Though there is plenty of competition, these are some of the most arrogant words ever uttered by an American president. ~Michael Gerson

Gerson should know a thing or two about arrogant words uttered by Presidents, since he was responsible for writing some of the most insanely presumptuous and hubristic presidential statements of the last fifty years. So it’s a bit rich to hear Gerson tell us about the political dangers of presidential arrogance. That’s not what interests me about Gerson’s article and the avalanche of commentary that has followed the report of Obama’s statement. What I find remarkable is how thoroughly Obama’s critics misunderstand him.

Obama is expressing the bewilderment of someone who has made the mistake of thinking that voters normally behave rationally and then stop behaving rationally when they are under pressure. Obama may be an “intellectual snob” in some respects, but his statement about scared voters doesn’t tell us this. The problem isn’t that Obama attributes irrationality to voters now. His mistake came from attributing rationality to voters in the past. This is an easy mistake to make: “the people” are wise and intelligent when they agree with me, and have become inexplicably dense when they do not.

What is odd is that Obama seems to think that voters were not scared and were “thinking clearly” in the wake of the financial crisis (when arguably very few people were thinking clearly), but have become unduly fearful in the years since then, and he compounds the error by assuming that the public has well-defined policy preferences that can only be obscured or blocked by fear. Obama actually makes the same mistake that conservative pundits have been making all year, which is the mistake of identifying voter behavior in terms of ideological content and support for or opposition to a policy agenda. The difference is that Obama believes that 2008 represented a vote for his agenda, while the conservative pundits assume that 2010 is a vote against his agenda, when the truth is that his agenda has been more or less irrelevant to the dynamics of both elections.

Voting ideologically or voting on policy is not the way most voters vote, which is maddening to political observers, activists and politicians who are trying to make some sense out of the indecipherable mish-mash of contradictory preferences the majority presents to them. If one makes the reasonable, mistaken assumption that 2008 was a positive endorsement of the agenda Obama campaigned on, the current political situation doesn’t make much sense. After all, Obama largely did more or less what he said he would do, and in thanks for largely keeping his campaign promises his party is about to be badly punished. To the extent that he has disappointed anyone, as every politican inevitably will, it is progressives who have every right to complain that they have been shortchanged.

Gerson’s reaction and feigned outrage are typical of conservative pundits who have concluded on the basis of no evidence that the public’s expression of economic anxiety and discontent have some discernible ideological meaning, and further that this meaning is undeniably in line with a debt-slashing austerity agenda. Obama and the conservative pundits are all trying to give voters credit for careful deliberation and sober decision-making at some point, which is what politicians and activists have to do if they want to avoid offending large numbers of voters. Obama’s critics naturally want to say that Obama is insulting the intelligence of the voters, but all that he is saying is that he thinks voters really are intelligent and must be confused if they want to vote in what Obama must think is a foolish, destructive way. This is more or less what Obama’s opponents believed about Obama voters in the fall of 2008. Far from being some revelation of Obama’s character, his statement doesn’t amount to much more than a claim that he believes voters are misguided if they vote for Republicans, which is presumably what most Democrats believe. It is also what most Republicans believe about Democratic voters.

As usual, the truth about Obama is that he is not as exceptional or strange or different or unprecedented as everyone wants him to be in one way or another. He is a conventional center-left Democrat who thinks supporting Republican politicians at the polls is a mistake, and just like every Republican who tears up about our supposedly “center-right country” Obama assumes that the majority would normally be on his side were it not for extraordinary circumstances.

A few things came to mind when I was reading Jonathan Haidt’s article on Tea Partiers’ desire for what he calls “karma.” If Haidt is correct that Tea Parties want a world in which the truly deserving prosper and wrongdoers are punished in their present lives, it is not really karma that they want. Speaking very generally, karma is a concept that tries to explain how the evidently unfair and unjust state of affairs that we see all around us can be reconciled with ideals of justice and moral responsibility. Yes, eventually unjust actions are supposed to lead to ruin, but this can take a very long time. Discontented Americans today are interested in a more immediate reckoning.

