Damnation of Memory
Persecuting his predecessors, Obama would establish a poisonous precedent.
April 27, 2009 4:00 AM
By Victor Davis Hanson
article.nationalreview.com
The Obama administration apparently is giving a green light for liberal zealots in Congress and in the Justice Department to go after former Bush-administration lawyers.
We are supposed to damn these out-of-office lawyers because, in a time of national crisis, they gave advice that was construed as permitting torture. In three exceptional cases, interrogators waterboarded terrorist detainees — at least one of them responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. I emphasize the adverb “apparently,” because — as has been the case from campaign-finance reform to the imposition of the highest ethical standards in history for Cabinet nominations — with the Obama administration, any ethical proclamation is usually at odds with the unethical reality.
The administration should tread carefully, since it is about to embark on something nefarious that could tear apart the country.
POSTFACTO JUSTICE?
First, remember that the Constitution already permits ongoing audit of the executive branch. Watergate prompted Nixon’s resignation in face of impending impeachment. Iran-Contra almost destroyed the Reagan administration. President Clinton’s sexual antics with a female subordinate, and lying about it subsequently (speaking no truth to those without power), prompted his impeachment. Nancy Pelosi, who was briefed on the options of waterboarding in the dark days following 9/11, had ample opportunity to hold congressional hearings on Bush’s overemphasis on homeland security. Her outrage now rings false, an unseemly ploy to hide her complicity in what she once thought was responsible governance.
Such ongoing audit is not just the purview of congressional committee hearings. Between 2001 and 2008, Congress could easily have forced the appointment of a special ethics prosecutor, or even a torture prosecutor. Indeed, we have the frightening precedent of Mr. Fitzgerald’s convicting Scooter Libby, in which the supposedly covert Ms. Plame was not covert, and the supposed initial leaker was not the targeted Cheneyist, Mr. Libby, but the protected Powellist, Mr. Armitage.
In other words, Americans deal with perceived executive abuses, both effectively and clumsily, as they transpire. Such contemporary audit avoids the sort of postfacto, partisan damnation of former leaders so common in unstable dictatorships.
Prior to President Obama, Americans did not go in for this sort of thing, because we knew where it led.
Politics and conditions change. What a conservative administration does at a time of national crisis to protect the public may subsequently, in the calm of an eighth consecutive year of safety, seem in retrospect illiberal to a new liberal government.
Dwight Eisenhower did not open hearings to pave the way for indictment of federal officials of the Roosevelt administration or California lawyers working for Gov. Earl Warren, who in concert planned and carried out the forced internment of American citizens into camps. Much less did he bring Truman & Co. up on charges of using nuclear weapons to incinerate Japanese civilians.
Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge did not seek indictment of Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department, which did everything from strengthening segregation to jailing war critics and helping foster the odious vigilantes of the American Protective League. No subsequent administration tried to arrest Lincoln’s Cabinet members for signing off on the suspension of habeas corpus after Fort Sumter — unconstitutional decrees that eventually would mean some 15,000 Americans were held without charges for indeterminate length.
President Obama would not a want a putative President Palin to begin hearings on who ordered the targeted executions of two suspected Somali pirates, taken out in the middle of protracted negotiations. He would not wish a President Sanford one day to indict those Obama officials who approved the assassination-by-Predator-missile of suspected terrorists and their families in Pakistan — without habeas corpus, Miranda rights, or avenues of appeal. He would not enjoy a future President Giuliani’s bringing indictments of Obama officials over the NSA’s exceeding its allotted e-mail intercepts, or the CIA’s conducting overseas renditions of suspected terrorists without providing them the benefits of U.S. law.
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE
Second, Americans also do not Trotskyize our public sphere, in the manner of trying to erase memory itself — so familiar from the Soviet Union and the works of George Orwell. The Romans called this practice damnatio memoriae, “damnation of memory,” in which the new emperor, to prove that he had “reset” the government, and that the present ills were all the fault of his odious predecessor (e.g., “Domitian did it”), simply erased the memory of the prior ruler — even chiseling off imperial names from statues and decrees.
Yet Obama officials can hardly begin a foreign-policy address without either trashing the Bush administration or giving it no credit whatsoever for policies that continue today, with the Obama administration’s blessing. From current Democratic proclamations, no one is supposed to remember or even read memos circa 2001–03. We are supposed to forget that Democrats were chest-thumping their national-security bona fides — giving soapbox speeches about going into Iraq, leaking their worries about raw intelligence over WMD threats, and green-lighting coercive interrogation techniques to prevent another 9/11.
Be careful of fostering animus against well-intentioned American officials for the sake of short-term partisan advantage. Sharks smell blood. Now enters one Austrian professor, Manfred Nowak, the “U.N. special rapporteur” for torture who hails from a country that routinely sells Iran everything from sniper rifles to nuclear technology. Professor Nowak informs the world that the Bush officials must be punished. He is eager to please the Obamians, but not so eager to displease the Chinese, Russians, Libyans, Iranians, Saudis, and most of the rest of the world, where torture is as commonplace as its investigation is futile — if not dangerous.
ENDLESS CYCLES OF BLAME
Third, once we start this tit-for-tat cycle of adoration and damnation, there is no end — because it is based not on principle, but abject expediency.
We saw such contortions in the Iraqi War. Once upon a time, many liberal columnists and Democratic congressional leaders praised the pre-war notion of preemption. Public intellectuals wrote letters to then-president Clinton demanding that he preempt and remove Saddam Hussein. Some even castigated a hesitant Bush with charges that he resembled his timid father. One or two went on to demand consideration of nuclear strikes against Iraq should it be associated with the anthrax attacks of 2001.
Then came the insurgency. Not only did such braggadocio cease, but embarrassed liberal hawks suddenly reinvented themselves as long-suffering, anguished, and principled doves. They now felt betrayed by “phony intelligence” as they bought into the cheap rhetoric of “Bush lied, thousands died.”
Yet we all know their conversions into moralists were predicated entirely on the escalation of the insurgency. Only then did their inspired and perfect three-week victory become outsourced as someone else’s fouled-up occupation. And we all know that 20 of the 23 original congressional writs to go the war were as unchanged by the absence of WMD stockpiles as they were forgotten when the conflict became unpopular.
So we know this predictable pattern of flexibility and accommodation. From 2001 to 2003, Bush officials were deemed serious and sober, and reformed the intelligence agencies to stop the incompetence that led to 9/11. By consensus, they took decisive measures to stop new enemies in a new sort of war — in which terrorists out of uniform, blending in with civilians, had devised ways of infiltrating the United States to murder thousands. And that consensus kept us safe.
Then, in the luxury of that very safety, and with the recrudescence of partisanship, from 2004 to 2009, our once-praised guardians were redefined by their Democratic critics as Gestapo-like torturers who created a Stalag in Cuba. And the terrorists, this new story went, were unfortunates bundled away for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the vicinity of bin Laden’s Hindu Kush compounds.
And we know in advance the dénouement of this tragicomedy. Should we lose another 3,000 in a morning, and should the attackers have appeared earlier on wire-taps, been released from Guantanamo, or escaped notice due to new “firewalls,” then once more we will go into the cycle of recrimination.
The only constant is that those who are most loudly screaming for the heads of the Bush officials will be silent should the carnage return — or perhaps they will be the most vocal in allotting blame to the Obama administration, which listened to them. No doubt they will demand postfacto hearings on topics such as “Who let him out of Guantanamo?” as they chant, “Obama slept, we wept!”
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution |
