"Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli offensive -- by a 24-point margin (31-55%)."

Glenn Greenwald on Salon:

"More oddities in the U.S. "debate" over Israel/Gaza Even for those insisting that Israel's attack on Gaza is both wise and just, what possible interest does the U.S. have in involving itself so directly in this dispute?

Glenn Greenwald

Jan. 02, 2009 |

(updated below)

This Rasmussen Reports poll -- the first to survey American public opinion specifically regarding the Israeli attack on Gaza -- strongly bolsters the severe disconnect I documented the other day between (a) American public opinion on U.S. policy towards Israel and (b) the consensus views expressed by America's political leadership. Not only does Rasmussen find that Americans generally "are closely divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military action against militants in the Gaza Strip" (44-41%, with 15% undecided), but Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli offensive -- by a 24-point margin (31-55%). By stark constrast, Republicans, as one would expect (in light of their history of supporting virtually any proposed attack on Arabs and Muslims), overwhelmingly support the Israeli bombing campaign (62-27%).

It's not at all surprising, then, that Republican leaders -- from Dick Cheney and John Bolton to virtually all appendages of the right-wing noise machine, from talk radio and Fox News to right-wing blogs and neoconservative journals -- are unquestioning supporters of the Israeli attack. After all, they're expressing the core ideology of the overwhelming majority of their voters and audience.

Much more notable is the fact that Democratic Party leaders -- including Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi -- are just as lockstep in their blind, uncritical support for the Israeli attack, in their absolute refusal to utter a word of criticism of, or even reservations about, Israeli actions. While some Democratic politicians who are marginalized by the party's leadership are willing to express the views which Democratic voters overwhelmingly embrace, the suffocating, fully bipartisan orthodoxy which typically predominates in America when it comes to Israel -- thou shalt not speak ill of Israel, thou shalt support all actions it takes -- is in full force with this latest conflict.( TRUE )

Is there any other significant issue in American political life, besides Israel, where (a) citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet (b) the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice? More notably still, is there any other position, besides Israel, where (a) a party's voters overwhelmingly embrace one position (Israel should not have attacked Gaza) but (b) that party's leadership unanimously embraces the exact opposite position (Israel was absolutely right to attack Gaza and the U.S. must support Israel unequivocally)? Does that happen with any other issue?( ACTUALLY, IF THEY ARE SAYING WHAT THEY BELIEVE, I'M NOT THAT BOTHERED. )

Equally noteworthy is that the factional breakdown regarding Israel-Gaza mirrors quite closely the factional alliances that arose with regard to the Iraq War. Just as was true with Iraq, one finds vigorous pro-war sentiment among the Dick Cheney/National Review/neoconservative/hard-core-GOP crowd, joined (as was true for Iraq) by some American liberals who typically oppose that faction yet eagerly join with them when it comes to Israel. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the world -- Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East, the U.N. leadership -- opposes and condemns the attack, all to no avail. The parties with the superior military might (the U.S. and Israel) dismiss world opinion as essentially irrelevant. Even the pro-war rhetorical tactics are the same (just as those who opposed the Iraq War were demonized as being "pro-Saddam," those who oppose the Israeli attack on Gaza are now "pro-Hamas").

Substantively, there are certainly meaningful differences between the U.S. attack on Iraq and the Israeli attack on Gaza (most notably the fact that Hamas really does shoot rockets into Israel and has killed Israeli civilians and Israel really is blockading and occupying Palestinian land, whereas Iraq did not attack and could not attack the U.S. as the U.S. was sanctioning them and controlling their airspace). But the underlying logic of both wars are far more similar than different: military attacks, invasions and occupations will end rather than exacerbate terrorism; the Muslim world only understands brute force; the root causes of the disputes are irrelevant; diplomacy and the U.N. are largely worthless. It's therefore entirely unsurprising that the sides split along the same general lines. What's actually somewhat remarkable is that there is even more lockstep consensus among America's political leadership supporting the Israeli attack on Gaza than there was supporting the U.S.'s own attack on Iraq (at least a few Democratic Congressional leaders opposed the war on Iraq, unlike for Israel's bombing of Gaza, where they virtually all unequivocally support it).( THIS DOESN'T SURPRISE ME. THERE'S REAL PROVOCATION AGAINST ISRAEL. )

* * * * *

Ultimately, what is most notable about the "debate" in the U.S. over Israel-Gaza is that virtually all of it occurs from the perspective of Israeli interests but almost none of it is conducted from the perspective of American interests( I DON"T AGREE HERE. PEOPLE CAN BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE PROTECTING BOTH. ). There is endless debate over whether Israel's security is enhanced or undermined by the attack on Gaza and whether the 40-year-old Israeli occupation, expanding West Bank settlements and recent devastating blockade or Hamas militancy and attacks on Israeli civilians bear more of the blame. American opinion-making elites march forward to opine on the historical rights and wrongs of the endless Israeli-Palestinian territorial conflict with such fervor and fixation that it's often easy to forget that the U.S. is not actually a direct party to this dispute.( THIS HAPPENED BECAUSE OF THE COLD WAR )

Though the ins-and-outs of Israeli grievances and strategic considerations are endlessly examined, there is virtually no debate over whether the U.S. should continue to play such an active, one-sided role in this dispute.( I WOULD BE FOR US GETTING OUT, SINCE WE DON'T SEEM TO HELP, HOWEVER, I WOULD FAVOR US INTERVENTION TO HELP ISRAEL SURVIVE. THAT IS MY BIAS. ) It's the American taxpayer, with their incredibly consequential yet never-debated multi-billion-dollar aid packages to Israel, who are vital in funding this costly Israeli assault on Gaza. Just as was true for Israel's bombing of Lebanon, it's American bombs that -- with the whole world watching -- are blowing up children and mosques, along with Hamas militants, in Gaza. And it's the American veto power( OFTEN I DO SUPPORT THIS AGAINST JEW HATING PROPOSALS ) that, time and again, blocks any U.N. action to stop these wars.