Karma is an idea intended to help those suffering from injustice cope with the reality that justice in this world is often elusive and abuses of power and wealth often seem to go unpunished. The Christian equivalent of this idea is not a work ethic, but rather the conviction that the righteous will receive their reward in the kingdom of heaven and that the wicked will suffer damnation. Both take it for granted that righteousness and rewards in this life very rarely go together. Let me go out on a limb to suggest that neither of these has much to do with Rick Santelli’s complaints. Santelli had no problem with the financial sector bailout, but vehemently complained about relief measures for debtors. To put it a bit crudely, it is the Santellis of the world who make people want to believe that there is some higher moral law or some divinely-instituted justice that holds everyone accountable, because in this world it is so very clear that there are two sets of rules: one for the powerful and wealthy, and another for the rest. Put another way, if the Tea Partiers desire fairness and a world in which reward depends on effort and talent, they shouldn’t have anything to do with Santelli, who cheered throwing their tax dollars at Wall Street and deeply resented far fewer tax dollars being directed towards relief for the middle class.

That doesn’t mean Haidt hasn’t identified a core grievance of Tea Partiers and many other Americans along with them, but he is misdescribing it. At its heart, Haidt has identified a strong desire for fairness and order. The financial sector bailout was profoundly offensive to most Americans because it so blatantly rewarded the powerful, the wealthy and the connected, and it happened because of their ruinous failure. It was even more offensive because it was sold as a dire emergency measure and dressed up as something being done for the benefit of all, when it was not necessary and was never used for its original purposes. The bailout mocked ideas of fairness and responsibility, and on top of that its defenders insulted the intelligence of everyone opposed to it by pretending that it was a vitally necessary program.

Update: I stand corrected. Santelli claims he never supported any of the bailouts. If that was true in 2008, I never saw it, but I’ll accept that I got this wrong. I regret the error.

Will Wilkinson seems amazed that the leaders of “organized Protestantism” in 1942 espoused very internationalist and collectivist political views. First, I’m not sure why this is so remarkable. As Wilkinson partly acknowledges, this is not that radically different when compared to the politics of most mainline Protestant denominations and most member churches of the WCC today. For another thing, the positions reported in the Time article conformed to all of the views that good liberal Christians were supposed to have after U.S. entry into the war. It’s all there: the wartime vilification of nationalist causes, confidence in economic regimentation and collective organization, and support for strong international institutions in keeping with the conventional internationalist piety that the U.S. had contributed to the breakdown in global order because of our alleged “isolationism.” In other words, the leaders of “organized Protestantism” expressed their enthusiasm for what happened to be the prevailing ideology of the day and succumbed with amazing speed to the official propaganda campaign of the moment. Normally, this is the sort of thing that would get Wilkinson very agitated, but apparently not when it involves “principled, cosmopolitan globalism.”

It’s a generous assumption that the cosmopolitan globalism in question was, in fact, “principled” and not an embarrassing expression of wartime conformism. What’s even more strange is that Wilkinson regrets that this 1942 vision of regimentation, collectivism and global government did not come to pass. Had the conference attendees had their way, the U.N. would have had “the power of final judgment in controversies between nations . . the regulation of international trade and population movements among nations,” and the world government they imagined would be run by “an international legislative body, an international court with adequate jurisdiction, international-administrative bodies with necessary powers, and adequate international police forces and provision for enforcing its worldwide economic authority.” Whatever else one wants to say about that, it would have involved an overall reduction in economic liberty and self-government.

But traditionally, to get an absentee ballot you had to give a specific reason that you would be unable to make it to your regular polling place on election day. But in the last couple of decades a growing number of states are dropping these restrictions, allowing anyone to vote by mail without giving a reason. ~Tim Lee

Via Andrew

As a regular absentee voter, I don’t see the problem with ending these restrictions. More to the point, the requirement to give a specific reason for being absent wouldn’t change anything. It would simply create one more hoop for absentee voters to jump through, and there would be no way to verify if that reason is valid or not. If I had been required to give a specific reason why I couldn’t be at my polling place when filling out my absentee ballot application in years past, I would have had to give the same reason for each of the last four general elections: I was out of state on election day because I was a student. That’s true, but there would have been no effort to verify that.

This year is a bit different in that I just moved back to Illinois, but I did not find the time in the last month and a half to register here before the deadline. Once again, I applied for an absentee ballot in New Mexico, where I am registered. Were absentee voting rules more restrictive, or were absentee voting not permitted, I probably would not be able to vote in this year’s election. Given the laughable choices available, that wouldn’t be so terrible as far as I’m concerned, but that isn’t the point. Absentee voting is essential to making it much easier for people to move around the country without being cut off from the electoral process, and it is also very important for enfranchising students in their home states. I suppose students can and do register wherever they happen to be, but that isn’t something that they should have to do, and fortunately they don’t.

