Morality | Certain Doubt

Posts Tagged ‘Morality’

We need a better Script

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

I have been thinking about democracy a lot recently. Specifically, I have been pondering the nature of our political institutions, and whether they are even remotely capable of producing fairness and justice. I’ve begun to question whether the democratic form of government we hold up as an ideal for the rest of the world is, or has become in recent years, essentially an institutionalized mechanism for producing injustice.

To me the evidence is becoming overwhelming. From the increasing disparity between rich and poor, the ever increasing consolidation of power amongst the very rich and multinational corporations, and the decreasing willingness of elected officials across the political spectrum to buck this trend and respond to the needs of the majority of the population, it now seems clear to me, that fairness and justice are no longer principles that hold any weight in Washington D.C. What is worse, apathy and resignation in the electorate, fueled by a mainstream media machine that values ad revenue above all else and no longer provides any kind of investigative or even rallying function, has led to an American populous that passively accepts injustice and the erosion of basic civil rights which many of our forebears thought important enough that they were willing to shed their blood to protect them.

When he was running for president, I went to hear Barrack Obama speak. The speech was inspiring. I remember coming out of the arena thinking, wow! Finally we have a candidate who truly believes in justice and upholding the rule of law. Strangely enough, however, when I recently Googled the text of his speeches from that time, as well as since then, I could find little mention of either topic. The same holds for his current oratory. Try it for yourself. It is the rare speech by the President Obama that even includes the word “justice.” When he does mention the word, it is usually only in a quote from some moral leader like Dr. Martin Luther King. His latest State of the Union speech is a perfect example. While he includes the word “jobs” 25 times, “justice” is only mentioned once and that in the midst of a vapid piece of boilerplate: “And America’s moral example must always shine for all who yearn for freedom and justice and dignity. And because we’ve begun this work, tonight we can say that American leadership has been renewed and America’s standing has been restored.”

I do not think Obama’s unwillingness to mention the “J” word is accidental.

I believe it reflects the complete moral and ethical poverty which has infected our institutions of government like a virulent pathogen. Honor is dead. Virtue is out of favor. And Justice? Justice now equated with the ability to make unbelievably large sums of cash. These days, for most politicians, true justice and fairness has all the appeal of a three day old bag of fish guts.

Need an example? After two years in office, President Obama is no nearer to resolving the impasse of Guantanamo. We washed our hands of Abu Gharib, swept it under the carpet without ever truly acknowledging the moral horror that went on there. But our own Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, a place where by his own admission, former president George W. Bush unabashedly approved the repeated torture of prisoners, remains as a visible and ever present symbol of our government’s total contempt for justice and the international rule of law.

Witnessing the legal and moral debacle of Guantanamo from afar, it is easy to question the ability of democracy – at least the variety practiced in America – to produce justice. What else can one conclude about a system of government that condones holding prisoners indefinitely without a conviction, a trial, or even an accusation. A legal system which rejects the checks and balances of Habeus Corpus and the right to a fair trial virtually has to result in injustice.

Writers such as Sheldon Wohlin and Michael Sandel have argued that in recent years, our American democracy, a system of government which used to embrace ideals of justice and fairness, has been largely hollowed out and replaced with one that values instead, markets, profits, and the accumulation of capital. Those who have amassed great fortunes have largely come to believe that what is fair and just is: anything that allows them to amass even greater fortunes.

In a August 30th article in The New Yorker entitled “Covert Operations,”
author Jane Mayer examines one example of this hollowing out. In her expose of the Koch brothers, two billionaire oil men who have become the leading source of funds for libertarian think tanks and political action committees Mayer shows how influential these two wealthy individuals have been at reshaping our democracy. Much of the funding for the “Tea party” movement has come from these two men, as does the lion’s share of funding for the climate change deniers.

Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. “To bring about social change,” he told Doherty, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. “We have a radical philosophy,” he said.