For those reasons, the pervasive opposition and anger around the world from the Israeli assault on Gaza is not only directed to Israel but -- quite rationally and understandably -- to America as well. Virtually the entire world, other than large segments of the American public, see Israeli actions as American actions. The attack on Gaza thus harms not only Israel's reputation and credibility, but America's reputation and credibility as well.( THIS SHOULD MATTER, BUT WE SHOULD ALSO DO WHAT'S RIGHT. I SIMPLY DISAGREE WITH ISRAEL'S CURRENT OFFENSIVE IN THIS CASE. BEING A DOVE, I DO FAVOR A TWO STATE SOLUTION )And for what? Even for those Americans who, for whatever their reasons( SEE, I BELIEVE THE FOCUS ON THIS PARTICULAR WAR HAS TO DO WITH JEW HATRED, AMONG OTHER THINGS. IT CAN'T BE HUMANITY, SINCE 5 MILLION MORE PEOPLE HAVE RECENTLY DIED IN THE CONGO, AND SUDAN AND NIGERIA EASILY SURPASS THIS CONFLICT IN TERMS OF DEATHS. ), want endlessly to fixate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who care deeply and passionately about whether the Israelis or the Palestinians control this or that West Bank hill or village and want to spend the rest of their days arguing about who did what to whom in 1948 and 1967, what possible interests do Americans generally have in any of that, sufficient to involve ourselves so directly and vigorously on one side, and thereby subject ourselves to the significant costs -- financial, reputational, diplomatic and security -- from doing so?

It's one thing to argue that Israel is being both wise and just by bombing the densely populated Gaza Strip. It's another thing entirely to argue that the U.S. should use all of its resources to support Israel as it does so. Those are two entirely separate questions. Arguments insisting that the Gaza attack is good and right for Israel don't mean that they are good and right for the U.S. Yet unstinting, unquestioning American support for whatever Israel does is just tacitly assumed in most of these discussions. The core assumption is that if it can be established that this is the right thing for Israel to do, then it must be the right thing for the U.S. to support it. The notion that the two countries may have separate interests -- that this may be good for Israel to do but not for the U.S. to support -- is the one issue that, above all else, may never be examined.( HERE I DISAGREE AGAIN WITH GREENWALD. I DO THINK THAT THE PEOPLE I DISAGREE WITH IN THE US ARE LARGELY SEEKING THE INTERESTS OF BOTH ISRAEL AND THE US. )

The "change" that many anticipate (or, more accurately, hope) that Obama will bring about is often invoked as a substance-free mantra, a feel-good political slogan. But to the extent it means anything specific, at the very least it has to entail that there will be a substantial shift in how America is perceived in the world, the role that we in fact play, the civil-liberties-erosions and militarized culture that inevitably arise from endlessly involving ourselves in numerous, hate-fueled military conflicts around the world. Our blind support for Israel, our eagerness to make all of its disputes our own disputes, our refusal to acknowledge any divergence of interests between us and that other country, our active impeding rather than facilitating of diplomatic resolutions between it and its neighbors are major impediments to any meaningful progress in those areas.( THIS I AGREE WITH. WE DON'T SEEM TO HELP. )

UPDATE: One related point: I have little appreciation for those who believe, one way or the other, that they can reliably predict what Obama is going to do -- either on this issue or others. That requires a clairvoyance which I believe people lack.( I AGREE )

Some argue that Obama has filled key positions with politicians who have a history of virtually absolute support for Israeli actions -- Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel -- because Obama intends to continue, more or less, the Bush policy of blind support for Israel. Others argue the opposite: that those appointments are necessary to vest the Obama administration with the credibility to take a more active role in pushing the Israelis to a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, and that in particular, Clinton would not have left her Senate seat unless she believed she could finish Bill Clinton's work and obtain for herself the legacy-building accomplishment of forging an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians (this morning's NYT hints at that scenario).

I personally find the latter theory marginally more persuasive, but there is simply no way to know until Obama is inaugurated. Whatever else is true, the more domestic political pressure is exerted demanding that the U.S. play a more even-handed and constructive role in facilitating a diplomatic resolution, the more likely it is that this will happen.( HERE I AGREE. BUT, AS A ZIONIST, MY DISAGREEMENT IS ON MORAL, RELIGIOUS, AND POLITICAL GROUNDS. I DO SUPPORT ISRAEL, AND I SPEND NO TIME DEFENDING ITS EXISTENCE. )

-- Glenn Greenwald"

"America and its leaders are entitled to a different set of standards and better treatment"

Glenn Greenwald:

"Torture prosecutions finally begin in the U.S.

(updated below - Update II)

While fiercely loyal establishment spokespeople such as The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus continue to insist that prosecutions are only appropriate for common criminals ("someone breaking into your house") but not our glorious political leaders when they break the law (by, say, systematically torturing people), the Bush administration has righteously decided that torture is such a grotesque and intolerable crime that political leaders who order it simply must be punished in American courts to the fullest extent of the law . . . . if they're from Liberia:

MIAMI (AP) -- U.S. prosecutors want a Miami judge to sentence the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor to 147 years in prison for torturing people when he was chief of a brutal paramilitary unit during his father's reign.