I don’t know which party is more adversely affected by restrictions on absentee voting. Based on my understanding of absentee returns in Albuquerque, I believe Republican and right-leaning voters would be disadvantaged if absentee voting were more difficult, but that would probably vary by district and state. Regardless, keeping people who vote absentee out of the process or making it more difficult for them to participate in the political process seems far worse than the unlikely scenarios Lee has proposed. Come to think of it, if there are husbands who insist on pressuring their wives to vote the same way, they are going to exert that pressure whether or not there is a secret ballot. If employers are going to pressure their employees to vote a certain way, those pressures are probably going to be unspoken and subtle, and they wouldn’t be avoided by restricting or ending absentee voting.

Pape is not arguing that U.S. troops provoke suicide terrorist campaigns wherever they land, but that suicide terrorist campaigns cannot be explained without the presence of foreign (not simply American) military forces operating on territory the terrorists prize. ~Greg Scoblete, responding to Kori Schake

That’s right. Schake is in such a hurry to attack Pape’s “offshore balancing” recommendations that she misrepresents Pape’s core argument about suicide terrorism. As Prof. Pape has been arguing for years (including this 2005 interview with Scott McConnell for TAC), the goal of suicide terrorism is to inflict enough damage on a country’s civilian population that its government feels compelled to withdraw. Unfortunately, around the same time Prof. Pape gave his interview to TAC, the London bombings in July 2005 re-confirmed everything he had been saying in connection with the Iraq war. Here is Pape’s claim:

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland [bold mine-DL]. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

Of course, the nature and origin of the military presence are significant factors in all of this, which is why Pape emphasizes foreign occupation as the driving factor. A military presence that results from an invasion or military intervention or as part of an occupation and/or counterinsurgency policy will typically generate violent opposition. A military presence that results from a basing agreement with a national government that is perceived as legitimate usually will not provoke violent opposition. This seems to be most obviously true for the American experience with suicide terrorism. The U.S. intervened in Lebanon on the side of Israel and its Lebanese allies, deployed Marines to Beirut, suffered a horrific attack from Hizbullah and then withdrew soon thereafter. Once they had achieved the objective of forcing the U.S. out of their country, there were no more attacks. Crucially, there never would have been any attacks had the U.S. not intervened where it had no business going.

Contrary to the mythology some of the more enthusiastic anti-jihadists like to promote, Hizbullah terrorists did not “follow us back home,” because Hizbullah was fundamentally a Shi’ite resistance movement in Lebanon that doesn’t particularly care about what America was doing as long as it wasn’t interfering in Lebanon. Reagan’s error regarding Lebanon was not his decision to withdraw in the wake of the barracks bombing, which some hawks still think was a “sign of weakness.” His error was obviously the reckless decision to deploy American soldiers into the midst of an international and civil war in which America had nothing at stake.

Where I partially agree with Schake is in her criticism of an “offshore balancing” approach that prioritizes removing U.S. forces and relying on military strikes from afar. This is a policy recommendation for conceivably endless war with no guarantee that it would lead to fewer terrorist attacks. On the contrary, it seems likely to generate more attacks, including more attacks by radicalized individuals here in the U.S, because these strikes from afar are more likely to lead to civilian casualties. That will generate greater resentment against the U.S. It seems to me that this is not very different from the “counter-terrorist” approach to Afghanistan that the previous administration largely followed. “Offshore balancing” of this kind doesn’t eliminate the basic problem that Pape identifies as the cause of suicide terrorism, which is that this sort of terrorism feeds off of resentment of foreign military intervention as such.

Long-term occupation is one form of this, but we would be foolish to think that we can routinely bomb another country without generating the same violent reaction. Instead of trying to force withdrawal, terrorist attacks would have the cessation of attacks as their goal. It is one thing to argue that we should not have a military presence in Afghanistan because it feeds the instability and violence the government is presumably trying to reduce, but it is quite another to claim that the U.S. can remove its forces from a country, reserve the right to continue attacking it at will, and that this still counts as a real withdrawal. The trouble here is that Pape seems not to have taken his own claims about the causes of terrorism as seriously as he should, which has given Schake an opportunity to dismiss his important and valid claims along with his more questionable recommendations.

