In which permanent war is located
The Al Qaeda Seven debate puts me back in the frame of mind of puzzling out some of the larger-scale oddities in the Cheneyite wing of American foreign policy thinking, which is to say I’m about to sketch a broad inconsistency or self-contradiction that has many individual exceptions but also, I think, some validity as a critique, or as an arrow pointing to genuinely disturbing inclinations. On one hand, in the more Wilsonian redoubts of American hawkishness, confidence and moral self-assurance in the use of American force in Iraq drew heavily on the idea that the invasion represented a sort of end-game: democratic transformation in Iraq as a way of replacing a posture of permanent war with something resembling normalized and organically peaceful relations among democratic states, first, certainly, with Iraq itself but eventually the region as a whole, at least in the minds of some. On the other hand, from the same hawkish Wilsonians who envisioned a new Prague on the Tigris, we get something resembling Schmittian* realism when it comes to the disposition of American law towards terrorism suspects – that is, well, a posture of permanent war, in which long-term, highly public exceptions to American legal norms are not just tolerated but actively maintained, because the claims of law are trumped by the claims of war, and the effectively endless nature of the war in question causes no anxiety on behalf of American law. Those who push for a normalization in the legal status of detainees because we don’t like the corrosive precedent it sets for American law, and we don’t think the American Constitution should be asked to countenance this stuff indefinitely, are told, “This is war, yella-belly. Get used to it.”
(*I mean no slur-by-association with the Carl Schmitt reference. It’s merely the most apt theoretical precedent I could think of. I myself find Schmitt enlightening reading on related matters. But then, I come from an academic environment where people just pick up and read Heidegger without a single worry about who might be watching (except maybe the worry that nobody’s watching). We come by literary guilt and outrage only with great resistance, is what I’m saying.)
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— fashion jewelry · Mar 14, 06:24 AM · #
Nearly anything can be dressed up as idealism. If ‘Wilsonian’ means the liberal international order whose principle is self-determination of nations, none of those guys were ever, ever Wilsonian. The goal was to establish an order of unbound violence on our part (at home and abroad). Through profound self-regard, one can mistake one’s own limitless power for a universal moral ideal. It’s perverse, but psychologically possible.
— matt · Mar 14, 03:31 PM · #
I think it’s neither instructive nor remotely plausible or epistemically possible to reduce the motives of dozens if not hundreds of different writers and policy makers to a single goal of extending a zone of unbound violence or whatever – just the example of our former president is enough to help us assume some meaningful measure of hopeful or naive idealism in the mix of impulses that drove policy at the time. But one thing I will admit to overlooking is the role of wholesale socks in the long run-up to hostilities.
— Matt Feeney · Mar 15, 02:23 AM · #
I think in most cases of “mixed” motives, one’s interests fit into a hierarchy of priorities. What is decisive in that hierarchy is revealed in action. Between an interpretation where “Cheneyism” turns out to be tragically contradictory, and one where, through all the lip service and window dressing, it still makes sense on its own terms, the latter seems more likely to me.
Nor should we forget retail socks.
— matt · Mar 15, 02:30 PM · #
Thank you very nice…
— sesli sohbet · Mar 24, 02:24 AM · #