Where Left and Right Meet on Both Sides of the Debate

Well….since the string of comments has steered the topic off course….

@Poppa_T #126:

My reason for this belief is that we never really had “enemies” prior to us allowing our glorious leaders to manipulate us into becoming an interventionist nation and building Pax Americana starting in WWI.

As pointed out by retire, we’ve a long history as an interventionist nation.

And in today’s day and age of interconnected globalism, America absolutely should be exercising its muscle and influence upon the world. Not just at our borders. What happens elsewhere affects us. What happens here, also affects the rest of the world.

All nations try and exercise what influence they have upon the rest of the world, acting in their own self-interest. It’s not something unique unto the U.S.

Earlier, you also mentioned the phrase popular amongst Ron Paul supporters, no “foreign entanglements”. Washington’s Farewell Address has been misused and abused by those with a political agenda to take his quote out of the context in which he said it, and twist it to serve their own political purposes today.

Extrapolated from an anti-Ron Paul post back in 2007:

Robert Kaplan says,

people have this image of the U.S. military going all over the world as a busybody, propping up dictatorships. It’s so false. In fact, the only regimes we prop up through training missions are of certified democracies, certified by Congress, which we have not imposed on them, that they’ve evolved organically on their own as democracies.

The Savage Wars of Peace, by Max Boot:

Far from being isolationist before World War II and the formation of NATO, America from the very beginning of the Republic intervened in a nearly continual series of civil wars, coups, and hostage rescues. Starting with attacks on the Barbary Coast pirates between 1801 and 1805, the nation has always interfered in other nations’ business far from home.

Two generations of college students have been taught that all such “adventurism” is nothing but imperialism and running-dog capitalism–and Boot does not deny that states naturally send in their forces out of national interest rather than mere idealism. But he shows that the majority of the time the Marines intervened to stop the slaughter of civilians, to retaliate against the killing of Americans and destruction of their property, and to prevent chaos from spreading beyond a country’s borders. While such incursions often served the local property-owning elites and corrupt grandees, such interventionists as Thomas Jefferson, Chester A. Arthur, and Teddy Roosevelt assumed that order and stable governments were usually preferable to mass uprisings, constant revolution, and mob rule.

Dangerous Nation, by Robert Kagan:

Americans, in fact, have always defined their interests broadly to include the defense and promotion of the “universal” principles of liberalism and democracy enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind,” Benjamin Franklin declared at the time of the American revolution, and as William Appleman Williams once commented, Americans believe their nation “has meaning . . . only as it realizes natural right and reason throughout the universe”.

This is the real “traditional approach”: the conviction that American power and influence can and should serve the interests of humanity. It is what makes the US, in Bill Clinton’s words, the “indispensable nation”, or as Dean Acheson colourfully put it six decades ago, “the locomotive at the head of mankind”. Americans do pursue their selfish interests and ambitions, sometimes brutally, as other nations have throughout history. Nor are they innocent of hypocrisy, masking selfishness behind claims of virtue. But Americans have always had this unique spur to global involvement, an ideological righteousness that inclines them to meddle in the affairs of others, to seek change, to insist on imposing their avowed “universal principles” usually through peaceful pressures but sometimes through war.

This enduring tradition has led Americans into some disasters where they have done more harm than good, and into triumphs where they have done more good than harm. These days, this conviction is strangely called “neo-conservatism”, but there is nothing “neo” and certainly nothing conservative about it. US foreign policy has almost always been a liberal foreign policy. As Mr Will put it, the “messianic impulse” has been “a constant of America’s national character, and a component of American patriotism” from the beginning.

The other constant, however, has been a self-image at odds with this reality. This distorted self-image has its own noble origins, reflecting a perhaps laudable liberal discomfort with power and a sense of guilt at being perceived as a bully, even in a good cause. When things go badly, as in Iraq, the cry goes up in the land for a change. There is a yearning, even among the self-proclaimed realists, for a return to an imagined past innocence, to the mythical “traditional approach”, to a virtuous time that never existed, not even at the glorious birth of the republic.

This is escapism, not realism. True realism would recognise America for what it is, an ambitious, ideological, revolutionary nation with a belief in its own world-transforming powers and a historical record of enough success to sustain that belief.