Charles McArthur Emmanuel, also known as Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr. is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 9 by U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga. His conviction was the first use of a 1994 law allowing prosecution in the U.S. for acts of torture committed overseas.

Even in the U.S., it's hard to believe that federal prosecutors who work for the Bush DOJ were able to convey the following words with a straight face:

A recent Justice Department court filing describes torture - which the U.S. has been accused of in the war on terror - as a "flagrant and pernicious abuse of power and authority" that warrants severe punishment of Taylor.

"It undermines respect for and trust in authority, government and a rule of law," wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Heck Miller in last week's filing. "The gravity of the offense of torture is beyond dispute."

The AP article which reported on these proceedings, by Curt Anderson, is almost as illustrative an exhibit of how our country operates as the trial itself is. Marvel at this passage:

Emmanuel had argued in previous court papers that he was being unfairly prosecuted for acts similar to those committed by U.S. personnel in Iraq and elsewhere.

The administration of President George W. Bush has been criticized by some around the world and in Congress for using aggressive interrogation techniques. Justice Department memos were seen as providing legal underpinnings for some of the techniques.

However, administration officials have blamed abuses at places such as Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison on a small number of soldiers or agents and insisted there has been no systematic mistreatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan or the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Acts which, when ordered by Liberians, are "criminal torture" meriting life imprisonment magically become, when ordered by Americans, mere "aggressive interrogation techniques." And while not all of the "techniques" used by the Liberians were authorized by Bush officials ("hot clothes irons" and "biting ants shoveled onto people's bodies"), many of the authorized American techniques are classic torture tactics and resulted in the deaths of many detainees and the total insanity of many more.

Worse, AP -- with canine-like subservience -- mindlessly recites the Bush administration's excuses (Abu Ghraib was due to low-level rogue bad apples and "there has been no systematic mistreatment of detainees") without even mentioning the ample evidence proving how false those government claims are. That's standard American "journalism" for you: "Our Government says X, and even if it's false and even if it's intensely disputed, we'll just leave it at that." Doing anything more -- as NBC News' David Gregory pointed out -- is "not their role."

There's something beautifully illustrative about this torture prosecution. Apparently, it's not just appropriate, but necessary and urgent, for American courts to be used to prosecute the leaders of small African nations who order torture exclusively in their own land. Doing that is necessary to uphold what the Bush DOJ calls "respect for and trust in authority, government and a rule of law."

But -- say Bush loyalists and our pliant political class in unison -- the one thing that we cannot tolerate is for American courts to be used to impose accountability on American leaders who authorized illegal torture. And, of course, the only thing worse than doing that would be to subject them to prosecution by another country or, creepier still, an international tribunal. That would be an intolerable infringement of our sovereignty, we say as we prosecute the son of Liberia's President for acts he undertook exclusively inside Liberia.

In Liberia, the Taylor regime, for many years, was genuinely threatened by numerous rebels and revolutionary factions -- ones supported by other countries -- seeking to overthrow the Liberian government. The torture which Taylor, Jr. was accused of ordering occurred during a brutal civil war.

Liberia undoubtedly has its own Jack Goldsmiths and Stuart Taylors who insist that the torture which the Taylors ordered -- though perhaps "crossing a line or two" -- was done for the Good and Safety of the Liberian People and to defend the Government against these foreign and domestic threats. The Taylors undoubtedly have their loyalists who echo our own Cass Sunsteins and Ruth Marcuses, urging that it would be so much better for the country if everyone just let bygones be bygones and looked to the pretty future and the challenges Liberians face and not get distracted by litigating the unpleasant and partisan fights of the past.

But, like most of the alleged principles to which our political elite professes allegiance, America and its leaders are entitled to a different set of standards and better treatment( THERE'S ONLY ONE ). Thus, Charles Taylor belongs at the Hague, being prosecuted as a war criminal. His son belongs in an American criminal court being prosecuted by the Bush DOJ for torture. And George Bush and Dick Cheney belong on their "ranches," enjoying full-scale immunity for the crimes they committed and a rich and comfortable retirement, treated as the esteemed and well-intentioned (even if sometimes misguided) dignitaries that they are. Virtually the only people in the world who fail to recognize this self-evident, ludicrous and disgusting hypocrisy are America's political and media elites and those who are misled by them.( WELL SAID )

UPDATE: Michael Mukasey, who refuses even to say whether waterboarding is torture and has repeatedly acted to protect Bush officials from prosecution, appeared two weeks ago at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and actually spoke these words (h/t sysprog):

It serves as a daily reminder to the leaders of the free world, and to the many visitors to our nation’s capital, that law without conscience is no guarantee of freedom; that even the seemingly most advanced of nations can be led down the path of evil; and that we must confront horror with action and vigilance, not lethargy and cowardice. . . .

Just as the Museum has focused on present-day mass killings such as those in Rwanda or Darfur, we at the Department are doing what we can to ensure that those responsible for such atrocities are brought to justice. We have provided support to the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and to the Iraqi High Tribunal. And where we can, we are bringing our own cases. Both the Office of Special Investigations and the Domestic Security Section – parts of the Department’s Criminal Division – are pursuing cases against perpetrators of those international atrocities who find their way into our country.

The most prominent example of those efforts is the recent conviction of Chuckie Taylor Jr., the son of the former President of Liberia, who was convicted of torturing his countrymen. His conviction – the first in history under our criminal anti-torture statute – provides a measure of justice to those who were victimized by his reprehensible acts, and it sends a powerful message to human rights violators around the world that, when we can, we will hold them accountable for their crimes.

