Obama v. Cheney

There aren’t too many days like the 21st of May 2009 in the political life of this nation. A popular American president was compelled to sequentially debate a disgraced vice-president over an issue—torture—that has destroyed America’s credibility in the world.

The continued public existence and eminence of a man, that even many Republicans admit is a troglodyte, attests to the fact that the United States has not ‘moved on’ from the Bush-Cheney era.

Cheney made the absurd assertion that “for all that we've lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings.” But that’s exactly what we’ve lost in America, and we lost it before Bush and Cheney were elected the first time, or they could not have been elected at all.

One of the best ways to conceal a truth is to speak a half-truth. There are two comfortable half-truths about the Bush-Cheney period in American history. Both purposely miss the main truth.

The first is that Obama’s election represented a true break with the Bush era of illegal invasions, torture and rendition, and wiretapping of anyone, citizen or not, that the American government deems a threat.

The second comfortable notion is that the Bush Administration was ‘gradually transforming’ after America was ‘blindsided’ by the 9.11 attacks. In this view, Obama has continued with the ‘evolution’ of Bush’s policies on torture and other cornerstone issues of domestic and foreign policy.

The second theory is closer to the truth, but it is even more disturbing for being so.

It’s one thing not to release more photos of prisoner abuse and torture; it’s another to sign on to a policy that turns 800 years of habeas corpus on its head. This is not the change we’ve been hoping for.

The specious argument that ‘we are a nation at war’ deliberately obscures the real issue, and the question: Are we, as a nation and international community, going to live by the rule of law, or not?

Half way Obama dropped the phrase ‘war on terror,’ but kept the policies behind it. The Bush and now Obama approach to terrorism has only managed to metastasize al Qaeda, and destabilize a region stretching from Syria to Pakistan.

Obama had the chance for a genuine break with the Bush Administration’s feckless policies regarding terrorism, but opted for a change in rhetoric over a change in reality. It turns out that Obama reflects a worldview not so different from George Bush’s, which was based on the idea that in politics, perceptions always trump principles.

In retrospect (yes, it’s only been a hundred and some odd days since Obama took office, but in our accelerated world, 100 days is equal to 1000 a generation ago) Barack was constitutionally incapable of radical change. Last week, by simply standing rhetorically toe-to-toe with Cheney, Barack lost.

The ‘war against terrorism’ is not a war at all; it’s a police action. It may have been necessary to undertake a police action to dislodge the Taliban in Afghanistan and bring bin Laden and his gang of terrorist criminals to justice (something non-coincidentally we still haven’t managed to do). But it was completely unnecessary, not to mention illegal and amoral, to invade Iraq. Now both police actions are bleeding America dry.

By definition, a state cannot wage war against a stateless entity. For the ‘sole remaining superpower’ to maintain that it is still doing so nearly eight years after being attacked with box cutters is a lie that not even ancient Rome could have perpetrated.

Deciding where al Qaeda suspects in American, Pakistani, or God knows who’s custody will be kept over the long term is “extremely, extremely sensitive right now,” a senior American military official said. He added, “They’re bad dudes. The issue is: where do they get parked so they stay parked?”

The caliber of a society is determined by how it treats the worst of its citizens. America incarcerates people by the hundreds of thousands, many of them non-violent offenders, in hellholes of violence and rape. And that doesn’t even touch on the death penalty.

The same principle of humane treatment applies in our de facto global society as well. And in an increasingly stateless world, the rule of law is all the more essential, especially since it’s being eroded by states everywhere in the name of security.

The country that used to be the world’s leader in promoting human rights is still leading their erosion. “Extraordinary rendition,” which is continuing by the CIA under the Obama Administration, is actually an ordinary abuse of power by a nation-state.

The irony is that Cheney is right—there is no middle ground in dealing with evil. That includes not just al Qaeda however, but also the black current in American consciousness Cheney represents.

Because there is no middle ground in meeting evil, does not mean evil can only be met with evil. On the contrary, faced with evil is precisely when the individual or a people must be most careful with the means used to meet it, lest we become evil ourselves.

Hence there is an absolute requirement for the rule of law, nationally and internationally.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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