped it. And if the American public is serious about wanting an “effective” government that can get things done, it needs to come to grips with the fact that that likely isn’t a bipartisan focused government that is primarily concerned with political kabuki.

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To me, the news story was this: Sorba got booed off the stage. At CPAC. This seems like great news. So why focus on the sad truth that yes, there are still homophobes out there? Maybe this is just heterosexual privilege, but this seems like a genuinely great moment in gay rights–and the gay conservatives and libertarians who sent met that clip seemed to take it as such.

And Erik noted,

That’s pretty astonishing if you ask me. While Andrew and others lament how awful conservatives have gotten lately, I see quite the opposite. Never before in the history of this country have gays and lesbians received such support from conservatives – and that support is growing at a pretty incredible pace.

Many of the commenters to the post have expressed their skepticism about how much this incident ought to count as a marker of change within American conservatism writ large. I think that skepticism is well founded and in light of Erik and Megan’s comments I would wend more closely towards that skepticism than describing Sorba speaking and getting booed off stage as “astonishing” or “a genuinely great moment in gay rights”. Especially insofar as that skepticism keeps us real about what kind of challenge stands in front of us and keeps us working hard .

It is, at best, a marker of what could perhaps best be described as the slow shifting in a general direction. That general direction is towards a greater acceptance of gay rights within conservative discourse, but the reaction to Sorba isn’t a slam dunk or a touchdown in terms of that movement such that I would call it describe it as Erik and Megan do.

A genuinely great moment in gay rights will be when everyone has the right to marry whomever they choose in every state in the country. That’s a touchdown and it won’t hearken the end of the culture wars either, but it will be a genuinely great moment. Frankly, even the final repeal of DADT doesn’t auger as a touchdown in my books, though it will be a great moment. The repeal of DADT is, maybe, a field goal and an important one.

But the reaction to Sorba, that’s basically moving the ball a couple of yards down the field. It might get you your first down, to extend the metaphor, but you’ve still got a lot of plays to go before you do any victory dances.

The reason I thought it was worth mentioning is less because of how substantial it was and more because of how it marks a movement towards a larger goal. What I think I found most heartening is that the dissent to what has been a pretty standard conservative line of thought was coming from within the ranks of conservatives themselves. Liberals and Democrats should and will continue hammering away at conservative attitudes towards gay men and women such that folks like Sorba get invited to speak at events like CPAC. But a touchdown in terms of really shifting attitudes amongst a majority of conservatives such that the ideology, movement, and party ceases to be even marginally antagonistic and obstructionist towards gay rights comes both from the kind of shifting of norms externally and from a movement within the self-identified subset of individuals and institutions towards accepting and internalizing those norms.

Even if the people booing Sorba were entirely made up of, as some have suggested and may be at least somewhat accurate, “college kids”, I find it at least marginally heartening to see those college kids in attendance at CPAC and emboldned enough in their beliefs to voice them an unapologetic and even somewhat forceful manner. It is equally heartening, therefore, to see a group like GOPride at CPAC and causing a conversation about this particular issue, knowing full well that doing so will result in blow back for them from not insubstantial quarters.

Having advocates within the particular ideological subsection in possession of the requisite courage to challenge one of the malignant beliefs of their ideological and party elders is, unequivocally, a good and positive thing, if not also a relatively small thing in the grand scheme.

And so in my commentary directed towards Andrew Sullivan, I was less frothing about the impending shift of conservative beliefs and actions and more redirecting focus in terms of what I took to be an important marker. There have for some time now been guys like Ryan Sorba in the conservative movement. People willing to use a microphone to bluntly and destructively deliver a message of discrimination wrapped in philosophical pretense and abstraction.

There’s nothing new there.

But to have a larger-ish group of people, many of whom are as young if not younger than Sorba, stand up and denounce that message at a highly watched national conservative event. To have an openly and proudly gay conservative group attend that same event to engage and challenge many of its participants in their biases and bigotry, knowing that a sizable chunk of the response is going to be negative. Those things are less predictable trope for American conservatism.