Radical or not, the Koch’s philosophy is working. Influencing elections, court cases, and public discourse, the millions the Kochs pour into libertarian organizations such as the Mercatus institute and the Cato Institute are all geared toward one idea: changing the country’s paradigm of what constitutes fairness and justice in society to one which allows them (The Kochs) the “freedom” to amass as much wealth as humanly possible.

It is interesting to note that like others who share their beliefs, the Kochs began their careers as starry eyed idealists. However, over time their idealism has morphed into something not so benign. As Mayer notes:

“Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”

For me, the most telling insight in Mayer’s article is her observation about the conclusions reached by the Kochs after David Koch’s unsuccessful campaign in 1980 as vice-president on the libertarian ticket:

That November, the Libertarian ticket received only one per cent of the vote. The brothers realized that their brand of politics didn’t sell at the ballot box. Charles Koch became openly scornful of conventional politics. “It tends to be a nasty, corrupting business,” he told a reporter at the time. “I’m interested in advancing libertarian ideas.” According to Doherty’s book, the Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.”

This, I feel is the nut, the very essence, of what is wrong with today’s democracy. It is not that the Koch brother’s are wrong in their observation. Sadly, I feel that they are correct. In many ways, today’s politicians are not in charge; they are not making independent policy decisions. Instead they are acting out a script, a public performance that is increasingly being written by a smaller and smaller group of very, very wealthy individuals.

Need an example of what I’m talking about? Try this exercise. Download the text of any modern political speech. Anytime you see a noun insert the word “corporate,” in front of it and see what you get. Take this passage from Obama’s State of the Union Speech:

To help corporate businesses sell more corporate products abroad, we set a goal of doubling our corporate exports by 2014 -– because the more we export, the more corporate jobs we create here at home. Already, our corporate exports are up. Recently, we signed corporate agreements with India and China that will support more than 250,000 corporate jobs here in the United States. And last month, we finalized a corporate trade agreement with South Korea that will support at least 70,000 American corporate jobs. This corporate agreement has unprecedented support from corporate business and labor, corporate Democrats and corporate Republicans — and I ask this corporate Congress to pass it as soon as possible.

Or take this passage from Obama’s inagural address:

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential corporate oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of corporate prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the corporate oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, corporate America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in corporate high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our corporate forbearers, and true to our corporate founding documents.

If nothing else, this sort of “Mad-Lib” game highlights the ridiculous banality of most political discourse. On a deeper level, however, the policy decisions we see carried out, from domestic debates like health care, to issues such as climate change that have enormous global consequences, no longer seem to be debates at all. Rather than true deliberative bodies, the three branches of our government have become a kind of ritualized Kabuki theater, one in which the story’s lesson has been twisted and disfigured till the morality is replaced by a statement of profit and loss.

As I see it, there are two ways of resolving the moral quandary in which we find ourselves. One is to reject democracy and allow an oligarchy of rich elites to make the decisions for us. In this scenario our only path to achieving true justice is to petition the elites to adopt a broader and more enlightened view of fairness beyond their own personal self-interest.

The second course is for We the People to take back the power over the script which our elected officials are reading from. We need to re-instate the traditional ideals of fairness and justice for all, not just a few. In short we need to return to true democracy.

Regardless of which we choose, at the very least we need to re-write the script to give ourselves a few more lines. Our scene might wind up on the cutting room floor but at least we’ll have the joy of being actors once again.

To paraphrase a popular T-Shirt slogan: “If all the world’s a stage, I need a better script.”

Tags: Charles Koch, David Koch, fairness, government, justice, Koch, Morality, oligarchy, Politics, script, tea party
Posted in Daily Rant, Ethics, Politics, economics, government, law, media | 1 Comment »

Drone Diplomacy

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

The recent article in the Wall Street Journal stating that the White House and the Pentagon are actively considering the deployment of unmanned drones as part of “hunter killer” teams in Yemen is an interesting development in the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

It is not a development for the better.

Under this proposal the military would cede authority over elite special forces units to the C.I.A. to allow them to operate in foreign countries extra judicially… that is with out oversight, accountability and most importantly, without asking permission of the governments in which they conduct their operations.

