The Party Of Torture
andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com
By Andrew Sullivan / The Atlantic - May 16, 2009
Bill Kristol provides a curtain-raiser for a Cheney speech next week that
promises to entrench the notion that the Republican party is the Torture Party.
As always, Kristol's sole principle seems to be the wielding of power.
He, like Cheney, is beginning to understand that history is beginning to gel
around the assumption that the Bush-Cheney administration presided over
the worst attack on US soil in history and failed to capture or bring to justice
any of its perpetrators, put the next generation into unparalleled and
unsustainable debt, did nothing to combat climate change, viciously opposed
the civil rights movement of its time, shrunk the GOP to one in five voters,
precipitated the worst recession since the 1930s, took the US into two grueling,
unwinnable wars, humiliated the US at the UN with fatally flawed intelligence
for war in Iraq, and destroyed the credibility and endurance of the Geneva
Conventions, thus ensuring that future captured Americans will be tortured
with no recourse.
What to do about this? Do a self-accounting? Figure out how these appalling
errors were made? Apologize? Nah: An intelligent and knowledgeable
advocate--even if he's personally not so popular--can do a lot to get
an issue front and center. And the debate of that issue can do political
damage to the existing administration and its congressional allies.
The real question any Republican strategist should ask himself is this:
What will Republican chances be in 2012 if voters don't remember the
Bush administration--however problematic in other areas--as successful
in defending the country after 9/11? To give this issue away would be to
accept a post-Herbert-Hoover-like-fate for today's GOP. That's why
Republicans should listen carefully when Cheney gives a speech this week in
which he'll lay out the case for the surveillance, detention, and interrogation
policies of the Bush administration in the war against terror.
If Kristol and Cheney believe that conservatism should become the political
philosophy that gives the executive branch absolute power to tap any phone
without a warrant, seize anyone in the US or world, deny them any due process
and torture them for "intelligence", then they are welcome to do so. But at
some point, surely, decent conservatives who believe that the West's defense does
not need a police state and a torture regime will fight back. At some point,
surely, some conservatives will advocate a sane intelligence-gathering policy
and an adult understanding that total security is impossible in a free
and interconnected world - and that only unscrupulous, cynics
pretend otherwise for the goal of manipulating public fears for
political advantage.
Or are they all still as bullied by Rove and Cheney and Kristol as they
were for the eight years these goons ran their party and their country into
the ground? |
