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If you are considering voting for President Bush in the upcoming election, I urge you to read this article from the Washington Post. I didn't even make it half-way through before I found myself seething with rage at the current administration. The president and/or his advisers have decided that, for better or for worse, that their need to wage a "war on terror" (don't even get me started on the oxymoronic nature of that phrase) trumps all other legal barriers. Yes, the terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. However, according to some websites approximately 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since our war in Iraq began. How much is one American life worth? And how do we factor in the torture?

Here's the paragraph that really got me:

A U.S. law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon group's report, prepared under the supervision of General Counsel William J. Haynes II, said that "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority."

Presidents have always taken liberties during times of war. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, but that wasn't entirely legal. Further, our "war on terror" isn't a war in the strictly legal sense or in a practical sense. I would argue that a war needs to have a definite enemy and a definite objective. The current "war" has neither and looks more like an on-going and perpetual struggle. Is it really possible to win the "war on terror?" If not, we cannot have a president who is willing to take and expand war-time powers to their utmost limits. Its all about checks and balances, something that Mr. Bush doesn't seem to understand.

Also, for those of you who weren't swayed by the article linked above, try this one and this one on for size. The deputy solicitor general told the Supreme Court justices that the possibility of abuse (in response to a question about torture) didn't justify "judicial micromanagement" and that the current executive didn't approve of torture. Its a bit of a no-win situation for President Bush here. Either he didn't know about any torture by Americans, in which case he's not in control of the government he's supposed to be leading, or he did know and approved of the torture. Neither option is all that good for us as a country, but I hope its the former. I'm just not that comfortable with having Torquemada as my president.

(I'll leave the comments on until things get abusive and ugly. Any bets on how long that'll take?)

Posted by on 8 June 2004 at 5:12 PM

The Washington Post seems to have taken a rather hard turn from their pre-war and "active operations" coverage of the administration. I wonder if they felt they were hoodwinked?

Posted by Charlie on 9 June 2004 - 3:51 PM

It's easy now to look back and to think that we made a mistake unseating Iraq's (he-who-shall-not-be-named) leader and imposing a martial form of democracy. It's easy with 20/20 hindsight to say that American lives should not be lost fighting terror in a country with a deplorable dearth of weapons of mass destruction.

The troubling thing is, all of the above was easy to see before we went over there too.

Posted by rkc on 9 June 2004 - 4:28 PM

As a liberal, I strongly believe in intervening in situations where a government is oppressing its people (and surely Iraq must fir that bill). I could be wrong, but this used to be standard liberal philosophy. Even if liberals are now seemingly endorsing isolationism -- probably a knee-jerk reaction to Bush's screwy definition of "helping" Iraq -- I maintain aiding the rest of the world is our responsibility as a hegemonic power (if we can still be considered that).

Here's my dilemma: I'm starting to believe that it's impossible for a government to intervene in situations like this without A) having ulterior motives (I guess I can live with the ends justifying the means) and B) messing up royally. Does that mean we should leave it to humanitarian groups or the U.N.? I have a sinking suspicion that those organizations have little more than good intentions and impotency when it comes to improving conditions in other countries.

Say what you will about the Bush administration -- please, because it's been one disaster after the next, as many of us predicted before he took office -- but the U.N. deserves some blame in this debacle as well. *Their* knee-jerk reaction to Bush's cowboy-out-for-revenge plan was to bury their heads in the sand. (Yes, they checked for WMD, but that's assuming the only reason to have intervened was to rid Iraq of such weapons. There were many more reasons to do so.) To me, not doing anything is not that much better than doing something and making things worse in the process.

And don't get me started on France and Germany; let's not forget they too had their own interests to consider, and I doubt wanting to "keep the peace" was truly that high on their lists. France's considerable oil interests in Iraq alone make me a tad suspicious. (Germany, understandably, might be a little weary of war.) Maybe if the rest of the world had been involved, this job wouldn't have been so botched.

So how can bleeding-heart liberals such as myself be happy knowing there are people dying for freedom? Whom should we trust to remedy these situations? We can't trust our government (at least not this one); we can't trust the U.N. Should we just let the rest of the world suffer because nothing we've tried has worked?

Posted by Rachel on 10 June 2004 - 10:10 AM