[Peace-discuss] The year 2005

[Morton K. Brussel]

Although the New York Time owns the Boston Globe, we still get  
ascerbic critical commentary from James Carroll of that paper.

Published on Monday, December 26, 2005 by the Boston Globe
Staying the Course
by James Carroll

American intellegence was proving itself inadequate to the challenge.  
The president appointed a special commission to make recommendations.  
The year was 1954. The commission chairman was James Doolittle, the  
retired bomber general who had led the first air raid against Tokyo.

''It is now clear," he stated in his report to President Eisenhower,  
''that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is  
world domination by whatever means and whatever cost. There are no  
rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do  
not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding concepts  
of 'fair play' must be reconsidered. We must develop effective  
espionage and counter-espionage services, and must learn to subvert,  
sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated,  
and more effective methods than those used against us. It may be  
necessary that the American people be made acquainted with,  
understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy."

Sound familiar? Again and again, in the year now ending, the American  
people have been told by their leaders that strategies based on a new  
''repugnant philosophy" are required if the nation is to survive the  
challenge facing it. Forbidden incendiary weapons must be used in  
urban settings. Prisoners of war must be deprived of Geneva  
protections. Aggressive interrogations of enemies must approach  
torture. Commitments to provide US combat forces with adequate  
protective gear must be forsworn. Extrajudicial kidnapping of bad  
people must be justified. Allies must be pressured into joining  
secret networks of detention camps.

Human rights standards must be jettisoned. Traditional obligations to  
the United Nations must be ignored. Treaties that limit action can be  
cast aside. Distinctions between foreign and domestic espionage must  
be left behind, with US citizens subject to unmonitored surveillance  
by military agencies. Public libraries must be regarded as government  
peepholes. The lawyer-client privilege must no longer be regarded as  
sacrosanct. The press must be recruited into the project of  
information management. Dissent must be labeled as treason.

A great American erosion has occurred this year, and only now are the  
contours of what is lost becoming apparent. Much more is at stake  
than the abandonment of ''longstanding concepts of 'fair-play' " of  
which Doolittle wrote. To ''subvert, sabotage, and destroy" what  
threatens us, we have begun to subvert, sabotage, and destroy what  
protects us: the mutuality of solemn compacts abroad, fundamental  
safeguards of the Constitution at home. Because the justifying  
''state of emergency" is an open-ended war, the trashing of  
''hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct" will be permanent. Get  
used to it.

Doolittle proposed a break with American traditions and laws for the  
sake of far more aggressive responses to Soviet communism. The year  
he did so saw the initiation of unprecedented American covert actions  
in Iran and Vietnam, with unhappy consequences that reverberate to  
this day. But Doolittle's remained a minority report in the annals of  
US government responses. Eisenhower was neither as freaked out by  
what threatened as his commission chairman, nor as indifferent to  
basic decency as a standard of national identity. To Doolittle's  
credit, he and those who saw things his way understood themselves as  
occupying the country's shadows. They knew enough to be ashamed of  
what they thought was necessary.

Where is the shame in Washington today? How does Donald Rumsfeld not  
blush in the presence of the soldiers he so routinely betrays? How  
does Dick Cheney maintain that straight face, treating core values as  
a joke? The recasting of the nation's moral meaning -- a blatant  
embrace of ends-justify-the-means -- is happening in plain daylight.  
No shadows here.

Every time the Bush administration is caught in one of its repugnant  
purposes (Thank God, again this year, for Seymour Hersh), the White  
House declares its intention to stay the course. Torture?  
Wiretapping? Kidnapping? Deceit? The president's eyes widen: Trust  
me, he says with a twisted smile. Then he leans closer to display a  
snarling defiance. The combination reduces his critics to sputters.

Perhaps Bush's savviest achievement has been to make the public think  
that Rumsfeld and Cheney are the dark geniuses behind the  
administration's malevolence. If Bush is taken as too shallow to have  
a fascist ideology; as too weak to stick with hard policies that  
undermine democracy; as a religious nutcase whose apocalyptic  
fantasies don't matter; as a man, in sum, the average citizen can  
regard as slightly less than average -- then what he is pulling off  
will not be called by its proper name until it is too late. 2005? Oh  
yes, that was the year of the coup.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© 2005 Boston Globe

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