Mukasey actually had the audacity to approvingly quote from Robert Jackson's addresses to the Nuremberg Trials, at which this central proposition of Western justice -- now explicitly renounced by America's political and media establishment -- was ostensibly established:

The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power . . . .

Unsurprisingly, Mukasey neglected to mention that Jackson, in his opening remarks to the tribunal, called "aggressive war" the "greatest menace of our times," and in his summation, Jackson observed that "the plot for aggressive wars" is "the central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together."

The glaring contradictions in Mukasey's words are too self-evident to warrant explanation. Ponder, instead, the opinion which Mukasey -- by uttering such brazen statements in public and knowing he can do with impunity -- is implicitly expressing about how broken is our establishment media and how distorted is our political discourse.( IT'S A DISGRACE )

UPDATE II: Alberto Gonzales gave a painfully self-pitying interview to The Wall St. Journal this week and announced that the real victims aren't the detainees who were tortured in our secret and not-so-secret prison camps, nor the millions of dead or displaced Iraqis, nor the Americans whose communications were illegally spied upon without warrants. No, the Real Victims of the last eight years are Bush officials like him who face criticism for what they did:

I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.

Here we find the predominant -- virtually unanimous -- Beltway mentality: when high American officials break our laws, it's nothing more than "formulating policies that people disagree with." Gonzales cried out: "What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" The answers are obvious to anyone paying even minimal attention. Steve Benen points out just some of them here."

We have serious problems when we condone torture on the pretext of safety. Safety can justify just about any war crime. That's why we have the Geneva Conventions in the first place: In order that criminals not plead that they were simply protecting their country. What happened to the anti-relativists, by the way?

"would find the slaughter of scores of innocent Palestinians to be a horrible and deeply lamentable event."

Glenn Greenwald with a good post:

"Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel

(updated below - Update II)

Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict generally or "who started it." Still, any minimally decent human being -- even those who view the world through the most blindingly pro-Israeli lens possible, the ones who justify anything and everything Israel does, and who discuss these events with a bottomless emphasis on the primitive (though dangerous) rockets lobbed by Hamas into Southern Israel but without even mentioning the ongoing four-decades brutal occupation or the recent, grotesquely inhumane blockade of Gaza -- would find the slaughter of scores of innocent Palestinians to be a horrible and deeply lamentable event.

But not The New Republic's Marty Peretz. Here is his uniquely despicable view of the events of the last couple of days:

So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews.

"Do not fuck with the Jews." And what of the several hundred Palestinian dead -- including numerous children -- and many hundreds more seriously wounded? ( THAT'S A DISGRACEFUL STATEMENT )

Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.

Objections to the Israeli attack are just "whining." Those are the words of a psychopath( I AGREE. A BIGOT. ). And what to do now?

Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the Jewish nation. . . .

The current warfare will go on a bit longer. If there is a pause and if I were giving advice to the Israelis, this is what I would say to Hamas and to the people of Gaza: "If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work."

This super-tough-guy warrior -- whose prime accomplishment in life was marrying an heiress and then using her family's money to buy himself The New Republic -- beats his chest and threatens that even a single Palestinian act in response to this bombing campaign will provoke still more massive retaliation in the form of collective punishment (which, not that anyone cares, happens to be a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, as are Hamas' far less harmful rocket attacks on Israeli civilians).( I AGREE. BOTH ARE CLEAR VIOLATIONS. )

It may be true that, as Eric Alterman put it in his seminal article on Marty Pertez (quoting Ezra Klein), "Peretz is rarely held to account, largely because there's an odd, tacit understanding that he's a cartoonish character and everyone knows it." But how unusual are Peretz's views, revolting as they are, in the American political mainstream? He certainly expresses anti-Arab hatred and bigotry more bluntly than most, but this reflexive support for anything and everything Israel does is anything but unique in our political debates.( I DISAGREE. HE'S A REAL BIGOT. MOST PEOPLE AREN'T )

Here, as but one illustrative example, is Caroline Kennedy -- who, in order to win her Senate seat, is self-consciously trying to turn herself into a Barack Obama clone -- responding recently to a question about Israel from Politico:

QUESTION 8: Do you think Israel should negotiate with Hamas? Do you agree with Israel's Gaza Strip embargo? Would you support an Israeli airstrike on Iran if they felt Tehran's nuclear program represented a threat to their survival?

ANSWER: "Caroline Kennedy strongly supports a safe and secure Israel. She believe Israel's security decisions should be left to Israel."

What could be more absurd than that? Apparently, not only should we continue to feed Israel billions of dollars a year of American taxpayer money and massive amounts of weapons -- thereby ensuring that the world, quite accurately, perceives their actions as American actions -- but we should then take the position that they are free to do anything they want with it, no matter how extreme or destructive to our interests, and our only view on all of it should be that we blindly support whatever they do. Or, as Clinton aide Ann Lewis put it during the primaries, in response to Obama's observation that he needn't have a "Likud view in order to be pro-Israel":

The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.

Yesterday, the Bush administration applied this mindset, naturally, by expressing unequivocal support for Israel and heaped all blame on Hamas. And, needless to say, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed the administration's view:

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi issued a statement concerning the Israeli operation in Gaza in which she wrote that "When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally."

According to Pelosi, "Peace between Israelis and Palestinians cannot result from daily barrages of rocket and mortar fire from Hamas-controlled Gaza. Hamas and its supporters must understand that Gaza cannot and will not be allowed to be a sanctuary for attacks on Israel."