Recognizing the increasingly questionable nature of the reporting in the Wall Street Journal – neither the White House nor the Yemeni Government deigned to comment on their claims – the mere notion that the White House might even be considering this move should be enough to send chills up the spines of tribal muslims around the globe. The deployment of special forces teams or even just a squad of armed drones under the auspices of the C.I.A. would cement the precedent set in Pakistan to allow the President to issue targeted assassination orders of foreign nationals in secret with no accountability whatsoever. In other words it would give the president his own personal hit squad.

My own feeling is that even if drones in Yemen is only a trial balloon it is one that should be punctured without delay.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right off. Unmanned drones are lousy as tools of statecraft. If you want to have a drone circle a battle field for hours and then blow things up without putting soldier’s lives at risk then arguably they are an effective weapon. No one can argue that American soldier’s live are in jeopardy when the operators of the drones are half a world away slipping Big Gulp Slurpies in air-conditioned comfort the deserts of New Mexico.

If your goal is to build things, like roads, bridges, and hospitals or if you desire to bring stability to a region through democratic nation building or if you merely wish to win over hearts and minds, drones will not do you any good. The ability to blow up a building without putting yourself in harm’s way is hardly the way to make peace, build infrastructure, or get people to like you. In fact, as many observers and counter terrorism experts have noted, the use of drones as a weapon against insurgents is wildly ineffective and even counter productive. Every time a drone attack kills innocent civilians it acts as a recruiting tool for the militants whom you are fighting. And drones always kill civilians.

To use unmanned drones as we have been, for targeted, extra-judicial killing is contrary to every known international law one can think of. If one has any respect for the laws of other nations one has to condemn the use of drones as tools of state sponsored assassination. It matters not that we have been flying them over areas where the “state” government is a loose and unruly collection of tribal councils. If we were to fly drones over Ottowa, Cancun, or London in an effort to assassinate those we suspect of harboring ill will against our country, we would be just as guilty as we are blowing up militants in the Tribal areas of Waziristan. Every time we use drones to run an assassination mission over a sovereign nation we are guilty of a crime under international law. It’s that simple.

If it is illegal to use drones as assassination tools, then it is perforce immoral as well. Let me put it bluntly. Assassination is murder. You can call it extra-judicial killing but that doesn’t make it any more ethical. In order to put any kind of legitimacy on the taking of a life by the United States government we must first make such an order comply with the full weight of the law. The process must be transparent, or at least be controlled by some independent body with oversight capability. This does not happen with drones. The targets are chosen in secret. The death sentence decrees are handed down in secret. The affected parties are incinerated with no ability to face their accuser declare their innocence or refute the evidence against them. Indeed, if the person blown to glory is innocent, he or she may go to their reward never even knowing they were suspected of being a militant. And of course, the innocent bystanders who die as a result of any attack never get a say in the matter at all.

To be able to use any weapon without oversight or accountability, virtually insures that the weapon in question will be used with less reservation than if controls and oversight were in place. If any one requires proof of this, simply look at the statistics for frequency of drone attacks by the United States. Since the introduction of drones as a tool for targeting insurgents was introduced, their use has steadily increased. For Presidents like Obama and Bush before him, the ability to wipe out inconvenient people in foreign countries without having to ask permission or provide any reason to the leaders of the countries in question is like a powerful drug – one with dangerous side effects.

To sum up,
1) using drones for state assassination is illegal and immoral.

2) When employed with no oversight or accountability, the use of any weapon to carry out state sponsored assassination is an addictive drug for world leaders bent on military domination of the planet.

3) Drones are lousy weapons for fighting insurgencies because they are inaccurate and they create enemies when we kill the wrong people. The use of remote drones in targeted assassinations act as a recruiting tool for the very militants we are attempting to kill.

4) Finally, when used as a weapon of war, drones are excellent for blowing things up. However, they are useless for putting things back together, thus they are lousy as instruments of Statecraft, nation building, and bringing stability to a region.