Coming off of an interview with Robert Kagan, Michael Medved writes,

Ignoring the long record of American involvement in such conflicts in every corner of the globe, those who question our current world-wide role express reverence for a simple-minded (and non existent) tradition of isolationism. They cite George Washington’s words in his celebrated Farewell Address of 1793: “The Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible….’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.” Jefferson also warned against “entangling alliances,” at the same time he negotiated a vast expansion of U.S. territory with France, and pursued the daring and difficult Barbary Wars.

Even Pat Buchanan, the three time Presidential candidate most often identified as a contemporary advocate of “isolationism,” rejects the idea that the nation ever cowered behind its Atlantic and Pacific “water walls.” In his provocative and beautifully written book “A Republic, Not an Empire,” (1999), Buchanan argues: “The idea that America was ever an isolationist nation is a myth, a useful myth to be sure, but nonetheless a malevolent myth that approaches the status of a big lie…. What is derided today as isolationism was the foreign policy under which the Republic grew from thirteen states on the Atlantic into a continent-wide nation that dominated the hemisphere and whose power reached to Peking….To call the foreign policy that produced this result “isolationist” is absurd. Americans were willing to go to war with the greatest powers in Europe, but only for American interests. They had no wish to take sides in European wars in which America had no stake.”

To hammer home how wrong Ron Paul is on foreign policy and a romanticized non-existent isolationist/non-interventionist past, Mike Boyer at Foreign Policy Passport Blog writes,

1. Foreign Policy and the Constitution. Paul is what you might call a Constitutional originalist. He divines his governing philosophy from the Constitution and America’s Founders. But his understanding of their vision is profoundly flawed. Paul appears to believe the founders vested absolute authority for foreign-policy making in Congress, not the executive. “Policy is policy,” Paul wrote in 2006, “and it must be made by the legislature and not the executive.” But there’s almost no evidence the founders saw it in such simplistic, absolute terms. Law professor Michael Ramsey, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, recently noted (pdf) this in very eloquent terms in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Reasonable people can agree that Congress has failed its oversight responsibilities with regard to Iraq and the Bush Doctrine. But Paul’s thinking here is simply not supported by the weight of historical evidence.

2. “Noninterventionism.” This is the word Paul uses to describe his foreign policy, and he insists the term also encapsulates the vision of the Founders. While Paul claims “noninterventionism” is not isolationism, it sure sounds like it is. For instance, he even seeks to dismantle the Bretton Woods system of international cooperation born from the ashes of the Second World War (more on that below). Isolationism by any name, friends, is still isolationism. Sure, such sentiments were rampant in 18th and 19th century America and before WWII. The same sentiments are resurfacing today as a backlash against Iraq. Intelligent people can disagree about the Bush Doctrine’s place in history. But let’s not make up facts. The post-9/11 period has been filled with literature by such historians as John Lewis Gaddis and Walter Russell Mead debunking the notion that the founders were only concerned with domestic security and never saw an ideological component to America’s place in the world.

retire is correct when she makes mention that those Japanese officers convicted of war crimes were prosecuted for far more than waterboarding (and it is of significance to point out- as NanG did- that there is a vast difference between the water torture as carried out by them and the CIA program operating under the constraints of what was approved and laid out in the OLC memos).

aye’s past comment:

What I find more than a tad amusing is the eagerness of those who trot out the Japanese prosecutions as proof that waterboarding is “torture”.

The people who do that have never read up on the prosecutions and thus have never discovered that only two Japanese soldiers were actually prosecuted for waterboarding alone.

Of those two, only one, Yukio Asano, was found guilty. He was found guilty because he practiced waterboarding on a US civilian, a clear violation of the GC.

Captured U.S. soldiers, as uniformed, legal combatants, are granted POW status under the GC.

What happens when you grant non-uniformed terrorists the same legal cover? Of having the same exact POW protections as that given to soldiers whose nations are signatories to the GCs?

I don’t believe we’ve sacrificed our values because 3 HVTs were subjected to SERE-inspired waterboarding sessions.

You wrote in #120,

Such an experience might barely phase you or I, but for “Bobby” it would be her worst fears come to life so yes I think that it could be construed as torture by some.