Not a word of condemnation of the Israeli blockade -- which has caused extreme suffering and deprivation in Gaza -- or of the massively disproportionate response or the ongoing and ever-expanding Israeli occupation. It is all one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world. ( WHAT'S THE MORAL POINT OF NOT CRITICIZING ISRAEL? )

It would be nice if U.S. citizens weren't connected to and responsible for every Israeli military action, so that we really could and should take the attitude that what the Israeli Government does -- or what is done to it -- is not our responsibility. That's how it should be. ( I AGREE )

Instead, since we fund a huge bulk of it and supply the weapons used for much of it and use our veto power at the U.N. to enable all of it, we are connected to it -- intimately -- and bear responsibility for all of Israel's various wars, including the current overwhelming assault on Gaza, as much as Israelis themselves. Blind support for whatever they do -- the consensus view in American political life in both parties -- is therefore a total abdication of our responsibility. ( I AGREE )

It remains to be seen if Barack Obama intends to deviate even a small amount from what has been decades of excessively loyal U.S. support for Israel -- which, over the last eight years, transformed into truly blind and absolute support for anything they do. It's impossible to know for sure until Obama is inaugurated, but the bipartisan, purely "pro-Israel" statements issued by his allies -- such as Caroline Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi -- don't bode well, nor do the statements which Obama himself made during the campaign, as compiled yesterday by Salon's Mark Schone:

The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if -- I don't even care if I was a politician -- if somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.

Can't the exact same mentality be deployed to justify everything Hamas has done and is doing, to wit: "if a foreign power were brutally occupying my country for four decades -- or blockading my country and denying my children medical needs and nutrition and the ability even to exit -- I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing"? But the last thing that our political class ever extends is reciprocal, two-sided analysis to this dispute. ( I AGREE )

The suffocating bipartisan orthodoxies in the U.S. regarding Israel thus make virtually impossible what the new Jewish-American group, J Street -- in condemning the attack (even while calling it "justifiable") because it "will deepen the cycle of violence in the region" -- urges: "immediate, strong diplomatic intervention by the United States, the Quartet and allies in the region to negotiate a resumption of the ceasefire." Most of our political elites know enough to avoid the ugly language of Marty Peretz, but the ultimate policy positions aren't much different.( I DISAGREE. IT STEMS FROM A JUSTIFIED REPUGNANCE OF HAMAS. HOWEVER, THAT DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE ISRAELI RESPONSE. ADDED TO THE LEBANON DEBACLE, THIS OLMERT/ LIVNI GOVERNMENT HAS PROVED PARTICULARLY INEPT AND CRUEL )

UPDATE: Without necessarily endorsing all of it, I want to recommend very highly this column by Israeli Gideon Levy in Haaretz, entitled "The neighborhood bully strikes again." What's most striking about it is that this scathing criticism of Israel's behavior can -- and does -- appear in one of Israel's leading newspapers( OF COURSE. WHY SHOULDN'T IT? ), but not a paragraph of it could ever be uttered by any American politician, in either party, of any national prominence. ( READ IT ONLINE )

UPDATE II: Here's Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and a Democrat, echoing Nancy Pelosi, George Bush and virtually every other key American political official:

Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week. No government in the world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected to this kind of indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a terrible tragedy, and the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas.

One can travel from the farthest right fringe of the GOP to the heart of the Democratic Party leadership and hear exactly the same thing: Israel is always right. Israel must not be criticized. Israel never bears any blame. Any action taken by Israel is justified. No matter the situation, that just gets repeated over and over like some hypnotic bipartisan mantra. Meanwhile, American citizens overwhelmingly -- 71% -- want their Government to be "even-handed" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet that view is simply ignored, disregarded, not even viable for any American mainstream political leader to express."

The current Israeli response, along with the war in Lebanon, are not morally justified.

"they seek to depict their own ambivalence about torture (American Torture, that is) as the only morally and intellectually respectable position,"

This Glenn Greenwald post needs to be kept. Since Jean Amery is one of my essential influences, and he wrote the essential piece on Torture in "At The Mind's Limits", you can guess that I accept no reason or excuse for torture:

"Torture ambivalence masquerading as moral and intellectual superiority

(updated below - Update II)

Behold the now-solidified Smart, Reasonable American Consensus on torture: the agreed-upon method for dismissing away -- mitigating and even justifying -- the fact that our leaders, more or less out in the open, instituted a systematic torture regime with the consent of our key elite institutions and a huge bulk of the American citizenry, engaging in behaviors which, for decades, we insisted were inexcusable war crimes when engaged in by others( SAD BUT TRUE ):

Sure, it was wrong. OK, we "crossed some lines." Yeah, we probably shouldn't have done it, etc. etc. etc. (yawn). But . . . . when American leaders did it, it was different( I THOUGHT THAT THESE PEOPLE WERE KANTIANS. NO RELATIVISM HERE. UNIVERSAL RULES. ) -- fundamentally different -- than when those evil/foreign/dictator actual-war-criminals did it. Our leaders had good reasons for doing it. They were kind and magnanimous torturers. They committed war crimes with a pure heart. They tortured because they were scared, because they felt guilty that they failed to protect their citizens on 9/11, because they were eager -- granted: perhaps too eager -- to keep us, their loyal subjects, safe from The Murderous Terrorists.( LEAVE ME OUT. I'LL FACE GOD TODAY RATHER THAN HAVE A FEW EXTRA YEARS AND TORTURE ON MY BRIEF )

Here are Tufts University Political Science Professor Dan Drezner and Stanford Philosophy Professor Joshua Cohen demonstrating how good-hearted, profoundly reasonable, oh-so-intellectually sophisticated Americans diligently struggle with -- torture themselves over -- what they have convinced themselves is the vexing question of whether our leaders should be considered "war criminals" by virtue of . . . . having committed unambiguous war crimes( TRUE ):

This is now the conventional wisdom, the settled consensus, of our political and media elites with regard to America's torture program. It's perfectly appropriate that Drezner cites and heaps praise on the self-consciously open-minded meditation on the torture question from The Atlantic's Ross Douthat because -- as I wrote in response to Douthat -- our political elites have now, virtually in unison, convinced themselves that ambiguity and understanding with regard to American war crimes are the hallmarks of both intellectual and moral superiority( GOOD LORD ).

