“Tonight there is no opposition party,” Republican Sen. Trent Lott announced after President Bush’s speech last Thursday. Although the collective urge for therapeutic “unity” is both predictable and understandable in the immediate wake of stunning calamity, Lott’s words should deeply alarm those who think of liberty and democracy as pretty good things.
Since Sept. 11 there has been much constructive talk about tolerance toward those who happen to share the cultural or national heritage of the perpetrators. But tolerance for diverse opinions is clearly an early casualty of the kind of war the Bush administration has in mind. In the days immediately following the attack, one could find thoughtful critiques of the U.S. response and its underlying policy only in the foreign press; American media, by and large, would have none of this.
Many believe it is ill-mannered or unpatriotic to be critical at a time when the fabric of our national community is so savagely torn by violence and sadness. Especially in those first few days, restraint is the better part of valor and civility, right? But the problem is that those first days are precisely when strategies of enormous consequence are formulated and set into (largely irreversible) motion. To say in the wake of a devastating external threat that dissenting tongues must be held is to cede a level of discretionary power to our leaders that neither our Constitution nor common-sense notions of a functioning democracy would grant. The clash of ideas in tragedy’s wake is painful, but vital.
Now that the distance from Sept. 11 has grown from days into weeks, voices of dissent are filtering into the mix of commentary, although not from people in a position to make a difference on the issues that matter most. There clearly remains what one New York Times report labeled a “moratorium on presidential criticism in the nation’s capital.” Skeptics challenging the Bush administration’s bellicose posture are getting some airtime, but they continue to run a gauntlet of character assassination from the likes of syndicated pundit Cal Thomas, who tagged critics of administration policy as “enemies of America’s promise [who] seek to undermine our resolve and unity.” The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer labeled efforts to explore the root causes of 9-11 as “moral obtuseness.”
So, in lieu of a substantial public conversation about our place in the world, the nation’s political and emotional capital is spent engineering and polishing George W. Bush’s new image as a tough, courageous leader. The speech he read last Thursday was effective for rallying the majority of viewers who see the world only through lenses of exceptionalism and retribution. One suspects it was far less successful at changing anyone’s mind about Bush’s painfully limited grasp of world affairs. In a bizarre attempt to make a virtue of ignorance, the resolutely loyalist Wall Street Journal editorialized last Friday that Bush’s willingness to make decisions without bothering to decipher complex issues is a “fundamental leadership advantage,” given that in times like these “the talent for appreciating ambiguity is no virtue.”
Some would say that whatever Bush’s intellectual shortcomings, what’s important is that Americans are overwhelmingly on board with the administration’s strategy. But a closer look at polling data suggests this is overstated. It is commonly reported that close to 90 percent of Americans endorse a military response. But a Gallup poll last week showed opposition rising to almost one-third when Americans are asked if they support military action that might last years or cost the lives of 1,000 U.S. troops. Clearly, a very substantial number of us are not comfortable with the kind of protracted military adventurism that the Bush administration seems to have in mind.
One promising development is that the frontal assault on civil liberties in the name of combating terrorism is being seriously challenged. Congress has a chance to moderate some of the administration’s more blatant attempts to sacrifice individual liberty on an altar of anti-terrorist surveillance and detention. Importantly, it is not just the civil libertarian left sounding alarms here. In the eminently conservative National Review last week, Dave Kopel wrote that “much of the legislation turns out to have nothing to do with fighting terrorism” and represents “a serious threat to the Bill of Rights.”
But on the broader matter of war and retribution, official Washington has little interest in reflecting on the hypocrisy of a worldview that flouts global arrangements on everything from the environment to ballistic missiles to an international criminal court, and then declares itself suddenly multilateralist when American lives and property are directly threatened. Neither the administration nor its so-called opposition has offered even a wisp of acknowledgment that this new world of terror and counter-terror is at least partially one of our own geopolitical making, the U.S. having spent decades and billions sowing seeds of rebellion and fundamentalism in its tenured role as arms merchant and dictator enabler in too many places.
This is not to place the blame for killing thousands with anyone other than those who steered planes into buildings. But if singular, ghastly events cannot induce us to question our assumptions and entertain systemic explanations, then what on earth will?
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