And so without lapsing into euphemistic cheer leading — of which I am not accusing either Erik or Megan, per se — I think weighing the two offers justification for a modicum of optimism and impetus to keep moving the ball further down the field.

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Let me begin with the very bald fact that I found Sorba’s tirade repulsive and continue to be utterly gobsmacked about the state of gay rights in American politics. How a so-called beacon of freedom manages to get away with systemic attitudes towards gay men and women that are only marginally better than many of the “Islamo-fascist” entities it berates as fundamentally evil is outrageous.

But with that said, let me take a slightly different tack on the Sorba incident.

Andrew Sullivan, commenting on Sorba’s display, says,

Sorba also fits into a sub-sub-sub-category of those young men, always bristling with somewhat strained masculinity, who are obsessed with the subject of homosexuality and have obviously spent a huge amount of time finding sources and arguments that can back up their feelings on the subject.

Here is a Google video of a recent lecture of his at Cal State. Enjoy a glimpse into the future of Republicanism.

While I share Andrew’s disgust with Sorba, I think those who want to catch a glimpse into “the future of Republicanism” ought to look at the You Tube video of Sorba at CPAC, not his Google videos.

The reaction of the crowd struck me as telling insofar as Sorba essentially got called out on his hate-mongering bigotry by what seemed like a decent cross section of the attendees. That Sorba was invited to speak at all is not all that surprising given that CPAC is being called by many the conservative event of the year. CPAC’s list of speakers contains a host of talking heads ranging from obnoxious to offensive.

But the moderator having to come back to the microphone after Sorba and say something like, “freedom of opinion, folks, freedom of opinion,” because the shouts in opposition to what was said required addressing is at least cause for a dim glimmer of hope.

It isn’t a full blown step in the right direction, but we’re also talking about the party who hosted the comment, “I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that, if you want to call me a bigot, fine,” from the likes of Jesse Helms in 1993 without a substantial in-house backlash of the kind that Sorba encountered. We’re talking baby steps here, painfully slow and hard earned baby steps, but baby steps all the same.

To wit, the very fact that a group like GOPride is at CPAC and causing a stir, able to shout down someone like Sorba, as opposed to being barred access and having comments of the kind that Sorba delivered go unchallenged, is a small but important victory in terms of seeing an American conservatism that embodies something approaching sanity.

Besides, these days you gotta takes your victories, be they small, tiny, or minuscule, where you can get ‘em.

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But at the end of the day, I’m with Michael Tomasky who writes that the point really is moot,

Stack was in fact angry at everyone. Angry at the IRS. Angry at the government generally. Angry at unions. But also angry at corporate greed and at rich people and at “thugs and plunderers” of various stripe.

Not only do I think the point is moot, I don’t think it matters nearly as much as to ask why Joseph Stacks did what he did. What were the conditions that lead to such a heinous and violent act?

There are particulars at player here, of course, in the form of Stack’s protracted battle with the IRS and what Shanon Love over at Chicago Boyz has noted as “an incredibly invariant profile” of “[p]eople who carry out these types of crimes” (h/t: Mark). These assessments strike me as intelligent and grounded, as noted earlier it seems clear that Stack, to have acted the way that he did, was clearly a very disturbed man.

But disturbed or not, our actions and motivations rarely incubate in a vacuum. Social creatures that we are, there are often broad contexts and diffuse dynamics that come to influence even the most unbalanced of us. The violence and extremity of Stack’s actions can act as a sort of “get out of jail free” card in terms of examining and attempting to better understand those broad dynamics. I mean, the guy flew a freaking plane into a building, he was crazy. What’s to examine, right?