This is the justifying argument the political class has latched onto -- one that was spawned, revealingly enough, by Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith: sure, some of this might have been excessive and arguably wrong, but it was all done for the right reasons, by people who are good at heart. So common is this self-justifying American rationalization that it has now even infected the mentality of long-time Bush critics, such as The Los Angeles Times Editorial Page, which today argued that prosecutions for Bush officials are inappropriate, even though they clearly broke multiple laws, because "they did so as part of a post- 9/11 response to terrorism( AND THAT EXCUSES IT HOW ? )." As this excellent reply from Diane at Cab Drollery puts it: "civility and understanding( NEITHER ALLOW TORTURE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ) is far more important to them than simple justice( THAT SENTENCE IS MEANINGLESS )."

* * * * *

There are so many fallacies with this mindset that it's almost impossible to describe them all in one sitting. But the worst fallacy, the most destructive and self-delusional, is the stunted self-centeredness in which this view is grounded. As I detailed in the post I wrote about Douthat's flamboyant "struggle" on the torture question, virtually every single war criminal in history can recite good reasons for undertaking "excessive" measures. Other than psychopaths who do it exclusively for sadistic entertainment( THAT'S HOW THEY END UP USUALLY ), every torturer can point to actual fears, or genuine threats, or legitimate grievances that led them to sanction violence and brutality( SO THEY SAY ).

But people like Goldsmith, Drezner, Douthat, and The Los Angeles Times Editorial Page can only see a world in which they -- Americans -- are situated at the center. They cite the post-9/11 external threats which American leaders faced, the ostensible desire of Bush officials to protect the citizenry, and their desire to maximize national security as though those are unique and special motives, rather than what they are: the standard collection of excuses offered up by almost every single war criminal( TRUE ).

If ostensible self-protective motives are now considered mitigating factors in the commission of war crimes -- or, worse, if they justify immunity from prosecution -- then there is virtually no such thing any longer as a "war crime" that merits punishment( TRUE ). Every tyrant and every war criminal can avail themselves of this self-defense. But advocates of this view -- "Oh, American officials only did it to protect us from The Terrorists" -- can't or won't follow their premise to this logical conclusion because their oh-so-sophisticated and empathetic understanding that political leaders act with complex motives only extends to their own leaders, to Americans.( AMERICAN EXCEPTIONLISM IS RELATIVISTIC )

But the rest of the world's war criminals -- the non-Americans -- have no such complexities. They are basically nothing more than Saturday morning cartoon villains who commit war crimes not for any rational or justifiable reason or due to some grave predicament, but rather, out of some warped, cackling pleasure or to satisfy their evil, palm-rubbing plot for world domination and conquest. It's not an accident that, in the run-up to the war, our Government and media jointly issued a deck of illustrated playing cards to demonize Iraqi leaders, complete with cartoon villain names. It's how many Americans have been trained to conceive of whoever the Enemy de Jour is, but never our own leaders.

This is the self-absorbed mindset that allows the very same people who cheered for the attack on Iraq to, say, righteously condemn the Russian invasion of Georgia as a terrible act of criminal aggression. Russia's four-week occupation of Georgia is a heinous war crime, while our six-year-and-counting occupation of Iraq is a liberation. Russia drops destructive, lethal bombs on civilian populations, but the U.S. drops Freedom Bombs. Russian leaders were motivated by a desire for domination even though they withdrew after a few weeks; Americans, as always, are motivated by a desire to spread love and goodness. Freedom is on the March( A DISGACE ).

In the response I wrote to Douthat's piece, I wrote that this excuse-making for the Bush torture regime "isn't really anything more than standard American exceptionalism -- more accurately: blinding American narcissism -- masquerading as a difficult moral struggle." But that almost gives it too much credit. Really, this is nothing more than stunted adolescence. The definitive adolescent mindset is pure self-centeredness personified; it demands infinite understanding of and sympathy with one's own predicament and choices, and offers none for anyone else's. That's all this is: our Leaders -- Americans -- had good reasons to torture and therefore it shouldn't be punished; others who do it (the ones with foreign, unpronounceable names) have no good reasons and should be treated as criminals.( IT'S FINE IF YOU'RE A RELATIVIST AND DON'T BELIEVE IN UNIVERSAL STANDARDS )

* * * * *

There's an irony to the fact that this infinite capacity to self-justify is purely adolescent in nature. As the above-excerpted clip demonstrates, those who view American Torture as a fascinating moral dilemma over which Serious People publicly agonize -- as Drezner put it: "if you're a national security person, you don't care about the legal niceties . . . it is a complicated question; it's not cut and dried"( GOOD TO KNOW. IS ANYTHING CUT AND DRIED? ) -- have actually convinced themselves that their refusal to make clear, definitive judgments is a hallmark not only of their moral superiority, but of their intellectual superiority as well. Only shrill ideologues and simpletons on either side believe that the torture question is "cut and dried." They actually believe that their indecisive open-mindedness on such clear moral questions is a sign of their rich and deep complexity, even though it's nothing more than an adolescent inability to assess the world through any prism other than their own immediate reflexive desires and self-interest.