The use of unmanned armed drones as tools for targeted assassination virtually assures instability and lawlessness in a region. The president, the Pentagon, and the manufacturers of unmanned areal vehicles may try to push them on us as effective at producing peace. However, the truth is the escalating use of unmanned assassination drones as a substitute for diplomacy will produce a much, much more dangerous world and make us all less safe.

Tags: Assassination, diplomacy, Drone Diplomacy, Ethics, government, law, Morality, Thomas Vincent, Vincent, Wall Street Journal, war, warfare
Posted in Daily Rant, Ethics, Politics, law, warfare | 2 Comments »

Morality of War in Afghanistan

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Since the dawn of history, men have fought wars of aggression.

And since the dawn of history men have sought to justify those wars…

They have failed.

There is no moral justification for starting a war. None. While there can be honest debate about the acceptability of violence in defense of one’s life or liberty, it is a perversion of the concept of morality to claim that it is right and just to be the aggressor and preemptively attack another nation for any reason whatsoever. Whether you call it “making the world safe for democracy,” or whether you claim you are simply seeking “lebensraum,” sending soldiers into battle without provocation is wrong. It is immoral, and yes it is evil.

Fact: Since the events of Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941, no nation has attacked the United States. Despite prodigious amounts of government spin, in the past fifty years none of the conflicts in which we have engaged have been in defense of our shores. In every conflict since WW II in which the United States has begun, we have been the aggressors. Thus with regard to the defense of this nation, none of the wars and invasions we have begun were justifiable.

As I said, bullies of the past have always tried to justify their aggressive acts. The chief difference I see between wars of the past and today’s conflict is that today, those in power don’t even try to justify their actions. Take General David Petraeus for example. In a recent interview with David Gregory of MSNBC, General Petreaus spoke out on the “big issues” of the conflict in Afghanistan. He talked about “the public’s frustration with the war, the strength of the Taliban, the government of Hamid Karzai… and whether President Obama’s July of 2011 withdrawal timeline will hold.” In addition, Gregory added his own straw-man question to the mix: “Is nation building possible in the badlands of Afghanistan?”

However, no question was raised in the interview of the rightness of the United States’ cause. Not one word was devoted to the moral justification of invading and occupying Afghanistan, putting our soldiers in harm’s way, and bankrupting the country in the process.

Instead, Petraeus talked about the “importance of the mission” and how hard that mission was. But the rightness of the mission? Un uh. No way.

In addition to being morally vague, General Petraeus’ comments on the war were so ambiguous as to be practically double speak:

“What we have are areas of progress, we have to link those together, extend them and then build on it because, of course, the security progress, as you noted earlier is the foundation for everything else, for the governance progress, the economic progress, the rule-of-law progress and so forth… the trick is to get all of it moving so that you’re spiraling upward where one initiative reinforces another.”

If my head did much more “spiraling upward” it would leave my shoulders altogether.

Not only can’t Petraeus identify the moral underpinning of America’s cause, he has trouble identifying what constitutes success:

“…but if you could reduce the level of violence by some 90 to 95 percent, as was the case in Iraq, to below a threshold which allows commerce and business and outside investment to take place, where there is an election that’s certainly at least elected representatives, and now you have to see if they can come together and form a government that is still representative of and responsive to the people, as was the previous one. If that can all be achieved there, that would be a reasonable solution here as well. “

The hell with peace; the hell with freedom; the hell with winning hearts and minds, the most important moral justification for all the death and destruction we are causing is so that commerce can resume?

“If Afghanistan can become the central Asian “roundabout,” to use President Karzai’s term, to where it can be the new Silk Road, think of the implications for that, recalling that, of course, Afghanistan is blessed with the presence of what are trillions, with an S on the end, trillions of dollars worth of minerals if, and only if, you can get the extractive technology, the human capital operated, the lines of communication to enable you to get it out of the country and all the rest of that.”

Is he serious? The moral purpose behind fighting and killing and dying in Afghanistan is so that we can dig up some minerals?

In an August 14 article in Huffington Post, entitled “Why Petraeus can’t make the sale” Author Dan Froomkin identifies Petraeus’ main problem as a simple one of facing up to reality.