Update on 10/18: Yesterday, Prof. Pape put up a response to Schake’s argument (via David Benson). I recommend reading all of it, but I should point out that he specifically addresses that his off-shore balancing recommendation does not include heavy reliance on drone strikes:

Finally, I agree that replacing mass boots with mass drones would be a mistake — since vast numbers of air strikes could do inflict more than enough collateral damage to incite terrorism in response — exactly what CUTTING THE FUSE explains and why off-shore balancing means responding with stand-off military forces against significant size terrorist camps like Tarnak Farms (a military base larger than the Pentagon) and not every third ranking cadre in individual houses in Quetta, where more selective or even non-military means may well be more effective.

You might think that in a time of near-universal worry about the growing deficit, a Democratic president might take the opportunity to trim the defense budget by a few bombs. But holding military spending at its current levels—much less trimming it by the trillion-or-so dollars that experts say could be cut—apparently isn’t on the table. Obama wouldn’t even include military spending in his proposed spending freeze. As an influential critic of military spending once said about the country’s ongoing indulgence in defense pork, “Twenty years after the Cold War ended, this is simply not acceptable. It’s irresponsible. Our troops and our taxpayers deserve better.” That’s true, and could be pretty good guidance for a willing politician. And all it would take for the president to follow it would be for him to listen to his own advice. ~Peter Suderman

Via Andrew

Peter is absolutely right that Obama’s military budgets are indefensible, but we certainly shouldn’t be surprised. Since he was elected to the Senate, Obama has never been a particularly strong critic of the size of the U.S. military, nor has he seriously challenged the idea that the military should be used all over the globe. Complaining about pork and waste in military spending is all very well, but when it does not include criticism of the sheer size of the overall military budget it is the equivalent of complaining about earmarks while ignoring entitlement spending. It is a fiscally meaningless gesture that is supposed to signal that you take excessive spending seriously when you obviously don’t. At the same time, Obama has been assailed from the start of his term as a neo-isolationist, defense-slashing fool. Despite continually increasing the Pentagon’s budget, he has regularly been accused of reducing it. His modest arms reduction treaty has been portrayed as a capitulation to Russia, and hawks simply ignore his funding for nuclear arsenal modernization because they have re-defined “modernization” to mean building an entirely new arsenal. Hawks have been screaming about Obama’s alleged hostility to missile defense at the same time that Obama pursues missile defense in eastern Europe. Even if Obama were inclined to cut military spending, the bipartisan caterwauling this would unleash would prevent him from making any headway. As we should all know by now, Obama doesn’t challenge or buck entrenched interests, and that is exactly what warfare state reform would require.

Suppose that Obama had proposed real, large cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. The hawks would be screaming even more loudly, but they would now be able to point to real reductions in military spending rather than inventing them out of thin air. This would probably be to the political advantage of Republican hawks, since the majority of the public is as indifferent to excessive spending in the Pentagon as they are to entitlement spending. Most voters are likely to react poorly to proposals that will “make America weaker,” as the hawks will inevitably claim. If Obama were actually the enthusiast for nuclear disarmament and foe of missile defense the hawks desperately need him to be, they would be hitting him twice as hard as they are now, but instead of making things up they would be attacking Obama’s actual policies.

None of this excuses the administration’s fiscal irresponsibility, but it should make clear that there will be no significant reductions in military spending until the leadership in both parties agree not to use those reductions to bludgeon the other side. If we do end up with a Republican House majority, that will in some respects be the worst of both worlds, since there is no powerful constituency in the GOP that wants military spending cuts and Presidents rarely offer to trim the part of the budget that gives them so much power and freedom of action. Republican Presidents typically wouldn’t think of doing this, and Democratic Presidents have no reason to try, since they are going to be accused of gutting American “defense” no matter what they actually do.

That makes things sound rather grim, and perhaps they are. The constituencies that strongly support reductions in military spending are progressives, libertarians and deficit hawks, which also happen to be three constituencies with the least influence in their respective parties when it comes to national security policies. Obama’s military budgets are huge because there are no significant political obstacles to making them that way and there are no political incentives to make them smaller. A first, small step in changing the way we talk about military spending involves referring to military spending as just that. If military spending is ever going to be reduced, most Americans will need to acknowledge that the vast majority of military spending has a tenuous or non-existent relationship to the defense of the United States. At the very least, critics of that spending should avoid casually referring to it as defense spending, when that is not the purpose of most of these expenditures.