Independently ironic is the fact that these self-styled complex intellectuals are actually embracing the most intellectually superficial and simplistic form of analysis possible. On one side, they hear Dick "dunk in the water" Cheney and Rush "just blowing off steam" Limbaugh overtly justifying torture. On the other side, they hear what they perceive as the Far Left "civil liberties extremists" arguing that torture unambiguously is a war crime and those who order it are and therefore should be treated as war criminals( THAT'S MY POSITION ).

But all good, smart, Serious Broder-esque elites know that the Truth is never found on either extreme( THAT'S POISONING THE WELL, A LOGICAL FALLACY. ). It's always found in the center -- defined as whatever result is derived by randomly mixing the two poles( IT GENERALLY MIGHT BE, BUT YOU HAVE TO DEFINE THE QUESTION ). Even on questions involving the clearest legal and moral lines -- such as torture -- the Center is intrinsically right. Hence: "yes, torture is wrong; but no, our Leaders don't deserve prosecution for it because their hearts were in the right place." It's as intellectually shallow as it gets -- smart people always go to the center. That it's intellectually shallow doesn't prove it's wrong. But it's ironic indeed that these reflexive Centrists have convinced themselves that their reliance on this simpleton's crutch is proof of their elevated intellectual rigor( FUNNY THEY DON'T CREDIT AMBIGUITY AND GOOD MOTIVES ELSEWHERE ).

More simplistic still is the very idea that the motives of Bush officials -- including Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld -- can be reduced to one clear and pure desire( WE CAN'T KNOW THIS ): To Protect Us. Even one's own motives, let alone those of others, are notoriously difficult to ascertain( TRUE ). The certainty claimed by those who are defending Bush officials about what their motives were in torturing is absurd. There are all sorts of reasons to believe that they were motivated, at least in part, by the power that comes from torture, or a desire for vengeance, or the belief that the detainees in our custody were sub-human, or just general indifference to law and morality( TRUE ). How have those ignoble motives been ruled out by their defenders and noble motives so emphatically embraced? Ultimately, though, the reason leaders torture is irrelevant. It's one of those few absolute taboos, and it's almost as immoral to seek to dilute that taboo by offering motive-based mitigations as it is to engage in it in the first place.

Recall the Ward Churchill( I'VE MET HIM AND LIKED HIM, BUT HIS COMMENTS WERE DISGRACEFUL AND FALSE ) controversy, when an obscure academic was catapulted to infamy for a deeply satisfying Two Minute Hate Session, so that he could be held up as the consensus symbol of perverted anti-American amorality -- because he suggested that the acts of the 9/11 attackers should be understood, perhaps even deemed mitigated, by the justifiable grievances that motivated them( FALSE ). Yet just a few short years later, here we find that exact theory being hauled out in defense of our own leaders:

Sure, they engaged in acts that are universally criminalized and despised by all civilized societies, but it's not enough simply to evaluate those acts on their own. The underlying reasons -- their root causes -- need to be considered in order to determine how bad they really were. The motives of our leaders were good, and therefore their acts were, at worst, morally ambiguous.

A "root cause" theory( THIS THEORY IS ALWAYS FALSE )that is deemed unspeakably evil in American discourse when applied to non-Americans is immediately embraced by our elites when we need a way to explain the fact that our own leaders committed unambiguous war crimes( PURE RELATIVISM ).

It's certainly true that the Drezners and Douthats are nowhere near as extreme as the Cheneys and Limbaughs. After all, the former pay lip service to the idea that torture is wrong, whereas the latter explicitly defend it. But I actually prefer the Cheney/Limbaugh candor to the Drezner/Douthat pseudo-intellectual conceit, which is, ultimately, more pernicious. What they're offering is blatant excuse-making and mitigation-rationale -- the Ward Churchill defense -- thinly disguised as an intellectually sophisticated, profoundly reasonable moral struggle. They pretend to be offended by what was done while offering Reasonable Person theories that justify forgetting about all of it and even implicitly believing that it was done for noble ends. Most of all -- worst of all -- they seek to depict their own ambivalence about torture (American Torture, that is) as the only morally and intellectually respectable position, while those who call it a war crime and want it treated as such are blinded ideologues and extremists, impervious to the Serious, multi-layered complexities of the world( I GENERALLY ACCEPT THIS, BUT THERE ARE MORAL ABSOLUTES ).

UPDATE: Back in June, 2004, Matt Stoller wrote a piece -- entitled "Daniel Drezner, the Mediocre Reasonable Conservative" -- that captured much of the mentality I'm describing here. Matt's focus was on Drezner's various apologist behaviors for the Iraq War (which, needless to say, Drezner supported, and which I, too, wrote about before -- here: see Item 6). Back then, Stoller specifically said this about Drezner: "The problem as I see it is the essential unwillingness of someone like Drezner to admit what he knows is true - Iraq is an attempt at empire perpetrated by deeply illiberal individuals."( TRUE )

In reply, Drezner wrote -- and, remember, this was in June, 2004: more than four years ago:

Oh, please — an empire that sent in fewer troops than was necessary? An administration that now seems hell-bent on getting out of the country? Where’s your evidence for empire?

"Hell-bent on getting out of the country": that's from a self-styled expert in international affairs in 2004. This is why I've become increasingly resistant to the notion that the abuses and destruction of the last eight years should be blamed exclusively on the Bush administration. It's undoubtedly true they are culpable in all of it, but -- as several commenters here pointed out -- most of what the administration did was, with some notable exceptions, either actively cheered on or implicitly justified via this type of obsequious apologetics by our elite institutions: Congress, the media, academia, etc.( TRUE ) As demonstrated by the collective attempt now to prettify the "pure-at-heart" torture regime and thus relieve these elites of responsibility for it, none of these apologist efforts has abated in the slightest.