“That reality, increasingly obvious to national security experts and the general public alike, is that no amount of good intentions or firepower is going to advance our fundamental interests in Afghanistan — and that as much as Petraeus might be able to achieve in the next six months, or a year, little to none of it is sustainable and most of it is, even worse, counterproductive.”

I believe Petraeus’ problem to be much more basic. If the General truly cares about “making the sale” for continuing to fight a war in Afghanistan then either he or President Obama must offer up a clear and unambiguous moral reason for fighting it.

And as the United States was the one who invaded and is currently occupying Afghanistan – as well as being responsible for inflicting much of the damage – I think that is a hard sell indeed.

Tags: 9-11, afghanistan, agression, attack, history, Moral, Morality, Obama, Petraeus, preemptive, sale, Terrorism, Thomas Vincent, Vincent, war
Posted in Daily Doubt, Ethics, Politics, warfare | No Comments »

The Obama Doctrine

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Is war just, or is it just war?

What we heard articulated today in the president’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech was nothing short of the Obama Doctrine — the most comprehensive view we’ve been offered yet of how the president views foreign policy — and how he sees himself within the pantheon of world leaders.
ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper

The Obama Doctrine. It sounds so noble, so statesman like. If there is a doctrine contained in Obama’s speech, when it deals with the subject of war, it doesn’t sound that much different than the Bush/Reagan doctrine. In essence, what Obama said to the Nobel Committee was: “Nonviolent peaceniks like Ghandi and Martin Luther King are all very well and good, however, the world’s a dangerous place full of bad people and the US will continue to go to war with anyone, at any time, for any reason that we deem “just.” – and we can think up a whole lot of reasons.

So exactly what doctrine is Obama supposed to have outlined? Let’s examine some of the things said in the speech.

1)“Evil does exist in the world.” Man is imperfect and there are limits to reason.

2) There are times when nations find “the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

3) The purpose of military action can extend “beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor.

4)”The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”

5)“Force can be justified on humanitarian grounds.”

“Evil does exist in the world.”
There are times when nations find “the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”
Taken together, the first two statements are very troublesome. Obama seems to be saying: 1. There are bad people in the world who won’t listen to reason. and 2. to deal with these people, nations are justified in “the use of force.” While I agree that there are plenty of imperfect, unreasonable, and even nasty people in the world that doesn’t justify classifying them all as “evil.” Nor does it provide moral absolution for nations that use force in order to deal with them.

The problem with these two statements – as with most political doctrines – is that they are conveniently vague. They allow Obama to perform the same moral gymnastics that George W. Bush practiced when he justified pre-emptive strikes as an acceptable strategy to deal with “evil doers.” Even more disturbing, however, is Obama’s oratorical sleight of hand. Placing “Hitler” and “al Qaeda’s leaders” in back to back sentences Obama infers that they are equal.

Even from a purely practical standpoint, they are in no way similar. Hitler was the leader of a large nation, a totalitarian regime, with a huge military machine at his disposal. Nazi Germany slaughtered and tortured millions. Al Qaeda is a small network of radical Islamic fundamentalists with no army, or navy that has to hijack passenger planes in order to attack us. They are not equivalent evils. But because Obama treats them as such it gives him license to use the same moral argument to support the use of massive military power against both.

The purpose of military action can extend “beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor.”
Extending acceptable military action “beyond self-defense,” is opening the lid to a Pandora’s box of inappropriate uses for our military might. Our army is not a police force. It is not intended to build hospitals, roads, schools, or nations. It has one legitimate purpose: to defeat enemy armies by force of arms. Taking soldiers who are trained to fight wars and telling them they are now supposed to “wage peace,” is akin to using an M-16 to pound nails. Extending the army’s mandate beyond self-defense is not only a bad idea for practical reasons, it also stretches the moral justification of military action past the breaking point. It is every bit as bad as condoning torture.

