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elfsI recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about the progress being made in Iraq. I said that I thought it was so far tenuous and difficult to accept, that we had traded a secular strongman opposed to Iran with a theocratic strongman friendly to Iran, that we had an awful lot of dead and injured Americans for so minor a victory. We had fallen right into Bin Laden's trap-- for a few hundred thousand dollars on his end, he picked exactly the right president to taunt into an overreaction than bogged our country down in multi-trillion dollar wars and distracted the machinery of government from the responsibilty of overseeing the markets or maintaining the infrastructure. Too busy both prosecuting the war and justifying its overreach, the Bush Administration treated the destruction of New Orleans, the Iowa floods of 2008, the Minnesota bridge collapse, the Sago mine disaster, and the Tennesee Valley toxic coal ash disasters as acceptable collateral damage during its project to establish the New American Century.
He was adamant that what we had done in Iraq was the right thing. After all, what about all those purple fingertips? That was admirable wasn't it? When it came down to it, he said, he was "a small 'd' democrat."
I am not.
I am a small 'r' republican.
The major distinction between democracy and republicanism is this: In a democracy, power is derived soley from the expressed will of the people, without any intermediary power whatsover. In a republic, however, the power of the people to change the laws, to allocate powers and resources to themselves and to others, is strongly mediated by a a body of laws arranged in a heirarchy of criticality: the more critical the laws to the healthy operation of the nation, the harder they are to change. Without these conditions, democracy is the rule of the mob: convince enough of the mob, and you end up with an autocracy, rule at the whims of one man.
Before you can have an enduring democracy, you must have a republic. Iraq does not have a republic. It is not just that there has to be a constutition and laws and the heirarchy of criticality: there must also be laws in place to curtail corruption and, among both the bureacracy and the citizenry, a tradition of respecting those laws.
Transparency Internation lists Iraq as among the five most corrupt nations on Earth, and Global Initiative states that there is no effort in Iraq to instill integrity in the bureaucracy or respect for the rule of law among the citizenry. Nouri al-Maliki, our man in Iraq (except when he's not), re-instated a Saddam-era law giving him the right to review and shut down any investigation into corruption among any of his officials.
For the past six years, the United States has not been much better. I was absolutely grateful when Obama said we "reject the false choice between our security and our ideals." Those ideals are enshrined in our constitution, and our laws. We have always, as a nation, been what Reagan called a "shining city on the hill," and the past six years have tarnished that city, hopefully not beyond repair.
In the past few days there has repeated, vile commentary, most of it simply blogs but some of it public, stating unequivocally that some on the right hope and pray for an attack during Obama's administration as a sort of "I told you so" message. As a lesson: the United States cannot survive without torture, without extraordinary rendition, without warrantless wiretapping. The United States is doomed if the government cannot act without impunity so absolute we would never know it happened until we "disappeared." On Jan 21st, Bill O'Reilly said:
The people actually conducting interrogations tell us: torture doesn't work. The ticking time bomb scenario is a lie perpetuated by 24 and other ridiculous television shows. We do not need verschärfte Vernehmung to keep our country safe. We need our dignity, our honor, and our national soul.
Our soldiers are told to never compromise their principles. Most of them succeed, even when their lives are at risk, even when the bullets are flying are the bombs exploding. We do not honor them, or our nation, by cowering in our homes and asking them to commit horrors in our name. I believe in the rule of law. Those who break (or have broken) these laws, resting on principles that I hope are sacred to every American, ought to be prosecuted.
He was adamant that what we had done in Iraq was the right thing. After all, what about all those purple fingertips? That was admirable wasn't it? When it came down to it, he said, he was "a small 'd' democrat."
I am not.
I am a small 'r' republican.
The major distinction between democracy and republicanism is this: In a democracy, power is derived soley from the expressed will of the people, without any intermediary power whatsover. In a republic, however, the power of the people to change the laws, to allocate powers and resources to themselves and to others, is strongly mediated by a a body of laws arranged in a heirarchy of criticality: the more critical the laws to the healthy operation of the nation, the harder they are to change. Without these conditions, democracy is the rule of the mob: convince enough of the mob, and you end up with an autocracy, rule at the whims of one man.
Before you can have an enduring democracy, you must have a republic. Iraq does not have a republic. It is not just that there has to be a constutition and laws and the heirarchy of criticality: there must also be laws in place to curtail corruption and, among both the bureacracy and the citizenry, a tradition of respecting those laws.
Transparency Internation lists Iraq as among the five most corrupt nations on Earth, and Global Initiative states that there is no effort in Iraq to instill integrity in the bureaucracy or respect for the rule of law among the citizenry. Nouri al-Maliki, our man in Iraq (except when he's not), re-instated a Saddam-era law giving him the right to review and shut down any investigation into corruption among any of his officials.
For the past six years, the United States has not been much better. I was absolutely grateful when Obama said we "reject the false choice between our security and our ideals." Those ideals are enshrined in our constitution, and our laws. We have always, as a nation, been what Reagan called a "shining city on the hill," and the past six years have tarnished that city, hopefully not beyond repair.
In the past few days there has repeated, vile commentary, most of it simply blogs but some of it public, stating unequivocally that some on the right hope and pray for an attack during Obama's administration as a sort of "I told you so" message. As a lesson: the United States cannot survive without torture, without extraordinary rendition, without warrantless wiretapping. The United States is doomed if the government cannot act without impunity so absolute we would never know it happened until we "disappeared." On Jan 21st, Bill O'Reilly said:
I didn't like a line in the speech and I didn't nitpick it last night because I wanted to think about it for 24 hours about 'We don't have to compromise our values to protect ourself.' I think, sometimes, we do. I think sometimes we have to be realistic and do things that aren't Army field manual polite.Bill O'Reilly is simply wrong. And he's wrong in a way that, if he had his way, would ultimately destroy this county, would send us into a spiralling whirlpool of corruption, abuse, and national self-immolation.
The people actually conducting interrogations tell us: torture doesn't work. The ticking time bomb scenario is a lie perpetuated by 24 and other ridiculous television shows. We do not need verschärfte Vernehmung to keep our country safe. We need our dignity, our honor, and our national soul.
Our soldiers are told to never compromise their principles. Most of them succeed, even when their lives are at risk, even when the bullets are flying are the bombs exploding. We do not honor them, or our nation, by cowering in our homes and asking them to commit horrors in our name. I believe in the rule of law. Those who break (or have broken) these laws, resting on principles that I hope are sacred to every American, ought to be prosecuted.
