You actually surprise me with that, Karen. Was Hitler not evil? Stalin? How about 9/11?
Evil, all around. No question about it.
Maybe there are no moral standards among nations. That does not mean that individual Americans are barred from applying what they believe to be a decent moral standard to the international scene?
I agree with that. Individual Americans can frame this any way they want to. What is in question is how our country frames it on the international scene.
You're an engineer. You frame engineering problems in engineering terms. If you have a system component that is threatening to bring down the system, destroying your company reputation or costing it and you money, you don't refer to it as "evil." It's disfunctional, error-laden, buggy, or just plain crappy design. It's not evil. Evil isn't an engineering word even if the component threatens to wreck the livelihood of your whole company. The problem calls for an engineering framework, not a moral/religious framework.
The point that the author of that article, which I what I was trying to clarify for Tim, was that the framework for international relations is self-interest, preferably enlightened self-interest, and we should frame our war in those terms. Better to say that the "evil ones" are an unbearable threat to world stability and prosperity than to call them "evil." The word, evil, is in the moral/religious framework.
We particularly don't want to introduce a religious spin to this war while Bush is working so hard to say it's not about religion. There's a mixed message there. The moral/religious framework subsumes not only the concept of evil but the tactic of crusades. His point is that we should keep all that at arm's length and stay within the self-interest framework.
Karen |