“The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”
“Instruments of war.” A curious phrase. Bunker busters, cluster bombs, depleted uranium shells, land-mines, these are some of the instruments of war currently used by the United States military in the Middle East. For Obama to stand and accept a peace prize while declaring that these horrific weapons have a useful, moral purpose in preserving peace is, in my opinion, the most repugnant and insensitive statement the president has uttered since he took office.

“Force can be justified on humanitarian grounds.”
Here again, what does he mean by “force?” What does he mean by “humanitarian grounds?” Is he trying to say that he thinks “just war theory” should be altered to make it Okay to send 100,000 soldiers to invade and occupy a nation for eight years merely because they harbored a group of extremists who hatched a plot to hijack some jet planes and fly them into buildings? The events of 9-11 were horrific acts. However, is the president trying to infer in his speech that anytime an al Qaeda like terrorist organization pops up we have the moral license, even the responsibility, to mobilize our massive military machine and invade yet another country?

Obama’s statements that the nature of future world conflicts, “…will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace,” are curious. While it displays an admirable intellectual curiosity of the type lacking in his predecessor, Obama seems to be developing a sort of “make it up as we go,” morality. In his excellent article in The Atlantic, David Brooks indicates that the evolution of some of Obama’s ideas on “practical morality” stem from his interpretation of the writings of Reinhold Neibuhr:

Niebuhr’s great foe was idealism. American idealism, he believed, comes in two forms: the idealism of noninterventionists, who are embarrassed by power, and the idealism of imperialists, who disguise power as virtue. David Brooks.

By his words, and by his actions, Obama is certainly not coming down on the side of non-intervention. But while he may not be as rabid as the Neo-Cons in seeing military power as virtue, by stating that “the use of force” is morally justified for an ever-expanding range of uses, he nonetheless is continuing to ally himself with those who feel that war is necessary, moral, and good. When the leader of a nation that spends more than half a trillion dollars on its military avers in public that military might is an efficacious means of combating evil, I think this should give the world pause.

President Obama can assert the morality of his actions as Commander-in-chief all he likes. He can try to claim the moral high ground by twisting and torturing the definition of what constitutes a “just war.” He can continue to claim that all the death and misery we visit on foreign countries is moral as long as we are working toward “…a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual…” But in the end, it all comes down to the USA declaring its right to launch unilateral pre-emptive wars against whomever we please, whenever we please.

To paraphrase the late George Carlin, in the future under president Obama, US foreign policy will continue to be one of: “bombing the crap out of brown people.”

Tags: Ethics, government, just war, Military, Morality, Obama, Peace, Policy, war
Posted in Ethics, Politics, warfare | 1 Comment »

Ethics and The War on Terror.

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Ethical quiz:

Suppose there is a militant leader in a foreign country who has stated publicly he wishes to kill Americans. He has guns and ammo and a ready supply of rabid followers. No doubt about it, he’s a bad guy. Imagine further, the C.I.A. knows where and when this man is going to be at a given location. Say they can put a sharpshooter in place, and assassinate him upon your order.

Would you do it?

Would you give the order to execute a man merely because he had stated a desire to kill American citizens? Would you consider it moral or ethical to execute someone merely because of something they would like to do?

I suspect that there are many in America who wouldn’t agonize too long over this type of decision. For the plethora of second amendment supporters out there the merest hint of danger would probably be enough for them to justify giving a sniper with a Bushmaster a green light to blow the guy’s head into a fine pink mist. Let the other poor bastard die for his country and all that. All’s fair in love and horseshoes.

Okay, now let’s back it up a tick:

Suppose you know the location where the man will be and even when he he’s going to be there. However, the only means of assassination at your disposal is to lob a grenade through the window. Would you do it then? If the attempt would almost certainly kill more people than just the man you are gunning for would it still be moral and ethical to go ahead? If you say yes to this one – and I mean no disrespect here – how many bystanders would you be willing to kill before your ethics and morality meter started to quiver?