By such a subjective criteria (not that I don’t think it holds validity), then do you suppose tickling can also rise to the definition of “torture”? How about the mere act of incarcerating someone, since that person may feel “mental anguish and suffering”, due to it? And if someone like KSM can be waterboarded 183 times (no, not accurately descriptive), have the presence of mind to count off seconds on his hand realizing that his CIA interrogator couldn’t waterboard him for more than a certain number of seconds, does that mean for KSM, waterboarding wasn’t torture? Because his threshold to tolerate it was greater than your average jihad joe?

Aqua brought up the spider example because one of the EITs approved of was the use of harmless insects, such as a caterpillar. Abu Zubaydah had such a fear; but in the end, that technique was not used on him.

Ditto in #95:

This does not change that the claim that Saddam and Al-Qeada had joined forces was sketchy at best, and there wasn’t anything ever found tied him to the 9/11 attacks (which was the reason Bush gave to restart the US Irag war.

Post that may be of interest.

Ditto #68:

The blanket wide scope of this dragnet is a violation of the 4th Amendment

How so? Is this “data mining” really an invasion of privacy? How is it any more so an invasion than reading the addresses on a letter? Now, if the letters were to be opened prior to obtaining a warrant…

Joel Brenner:

As for intelligence collection, members of the public who haven’t been paying attention now know two things that those who were paying attention have known for some time: First, that telephone companies keep call records, that the government has the legal ability to obtain and store those records and does so, and that those records are not protected under the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Call records show such things as whom you called, when and for how long. Unlike contents of a call or letter, they’re not constitutionally protected because they are like the information on the outside of an envelope, which lots of people can see and are thus not private.

Mukasey:

Nor do these programs violate the law. Start with the Constitution. The applicable provisions lie in two clauses in the Fourth Amendment. The first bars “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The second provides that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause” established by affidavit, and it requires that warrants describe with particularity what or who is to be seized, and from where.

Notice that the first clause does not forbid warrantless searches, only unreasonable ones. And the second simply creates a warrant requirement that is read, with some exceptions, to bar evidence at trial if it is obtained without a valid warrant. The first clause has been read to protect the content of communications in which the speaker has a reasonable expectation of privacy—telephone conversations being an obvious example. It does not protect the fact of communications. Even in routine cases, prosecutors may obtain permission from a court to monitor the source of incoming calls and the destination of outgoing calls, as well as their date and duration, solely by averring that the information has to do with a criminal investigation.

The Founders were practical men who understood the need for secrecy. Indeed, they drafted the Constitution with windows and doors closed against prying eyes and ears even in sweltering summertime Philadelphia, lest their deliberations be revealed—not only prematurely, but at all. They realized that the free exchange of ideas was crucial to the success of their awesome project, and that it could only be inhibited by the prospect of disclosure, whether future or present.

They also understood that the nation could not survive without preserving its secrets. Article I, Section 5 of the document they created requires that “Each House . . . keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy.” The Founders well understood the difference between government by consent and government by referendum.

Even zealots do not dispute that the Patriot Act, as amended, authorizes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that was established under FISA to grant permission to gain access to the information at issue here. As to intercepting the content of foreign communications, I think it is best put starkly: The Constitution and U.S. laws are not a treaty with the universe; they protect U.S. citizens. Foreign governments spy on us and our citizens. We spy on them and theirs. Welcome to the world.

Volokh Conspiracy:

In short, there’s less difference between this “collection first” program and the usual law enforcement data search than first meets the eye. In the standard law enforcement search, the government establishes the relevance of its inquiry and is then allowed to collect the data. In the new collection-first model, the government collects the data and then must establish the relevance of each inquiry before it’s allowed to conduct a search.

@Poppa_T:

Good Morning Wordsmith,

Good morning, Poppa! 😀

it seems that I have given a false impression of my position to many of you. I have always maintained that it is justifiable to use our military defensively.

I for one am not pegging you as a kumbaya dude. 🙂

The difference between then and now is that we back then we retaliated against the people who were actually responsible for attacking us. The 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudi, not Iraqi or Afghan.