Maybe so, but there seems to be an increasing degree of anger and frustration about the state of affairs in the United States that, if left unaddressed, will only worsen over time. I’m not suggesting that there are necessarily more acts of this type to come, there probably aren’t. But what I’m suggesting is that there may well be a tie to the feelings experienced by Joe Stack and broader feelings being experienced by other Americans that prohibits us from shelving this incident into the “crazy wingnut” category and forgetting all about it.

Fresh-faced Senator Scott Brown is taking some heat in some circles over his comments with regards to Stack’s actions,

Well It’ s certainly tragic and I feel for the families obviously that are being effected by it. And I don’t know if its related but I can just sense not only in my election but since being here in Washington people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things effecting their daily lives. So I am not sure if there is a connection, I certainly hope not, but we need to do things better.

While I certainly don’t condone the seemingly cavalier way in which Brown delivered his remarks, nor his off-the-cuff, “no one likes playing taxes obviously” comment, I do think that Brown is onto something in terms of touching on the feelings of frustration he reads from the electorate.

At a time when average Americans are really and truly hurting, it must be enraging to watch the travesty that has been the health care reform debate, to see the kinds of bonuses that Wall Street CEOs are taking home, to watch increased corporate influence get handed down by Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, and to impotently observe the machinations of political apparatus that seems fundamentally unaffected by the immensity of desperation that has enveloped most of the country’s kitchen tables.

I don’t live in the country and I’m frustrated.

This kind of frustration seems so destined to get swept aside as the predictable populist frothing of a particular set of circumstances by pundits like George Will,

America, its luck exhausted, at last has a president from the academic culture, that grating blend of knowingness and unrealism. But the reaction against this must somewhat please him. That reaction is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. Besides, full-throated populism has not won a national election in 178 years, since Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832.

The more I see that label used — populism — the more I feel like it is a subtle smearing of real concerns, frustrations, and pains by a political establishment more concerned with maintaining the status quo than taking a hard look at its own shortcomings.

Inflammatory populist ragings on my part? Perhaps. But this sense that something has gone deeply and irrevocably wrong is not a feeling with which I alone resonate. A recent poll by CBS and the New York Times found that a majority of Americans, cutting across the party spectrum, are angry or dissatisfied with government and that , “levels of distrust and cynicism about government are at or near 15-year highs.”

This isn’t just the wax and wane of hard times, this seems more like a government — in some senses, the government — with a real and burgeoning legitimacy problem.

It is worth remembering that both the tickets in the 2008 Presidential election were change tickets. Granted Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin had very different ideas about what needed to change and how, but both pairs doled out their fair share of, “Washington needs to change” rhetoric. And so, as with the tickets, those who voted undoubtedly had very different ideas about what kind of change they wanted to see. But it is all the same conceivable that a majority of voters were voting for change in some fashion or another.

One particular side of that change equation won out, but it seems like, by and large, not a whole lot has actually changed as a result. So there may well be ample reason for a majority of Americans to feel cynical and angry about the state of their government, country, and lives, whether or not “their guy” won. That is a real frustration and the calcified malignancy to which it is a response is a real problem. And when one looks out over the political landscape, one doesn’t find very many people willing to face those facts and offer even modest solutions.

So, yes, Joseph Stack was undoubtedly a disturbed and unbalanced man, his actions were abhorrent and the results heart wrenching. But assuming that the appropriate response is to go back to business as usual strikes me as perfectly blithe and perhaps more than a little reckless.

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Over at Bleakonomy, Dan Summers does the unthinkable!

Mike at The Big Stick explores a Presbyterian approach to education.

At The Politic, Jonathan McLeod challenges President Obama’s hubris regarding the stimulus.

UPDATE (from Mark):

I wanted to add a few more links.  There’s an excess of great stuff today on our blogroll.

Transplanted Lawyer, as always, has some outstanding stuff.  I’m this close to just mirroring his site instead of writing my own posts.  Anywho, do check out his posts on judicially-enforced religious indoctrination and, especially, Arizona’s pending anti-Sharia legislation.

Additionally, check out Jason Kuznicki on whether there is a place for gays in conservative politics.

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