Good Question
'How the protection of ''our freedom'' -- the freedom of 5 percent of humanity -- came to require having American soldiers ''across the globe'' is hardly debated by our elected officials.' - Susan Sontag in the New York Times Magazine

The End of an Era

We are witnessing the second phase of the closing of the post World War II era in international affairs. Within the western world, it was an "era of good feelings" toward international leadership by the United States. The first phase of the demise of the era was the fall of the Soviet Union, unwittingly midwifed by Mikhail Gorbachev, and forever iconized in photographs of celebrating Germans tearing down the Berlin Wall. This second phase has been unwittingly midwifed by George W. Bush, and will forever be iconized in photographs of American war crimes at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (and, I expect, images yet to come, of global anti-American sentiment with a vehemence and on a scale never before seen).

This epochal change marks a time of great danger for the United States and the world. The best contribution that the U.S.A. can offer to international stability in this new context is restraint in international affairs, equivalent to the restraint in domestic policy exercised by Mr. Gorbachev during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Any action premised on belief that the good of the world depends on prompt, forceful reassertion of American global dominance in the face of the collapse of American foreign policy's legitemacy in the eyes of the world would be deluded and dangerous - and would be just the sort of thing to be expected from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. We can only hope, pray, and exercise every means that citizenship provides to ensure that the U.S.A. will be blessed, during the remainder of this transition, with a leader as stubbornly, fundamentally decent as Mr. Gorbachev.

What Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld need to know
"War is too terrible to be waged willy-nilly...there must always be an ethically or morally sound reason for opening the spigots to such horror." - Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert, in the New York Times

Tough Sanctions
It's been widely announced in the press that President Bush has imposed sanctions on Syria. You've got to read the fine print to learn that trade in telecommunications equipment and aircraft parts are exempted from the sanctions.

Kerry's Macho Moment
John Kerry is quoted by the Associated Press today as warning his political opponents that if they want to attack his wife, "they're going to have to go through me." Why didn't he say, "My wife is a thoughtful, articulate woman who's not afraid to speak on camera, and she's more than able to hold her own without my help"?

Military Intelligence and Prisoners of War
An argument frequently heard from non-military commentators in recent days explains that pressure on U.S. military prison guards to mistreat Iraqi and Afghan prisoners arose from the urgent need for intelligence which could save many American lives, intelligence which could potentially be extracted from the prisoners by means of torture. Such arguments neglect to state what should be obvious but apparently is not: this pressure always exists, and always has existed, in every situation where armed forces who are in harm's way take prisoners of war who may possess valuable intelligence - that is, in virtually every situation where armed forces take prisoners of war.

A View from the Pentagon

Quoted from the Washington Post:

'A senior general at the Pentagon said he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat. "It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this," he said. "The American people may not stand for it -- and they should not."

'Asked who was to blame, this general pointed directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. "I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion," he said. "Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice." '

Neoconservatives have been given enough rope, and they have hanged themselves

The consistent aim of neoconservatism since the Viet Nam war has been to demonstrate, to ourselves and the world, that the U.S. has lost neither the will nor the ability to apply American military force in support of America's national interest - defined in the broadest possible terms - around the globe. No American president has more closely aligned himself with that agenda than George W. Bush.

David Brooks is the resident token neoconservative at the New York Times. Here is what he is writing today:

"No matter how Iraq turns out, no president in the near future is going to want to send American troops into any global hot spot. This experience has been too searing."

American Values
During Donald Rumsfeld's hearing before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee today, Senator John Warner said that abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in uniform "contradicts all the values we Americans learn." It doesn't contradict the belief which gave rise to the deliberate, constitutional separation of powers in our government. That belief holds that any person or group must be expected to abuse power in the absence of some other person or group with a competing interest, wielding power equal to that which is to be restrained. Those in this president's administration, like Rumsfeld, who fought to prevent civilian review of military detentions and tribunals must have believed that at some point since the founding of the republic, we Americans have become so virtuous that abuse of power by Americans unrestrained by any countervailing power need no longer be considered a likelihood against which prudent planners ought to build barricades. That seems to be the main "value" we Americans have learned since the Civil War, and we need to unlearn it, and rediscover the realistic beliefs about the predictable unreasonable selfishness of all human beings which shaped our Constitution. Belief that "we" are more virtuous than "them" is not a peculiarly American value. It's as old, and universal, as the human race, and not the tiniest bit as profound as many genuinely foundational American values which even self-professed conservatives seem no longer to remember.

Cultural Coherence
In the little town of 2,000 where I live, vandals trashed the local Southern Baptist church 9 days after the massive April 25 abortion rights march in the nation's capital. They left behind a message: "Hell [hath] no fury like mine." I have no reason to link the two events in terms of cause and effect, but it is clearly the case that they are two coherent expressions of the same current within our culture. Pro-abortion organizations like the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights argue that any legal restriction on any abortion procedure is an infringement of the personal freedom and autonomy of women. It would not require an undue stretch of the imagination to envision a clique of drunken adolescents in the thrall of such arguments - kids who in an earlier age would have broken into a neighbor's garage and stolen his beer - deciding that a pro-life religious community like the Southern Baptist Convention, or even just belief in God and the sense of conscience which it ought to invigorate, represents evil in the form of a threat to their personal liberty and autonomy, evil that has no rights which they are bound to respect. When hedonism's freedom from constraint is the standard of virtue, the transcendent God who makes demands contrary to selfishness by means of an informed conscience is no less evil than the human child whose life is only comprehended as the persistently inconvenient byproduct of intense physical pleasure. We Americans have evolved into a higher form of life than those primitives who sacrificed their children on the altars of strange gods. We have become the strange gods themselves.

The Silver Lining in a Dark Episode for the USA
If the current scandal over mistreatment of POW's by US citizens in uniform demonstrates to Americans and the world that we lack the moral standing to justify acting as the world's moral and political cop when no one but ourselves and an embittered exile community favors our use of force, it will have done all of us an inadvertent service. Yes, we have a right to defend ourselves. In that respect we are no different than anyone else, nor need we claim to be. To the extent that our foreign policy goes beyond that and bases itself on a claim that our civic righteousness is exceptional, we are badly deluded.

Almost Done
Revelation of sickening but forseeable American abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq nearly completes the process by which President Bush's ill-conceived foreign policy is utterly squandering the USA's global political capital. This President has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by turning virtually unanimous global outrage at the 9/11 attacks on the USA into virtually unanimous global revulsion at American foreign policy, and in the process, performed the hat trick of making the principled sacrifices of three generations of Americans in two world wars and the cold war as meaningless as confederate dollars to our contemporaries around the world.