Response To Kevin Drum

by tristero

Kevin asks liberal bloggers to respond to a hypothetical and I will cheerfully do so, although my argument won’t please Kevin, I think:

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we had pretty good intelligence telling us that a bunch of al-Qaeda leaders were in the house we bombed. And let’s also assume that we did indeed kill al-Masri and several other major al-Qaeda leaders. Finally, let’s assume that the 18 civilians killed in the attack were genuinely innocent bystanders with no connection to terrorists.

Question: Under those assumptions, was the attack justified? I think the answer is pretty plainly yes, but I’d sure like to see the liberal blogosphere discuss it. And for those who answer no, I’m curious: under what circumstances would such an attack be justified?

My answer, which will surprise no one who knows my writing, is that what Kevin has written is so loaded that it is utterly incoherent as a spur to an honest discussion of terrorism and what to do about it. The only appropriate way to answer is ask the questions that should be asked in the first place, the ones that are being sidestepped. To explain:

Although it seems there are two questions here, there are exactly no real questions being asked. In fact, Kevin simply has crafted a blunt accusatory phrased as a question which can only elicit one possible answer: his. He’s really saying, roughly, “You’d be out of your mind not to bomb them, even if 18 innocents died. Thousands, if not millions, of lives, will be spared.”

The question, “Was the attack justified?” is not meant to be seriously disputed and a little bit of thought will show that it never can be. Let’s just say you answer no and with tremendous eloquence you discuss the morality of it, invoking not only the Bible, but the Bhagavad Gita and a few scientific studies of moral dilemmas. It’s all meaningless, for all Kevin needs to do is follow up with, “Okay, let’s say the people in that building were putting the finishing touches on a plan to nuke Boston. Would you now say it’s justified?” And if that doesn’t change your mind, Kevin can simply continue to up the ante – in the house, say, was enough Chemical W to obliterate the Midwest for generations. Eventually, even you will be forced to abandon your objections.

But what happens if you agree with Kevin that the attack was justified? Well, an opponent can easily play this game, too. Simply respond with the opposite extension of the hypothetical. “Okay, let’s say those 18 killed included your Mom, your Dad, your brother, two sisters, and your favorite cousins. Was it still justified to attack that house?” And sooner or later you will end up saying, no it wasn’t justified.

And around and around you’ll go, fine tuning the hypothetical to provide you with exactly the answer you want. It only looks like a moral dilemma but really, it isn’t. A moral dilemma happens in the real world, not in hypothetical situations. Kevin’s hypothetical is a setup. In fact, and this really should be patently obvious, it isn’t even Kevin’s hypothetical, but the Bush administration’s, a hypothetical they are asserting actually occurred. And while they’re marketing it as likely fact, this situation doesn’t resemble genuine moral dilemmas I know, which are far more complex than a carefully constructed hypothetical which this clearly is. In other words, the story of the attack and its justification is a lie.

The question Kevin asked is precisely the one Bush wants us to ask. They have composed this “justification” for the attack which they expect will meet the minimum standards necessary for some dispassionate observers to conclude that yes, it just might be worth it to have unfortunately killed all those innocent civilians. But the closer you look at the story, how it developed, how it’s being described, the more bogus it seems. For example:

Mysteriously, the bodies of the targeted terrorists were removed before they could be identified. The US government, quite skillfully, has refused to confirm or deny the latest Pakistani story which originally contended it was al Zawahiri but now it’s a mad bomber genius, al Qaeda’s own Unabomber, who was – ever so ironically – blown to bits. Surely, that’s worth 18 innocent lives, yes?

And that, plus other peculiarities, is why I don’t believe a word of it. It’s too pat, too perfect a concretization of a carefully crafted arm chair accusatory skewed towards only one right answer – Bush’s – and as details emerge it can be easily adjusted to make that answer even more inevitable. And tellingly, the structure of the Pakistan assertion combined with a US refusal to confirm easily enables the story to be disowned a few months from now, when no one’s paying much attention.

Am I saying that there is no way in hell the story put out by the Pakistanis and the Bushies could be true? What I’m saying is this: the story of 18 innocents sacrificed to eliminate an Evil Bombing Genius is so perfectly tailored to fit the moral theorizing of amateur philosophers rather than any possibly real conflict with al Qaeda that it resembles more the fake Jessica Lynch heroism stories than the real Lynch story.

This is merely Bush propaganda at its most cynical and crude. Frankly, I’m amazed that Kevin asked precisely the question Bush wanted us to ask, a question posed only so that outrage over American bombing of civilians – a war crime if deliberate – would dissipate. I’m also amazed, in fact saddened, that PZ Myers didn’t realize this was was a con and chose to respond as if it were a serious question designed to “engage” a debate about national security and its tradeoffs. PZ didn’t realize the fundamental bogosity of the question.

But while Kevin may be naive when it comes to accepting the terms of the Bush administration for debate – and he is, as his pre-invasion support for the war shows – he is no Bushite. In fact he is probably after a deeper question here: How should al Qaeda be confronted? What techniques and strategies will not only neutralize al Qaeda’s ability to strike but eliminate al Qaeda-ism as a serious danger? That’s a question I’d like not only liberal bloggers to discuss; I’d like the government of the United States to address it directly instead of spewing an endless stream of third rate propaganda intended only to make it impossible for their domestic political opponents to object to their cockmamie plans.

Perhaps Kevin is also posing a meta-question here: How can liberals construct narratives that are rhetorically as slippery as the rightwing, like this one about the botched bombing? That is another very good question. Personally, I lean towards crisply telling the truth no matter where the chips land. I’m not sure much more is required to bring down Bush and Bushism for good. It would be nice if a political party did that in a consistent fashion, just as an experiment some time.

(updated immediately after posting to fix grammar and clarify some subsidiary points.)