As always, it's important to emphasize that examining Drezner's comments here is worthwhile only as an illustrative endeavor -- not because his mindset is rare or unique to him, but precisely because it isn't. In fact, so appropriately and revealingly, this pro-war, torture-mitigating, "hell-bent-on-getting-out" academic is about to become, beginning early next year, the official blogger for Foreign Policy, the establishment journal of America's Foreign Policy Community.

That's a perfect microcosm of the last eight years: Support the Iraq War. Spout patently false claims to justify it. Rationalize and mitigate American Torture by insisting it's a complicated question and was authorized with good and noble motives. Have your credibility, visibility and establishment credentials enhanced. ( YIKES )

UPDATE II: Joshua Cohen, via email, objected to how his views here were characterized. After exchanging several emails with him yesterday, I was entirely unconvinced that I had mischaracterized anything he said, but nonetheless invited him to write a response, which I promised to post in full, unedited form and append to this post. The reply submitted by Cohen is here.

As I told him, it's a bit difficult to argue that one's comments have been distorted when the person criticizing the comments posts the full, unedited video of the original discussion, as I did here. I'm perfectly content to have everyone compare his actual remarks in the video to what I wrote in the one instance I mentioned Cohen and decide for themselves if his comments were fairly characterized here or not.

On his own blog, Dan Drezner has also posted a "reply," one that -- as the comment section to his post reflects -- is almost entirely bereft of substance. I replied to what he wrote in his comment section."

Torture can never be excused. Not if you value your soul. I've always doubted that many people do.

" What determines whether a political leader is good or evil isn't their nationality. It's their conduct. "

Glenn Greenwald on Salon with an excellent post:

"The moral ambiguity Douthat thinks he finds is applicable to virtually every war crime. It's the extremely rare political leader who ends up engaging in tyrannical acts, or commits war crimes or other atrocities, simply for the fun of it, or for purely frivolous reasons. Every tyrant can point to real and legitimate threats that they feared.

Ask supporters of Fidel Castro why he imprisoned dissidents and created a police state and they'll tell you -- accurately -- that he was the head of a small, defenseless island situated 90 miles to the South of a huge, militaristic superpower that repeatedly tried to overthrow his government and replace it with something it preferred. Ask Hugo Chavez why he rails against the U.S. and has shut down opposition media stations and he'll point out -- truthfully -- that the U.S. participated to some extent in a coup attempt to overthrow his democratically elected government and that internal factions inside Venezuela have done the same.

Iranian mullahs really do face internal, foreign-funded revolutionary groups that are violent and which seek to overthrow them. Serbian leaders -- including those ultimately convicted of war crimes -- had legitimate grievances about the treatment of Serbs outside of Serbia proper and threats posed to Serbian sovereignty. The complaints of Islamic terrorists regarding U.S. hegemony and exploitation in the Middle East are grounded in factual truth, as are those of Gazan terrorists who point to the four-decades-old Israeli occupation. Georgia really did and does face external threats from Russia, and Russia really did have an interest in protecting Russians and South Ossetians under assault from civilian-attacking Georgian artillery. The threat of Israeli invasion which Hezbollah cites is real. Some Muslims really have been persecuted by Hindus.

But none of those facts justify tyranny, terrorism or war crimes. There are virtually always "good reasons" that can be and are cited to justify war crimes and acts of aggression. It's often the case that nationalistic impulses -- or genuine fears -- lead the country's citizens to support or at least acquiesce to those crimes. War crimes and other atrocities are typically undertaken in defense against some real (if exaggerated) threat, or to target actual enemies, or to redress real grievances.

But we don't accept that justifying reasoning when offered by others. In fact, those who seek merely to explain -- let alone justify -- the tyranny, extremism and/or violence of Castro, or Chavez, or Hamas, or Slobodan Milosevic or Islamic extremists are immediately condemned for seeking to defend the indefensible, or invoking "root causes" to justify the unjustifiable, or offering mitigating rationale for pure evil.

Yet here we have American leaders who now, more openly than ever, are literally admitting to what has long been known -- that they violated the laws of war and international treaties which, in the past, we've led the way in advocating and enforcing. And what do we hear even from the most well-intentioned commentators such as Douthat? Yes, it was wrong. True, they shouldn't have done it. But they did it for good reasons: they believed they had to do it to protect us, to guard against truly bad people, to discharge their heavy responsibility to protect the country, because we were at war.

All of the same can be said for virtually every tyrant we righteously condemn and every war criminal we've pursued and prosecuted. The laws of war aren't applicable only in times of peace, to be waived away in times of war or crisis. To the contrary, they exist precisely because the factors Douthat cites to explain and mitigate what our leaders did always exist, especially when countries perceive themselves at war. To cite those factors to explain away war crimes -- or to render them morally ambiguous -- is to deny the very validity of the concept itself.

The pressures and allegedly selfless motivations being cited on behalf of Bush officials who ordered torture and other crimes -- even if accurate -- aren't unique to American leaders. They are extremely common. They don't mitigate war crimes. They are what typically motivate war crimes, and they're the reason such crimes are banned by international agreement in the first place -- to deter leaders, through the force of law, from succumbing to those exact temptations. What determines whether a political leader is good or evil isn't their nationality. It's their conduct. And leaders who violate the laws of war and commit war crimes, by definition, aren't good, even if they are American."

It's late, so I'll just say that I agree.