Their nationality is not as important as their embracement of al-Qaeda theology, which, like Islam itself, knows no national boundaries. It’s the religion that ties them together. So an American Muslim, such as Awlaki or Gadahn, can be embraced as a brother by others in the global jihad movement.

Certainly the nationality of the 9/11 hijackers did not call for us warring with Saudi Arabia, did it? (Al Qaeda’s violence and that of the jihad movement have often been directed at Saudi Arabia and other secular Muslim governments by disgruntled Islamists who advocate a more puritanical strain of Islam to govern through strict adherence to their brand of Sharia). And as Another Vet brings up, going after al Qaeda central in Afghanistan with an uncooperative Taliban government?

Example, our interventionist policies supported Osama Bin Laden against the USSR

This is a form of distortion that critics of American foreign policy make: That the CIA “created” or funded bin Laden. We did nothing of the kind. bin Laden funded his own Arab group (who were not very effective, btw). We supported the Afghan mujahadeen, a number of whom became the Northern Alliance, along with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir”. He remained our ally up until his assassination 2 days before 9/11/2001.

Do you feel that communist aggression should have been left unchecked by us? That it was of no concern to us what happened to other countries, including allies? Should we disentangle ourselves today of alliances that would have us come to the aid and military defense of nations like Germany, Japan, South Korea, Tiawan, Israel? Is there more global stability or less when America involves itself in the affairs of the world and intervenes, militarily and otherwise?

and Saddam Hussein against Iran.

Had Jimmy Carter given support to the Shah, another imperfect dictator, and intervened on his behalf, where do you suppose Iran might be today? Would Iran and the world be better off than what we have had to deal with in the 30 years since? It’s because we lost a valuable ally in Iran that we lent limited support to Saddam.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with making temporary alliances to deal with the crises of the times. We allied ourselves with Stalin against what we deemed to be the greater threat. Were we wrong? Because what followed was the Cold War, repercussions of which were the Korean War, Vietnam, support for the Afghan resistance against the Soviets which people want to claim was the CIA’s creation of bin Laden, etc.

There are no permanent friends and alliances. Only temporary ones. Britain was once an enemy, and is today a friend. Same with Japan and Germany. Someday, they may once again become enemies. Does that somehow invalidate our previous friendship and alliances? As if somehow we “created monsters” by former help? It’s such stuff and nonsense!

As for the water-boarding issue. Wordsmith you stated that a Japanese soldier was convicted specifically for that crime? Thank you, I didn’t know that. I was only aware that water-boarding was defined as torture and used as to help convict Japanese War criminals.

Reread Aye’s comment more carefully.

Actually, in none of the cases I’ve seen regarding the prosecution of Japanese officers, were they prosecuted for water torture alone. Water torture was cited as part of a broader case. I wonder if aye has links to what he read.

Regarding the case of Yukio Asano and 3 Japanese officers, what they did to American POWs bears nothing at all in resemblance to what our CIA interrogators did. Please compare the “water cure” description to that of CIA waterboarding. It’s apples and oranges with the only relationship being that both apples and oranges are fruit. Again, gradations matter. Also, purpose and intent. The CIA did not “torture” for the sake of gratuitous torture; nor was the purpose to seek confessions. As you probably know, I’ve several blogposts on the topic.

As I posted earlier torture is defined by US law, you may disagree with the definition but that doesn’t change the facts

And you may disagree with the legal justifications obtained by the Bush WH and the CIA, but that doesn’t change the fact that they had legal cover from the Justice Department for the CIA program to go forth. None of the techniques used by the CIA meet the standard of torture in U.S. law.

There were serious deliberation regarding where the line in the sand should be drawn on what is morally and legally permissible. You might disagree with where that line in the sand was moved to; but it’s still a line in the sand beyond which we did not cross. What’s harmed America’s image is that instead of defending such things as the CIA program and the detention facilities at Gitmo, we hyperbolize that the EITs used to interrogate HVTs was gratuitous torture; that Gitmo is no different than Soviet Gulags; that we went into Iraq for revenge. These are all distortions and exaggerations that propagandize and are responsible for tarnishing America’s image. The wild coverage of abu Ghraib did more for al Qaeda recruitment than the reprehensible abuses that actually did take place.