Okay, now for the kicker:

Suppose you are only “pretty sure” this man will be in the house where and when you think he’ll be there. Suppose further the house is located in between an elementary school and a wedding chapel and oh, by the way, your only means of attacking him is with a missile fired from an unmanned drone circling high overhead, commanded by a pilot who is half a world away? Does this do anything at all to the needle on your moral compass?

This last one of course is a more or less exact description of where we find ourselves in the “war on terror.” In a curious bit of irony, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta went before Congress recently and related how he had dismantled a program set up by the Bush administration that was to have C.I.A. operatives identify and assassinate Al Qaeda leaders on the ground. At the same time Panetta gave his wholehearted support for a program of assassination using Hellfire missiles launched from Predator and Reaper drones flying at 20,000 feet that is virtually certain to kill way more innocent people than a sniper’s bullet ever could.

From a legal standpoint, the decision to dismantle the C.I.A. assassination program is understandable. It can be argued that targeted killing, such as that put forward for Al Qaeda terrorists, is prohibited by presidential orders that date back to the Ford administration. Presidentially ordered assassinations are, by definition, unethical and immoral. However, the decision to go with the drone assassination program instead places the Whitehouse on even shakier ethical ground. Though there is disagreement as to the amount of civilian casualties that have resulted from drone attacks – much of which stems from the CIAs own secrecy surrounding the program – no less an authority than advisor and strategist David Kilcullen admitted in an interview with the Financial Times in May that with regard to the whole drone program:
“US drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal areas aimed at hitting al-Qaeda and Taliban figures were counter-productive. They have an undeniable benefit, because we have disrupted AQ operations and damaged AQ cells in Pakistan. But they have a negative strategic effect in that they incite Punjabi militancy, which is the biggest problem in Pakistani right now. Mr Kilcullen said the hit rate on drone attacks was ‘unacceptably low’. He said the US had killed 14 mid-level or lower level al-Qaeda leaders since 2006 but the strikes had killed 700 civilians.”

“That’s a hit rate of two per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It’s not moral.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/46c20ab0-3f59-11de-ae4f-00144feabdc0.html

By any measure, making the linchpin of your war strategy one in which you create 98% collateral damage is beyond justification. Any domestic police force that wiped out 700 innocents in order to target 14 bad guys would itself be labeled criminal.

It strikes me that the dilemma in which we find ourselves in the Middle East is made much more intractable because the powers that be are totally dysfunctional about the morality, the legality and even the efficacy of the strategy and tactics they’re willing to use to fight the so called “War on Terror.” Eschewing torture then giving prisoners defacto life sentences with no charges, no defense and no trial is dysfunctional. Axing a targeted assassination program, saying America is not going down that road is a fine moral stance. But to then employ a remote weapon that kills 98 innocent civilians for every one terrorist leader is just plain nuts!

Can there be such a thing as an ethical war against a group such as Al Qaeda? Is there a moral way of battling an insurgency such as the Taliban? Can we defeat terrorism?

Perhaps.

But in my opinion victory over religious zealots armed with box cutters will never be accomplished with either an armed occupation force or an assassination program. Terrorism is, by definition, immoral. However, assassination programs are also immoral. There is no way of defeating immorality with more immorality. Only by removing our troops from foreign countries; only by engaging in moral and ethical activities like helping the local people build schools, roads, and bridges; only by improving the lives of ordinary Afghan and Pakistani citizens, giving them jobs and access to healthcare; only then will we see peace in the middle east.

We could do this. We could change direction. However, it is frankly impossible to achieve a just and moral outcome while paying $400 a gallon for gas to move our army around in a country like Afghanistan where the yearly per capita gross domestic product is only $429!

I know. It’s a radical notion for our army to accept, that their very presence in a country might actually be part of that country’s problem. It will take will to change. But it can be done. After all, as Martin Luther King said about another intractable conflict:

“If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who posses power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”

Tags: Al Qaeda, Assassination, Drones, Ethics, Morality, Peace, Politics, Terrorism, war
Posted in Daily Doubt, Ethics, Politics, Uncategorized, warfare | 2 Comments »

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Posts Tagged ‘Morality’

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