Two years after being tossed out of power at every level, it’s about to waltz right back in, kicking aside the corpses of Democrats foolish enough to go along with the designs of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This is good news for most conservatives. It’s slightly worse news for a smaller group of conservatives—namely, the ones who spent the end of the ’00s explaining why a Republican comeback like this was not really possible. ~Dave Weigel

I realize the article is over a week old by now, but there were a few things I wanted to say about it and about some of the follow-up posts. Obviously, it’s true that “reformist” conservatives did nothing to facilitate Republican gains in this year’s election, but what is equally true and not as clearly stated in Weigel’s article as it might be is that Republican gains are not driven by popular support for a positive Republican agenda of any kind. Neither are they being driven by an ideological rejection of the administration’s agenda. One can defend or mock the “Pledge to America,” and one can sympathize with or scorn Tea Partiers, but neither of them has much to do with reviving GOP political fortunes.

The reality is that Republican gains this year are the product of immense economic discontent and anxiety to which few conservatives have plausible answers. One doesn’t have to like the policy recommendations of “reformist” conservatives to acknowledge that they have been just about the only ones on the right trying to provide those answers. Their answers have tended to dominate discussions of reforming conservatism because they’re the only ones actively engaged in the conversation. When the dust settles and Republican office-holders are looking for advice on policy and legislation, “reformists” will win the day for lack of serious competition.

If the main observation of “reformist” conservatives is that Americans, including most Republicans, are comfortable with the existing welfare state and want their government doing more to alleviate that discontent and anxiety, that is pretty hard to contradict. As I have hinted at before, there is probably no worse time for an agenda of severe austerity and budget-cutting than in the wake of one of the worst recessions in the last century, and to the extent that conservative activists genuinely want to pursue an agenda of austerity and budget-cutting they need to understand that there will be no political rewards for their efforts. If the “reformist” proposal is that Republicans need to adopt policies that attempt to alleviate economic discontent and anxiety, one would think that their proposal would be taken more seriously now than it was before the bursting of the housing bubble, the financial crisis and the recession. One might say that the incoherence and fiscal irresponsibility of the “Pledge” are acknowledgments from the Republican leadership that the reformists have a good idea of what the public will and will not tolerate.

My apologies for the unusually long silence over the past week. I am a week overdue in addressing the responses to my last column, but I did want to make a few remarks about James Joyner’s careful rebuttal of my main claim of NATO’s obsolescence. First, here is James:

But our primary motivation was our own security, not selfless sacrifice for the love of our European cousins. Yes, we were there to protect Western Europe. But we were drawing the line on the limits of Soviet influence.

NATO’s premise from the very beginning was that we were all in this thing together. And that remains the idea behind the Alliance. “Out of area” and various mission sets are force planning concepts, not rationales for existence.

I regret if I gave the impression that I think the creation of NATO had something to do with “selfless sacrifice” or “love of our European cousins.” It didn’t. As James says, Americans were motivated by our own security to create the Alliance. This an important point, and one that weakens pro-NATO and anti-anti-NATO arguments considerably. It is because the creation of NATO was first and foremost an anti-Soviet measure designed to enhance American security that America has no need of it any longer. When James diverts later to make an appeal to a “Europe whole and free” as justification for NATO expansion, he is appealing to sentiment and the idea that the Alliance has everything to do with “love of our European cousins,” or at least sympathy for the Poles and the Baltic nations.

The idea that “we’re all in this thing together” makes a great deal more sense if there were a general conflict or geopolitical struggle in which Americans and Europeans share common cause. There is a strong desire to make the “war on terror” fit that description, but it doesn’t. This brings us back to the matter of “out of area” operations. James writes that “it simply made sense for the West to continue working together to achieve our shared interests,” but the idea that Europeans share security interests in central Asia or the Near East with America doesn’t really make sense. It’s true that the “out of area” missions are not attempts to find “new conflicts to justify NATO’s existence.” They are the product of deciding that the post-Balkans NATO will be an international stabilizing force. The “out of area” missions have resulted from the re-definition of NATO that already happened in the 1990s when member states were confronted with the Alliance’s obsolescence for the first time. Once NATO opted for international vigilantism in Kosovo, there were all kinds of conflicts that could conceivably require the Alliance’s attentions.

It’s true that the U.S. has intervened and will continue to intervene militarily in other countries without NATO’s support or approval, but it is hardly news to James that many of the new allied governments brought in during the last two rounds of NATO expansion were among the most willing and eager to lend political cover to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, a few NATO members strongly opposed the invasion, but by my count at least twelve Alliance members rallied behind the U.S. in a war that clearly had nothing to do with European security. Albania supported the Iraq war and sent a few dozen soldiers as part of the initial invasion. This was before it had formally been accepted into NATO, and it was mostly done out of gratitude for U.S./NATO support for the KLA terrorists in Kosovo, but one can also see Albanian support in terms of its desire to be accepted into the Alliance. Slovakia was another would-be member that sent soldiers to Iraq to secure its place in the Alliance.

