I mentioned in my last post the "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell, which I've been rereading lately (the main reason I didn't have a post together on Monday). While I'm still not convinced that the books are 'good' by any conventional standard, they do have the occasional flash of very keen insight so contrary to the general level of the books that I wonder if they slip in by accident (example: earlier today I read a passage where a character witnesses an orbital bombardment and muses that this is what hell must be: not a place of torment, but a place where death has come and gone and human hands have wiped away any trace that life - human or otherwise - was ever here. I had to stop and think about that one for a bit.)
Another bit that has stuck with me comes from an earlier book. A central theme, inasmuch as these books can be said to have themes, in the series is the conflict and mistrust between military and political institutions and mindsets. One character, attempting to explain the latter to the former, uses an interesting comparison. While military leaders must carefully husband their forces and, if necessary, risk and sacrifice them reluctantly and only in pursuit of essential goals, a political leader must do the same with his principles, defending and stewarding them until the day comes that they must be dearly spent for a more urgent purpose. I thought that was very insightful at the time, and the more I've thought about it sense, the more it has affected my understanding of both military and political conflict and leadership.
Which brings me to the present.
The latest scandal to rock Washington surrounds the long-in-development congressional report on the use of 'extraordinary interrogation techniques' in the early years of the War on Terror, before the very idea of a War on Terror became a punchline. It seems the report is finished or nearly so and will soon be released; it also seems that the CIA, unhappy with some of the documents the Senate got its hands on, has been hacking into senatorial computers to try to hunt down their sources. Since one of the primary purposes of the legislative branch is to conduct oversight on the activities of the executive branch (including the CIA), it should be apparent to anyone that allowing the executive branch to spy on the efforts of Congress to conduct said oversight is a major problem. It is my hope that enough outrage can be generated to force some changes, starting with the firings (and, ideally, criminal prosecutions) of the responsible parties, a very uncomfortable grilling and possible resignation for John Brennan, and in the long term, a greater consensus on the need to scale down the CIA in particular and the intelligence community in general. My expectations, of course, are much more limited than my hopes, but the story is still young; we'll see where it goes.
Earlier today, President Obama held a press conference in which he addressed both the CIA spying on the Senate scandal and the subject of the actual report. Here's one story that focuses on the most striking statement from that conference: "We tortured some folks." As the writer accurately says, Obama is better known for verbosity than simplicity in his speeches, so it's worth paying attention to anything he thinks is best expressed in just four words.
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I do not subscribe to the rather fatalistic common belief that all politicians are inherently power-hungry and corrupt. I do think that the exercise of political power has a strong tendency toward instilling those traits in its wielders, and I think that some systems of government are more likely than others to attract people inclined to power-seeking and corruption. In general, though, and particular in our particular democratic system, I actually think that most people get into politics out of idealism - a belief that their leadership can make their city/state/country better for everyone. As an extreme example, I present the 2010 class of freshmen Republican congress members, who for all their numerous and manifest faults have a pretty good track record of sticking to their particular political ideology, even to the extent of acting to get rid of things like earmark spending that have been traditionally used by members of congress to strengthen their political positions in their home districts. And even among idealistic beginning politicians, I think Barack Obama was a standout case for the strength of his personal ideals and principles when he ran for the presidency back in 2008.
It's been a rough six years for Obama, and the dictum about politicians from The Lost Fleet has certainly held true; he's had to relinquish a lot of those principles he had as a senator and candidate. One can argue about whether he spent them wisely or whether he made sufficient gains to merit their loss, but at this point in an 8-year double term, any president is going to be running low on the principles they took into office with them. The only way to avoid spending them is to refuse any action at all, which is what we've seen for four years from the Republicans in the House of Representatives, and to do that requires sacrificing the most important principle of all: the need and responsibility to try to solve the nation's problems as best you can.
But while Obama hasn't gone down that road, so many other things - his advocacy for civil liberties, his desire for bipartisanship, his plans to close Guantanamo - have been lost along the way, which I suspect grieves him at least as much as it does those of us who voted for him in 2008. That's why, for all the ways that I'm disappointed in Obama or disagree with the compromises he's had to make, I deeply appreciate that he still has the honesty and humility to admit that we screwed up when we tortured prisoners in the early 2000s. That for all the very valid reasons people thought they had at the time, we crossed the line.
It helps, of course, that this happened in the previous administration, and when talking about the CIA's recent shenanigans with senate computers, his language is considerably more weasel-y ('very poor judgment' is the LEAST you should have to say about intelligence agencies that spy on the branches of government charged with exercising oversight on them, IN THE ACT of exercising said oversight). But I also respect that he's not throwing the Bush administration under the bus, which, whether justified or not, has been a major part of his political platform. The government - for reasons that seemed necessary at the time - broke faith with our traditions and our principles. That is a national shame, and requires a national response. Although I generally am disgusted by the government's unwillingness to impose personal consequences on its agents who do things like this (which I expect will be true of the current CIA/Senate scandal as well), I think Obama has been right not even to try to seek criminal or civil punishments for the people who authorized and conducted waterboarding and such activities. The rancor and division such an enterprise would entail would be severe, and in the end, the only likely victims would be low-level officials and actors who merely carried out decisions made high above their pay grade. (That does not excuse them, but squishing the little guys would represent little, if any, disincentive for future decision makers in similar situations, which should be our primary goal.)
As Obama said in his press conference, America should be judged not just by how we act when things are going well, but by how we act when things get tough. We failed at that in the aftermath of 9/11. I would hope that we will do better the next time something like this comes to pass. Perhaps this congressional report will help in that regard; perhaps the CIA and its sister agencies will require more structural changes to make sure that this kind of overreach (which, again, seems still to be happening) are averted in the future. But the first step in solving a problem, as we all know, as admitting that we have one, and I'm glad that President Obama, in his capacity as the political and moral spokesperson of America, was able to find the four words that we still need to hear. I'm glad that he's managed to hold onto enough of those 2008 ideals to be able to say with assurance, this was wrong, and next time we'll do better.
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