The enthusiasm of central and eastern European governments to help invade Iraq was a small but significant political boost for pro-war arguments in 2002-03, and Italian and Spanish participation left Germany relatively isolated among the Alliance’s major European members. All of this helped to maintain the fiction that the invasion was a “coalition” war akin to the Gulf War rather than an overwhelmingly Anglo-American effort. I should add that all of this enthusiasm was only at the official, government level; the nations of central, eastern and southern Europe were against the war as much as any other European nation. Without NATO expansion since 1996, it is hard to imagine many governments in Europe besides Britain lending any support to the Iraq war.

Admittedly, these new NATO members are militarily very weak countries, and other than Poland they have not contributed much to U.S.-led war efforts. That just points to a more significant flaw with NATO expansion: it extends security guarantees to countries that contribute next to nothing and which are net liabilities to the United States. If the Cold War-era NATO enhanced American security, the post-Cold War NATO detracts from it.

Regarding NATO expansion, I argued last week that expansion has been clearly detrimental to European stability and security because of the role of expansion in escalating the “frozen” conflicts in the Caucasus. James’ reply on this point is probably his weakest:

The counter-argument to this is that the problem in Georgia was not the proposed expansion of NATO but rather the lack of it. Would Russia have invaded the sovereign territory of a NATO Ally, risking military retaliation from the West, over its rather meager interests in South Ossetia and Abkhazia? It’s unknowable but I rather doubt it.

Yes, that is the counter-argument, and it is one that doesn’t have much evidence to support it. Russia didn’t just happen to invade Georgia. Yes, it goaded Saakashvili into lashing out, but he was the one who lashed out and escalated the conflict. The Georgian war in 2008 was the result of Saakashvili’s belief that he had the backing of the West and could “reintegrate” South Ossetia without suffering the consequences of using force against a region he knew to be under Russian control. Would Saakashvili have shown greater restraint and patience if he had a formal security guarantee from NATO? All that he needed in 2008 was a vague promise given at the Bucharest summit earlier that year that Georgia would eventually be granted membership, and that was enough to enable his reckless behavior. Had Georgia been admitted to NATO earlier in 2008, it would not have made Saakashvili less reckless, but it would have obliged the U.S. and all our allies to defend Georgia or show our security guarantees to be the empty, and therefore dangerous, political gestures that I believe most of them really are.

My new column for The Week lays out the argument for the obsolescence of NATO and the dangers of keeping it going when it has no real purpose. These arguments will be very familiar to readers here, and I am indebted to conservative and libertarian critics of NATO from the past two decades for much of what I wrote, but I hope I have managed to re-state the case against NATO in an interesting way.

There have been two distinct, related arguments going on concerning the administration’s claim to have the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens. The first, more important argument is over the administration’s refusal to allow review or accountability for the power being claimed. The problem here is obviously that the administration is claiming the authority to order the death of a citizen on the basis of evidence that the public cannot see as part of a process that allows for no legal remedy if this power is abused. If someone tries to sue, the government will shut down the lawsuit by invoking secrecy and national security. This is the very definition of unaccountable, lawless government. Defending the particular instance of targeting al-Awlaki for assassination doesn’t even address the main question, which is the administration’s effective claim to be beyond the law.

In al-Awlaki’s case, there may be ample evidence in the public domain to persuade us that he has committed treason and has sided with the declared enemies of the United States, but the administration is claiming that it would have the authority to order a citizen’s death solely on the basis of evidence not available to the public, and it could theoretically carry out that order anywhere. We have to trust that this does not apply to potential targets in the U.S. because there are more “practical” ways of apprehending them, and because it is formally against the law, but who exactly would hold a future administration accountable if it violated the law?

It is the outrageous nature of the claim and the enormous potential for abuse that provoke outraged complaints against tyrannical government. If this actually were just a narrow claim about the authority to kill a handful of enemy operatives, the debate would be a lot less heated and it would be rather less important. What we’re talking about is the executive’s ability to create unchecked authority for itself to kill citizens it deems guilty as part of an essentially undefined, open-ended, global conflict that has no apparent end.

The second, related argument concerns the name defenders of the administration’s claim give to the action of killing these individuals. The word assassination evokes many negative associations, so there is an instinctive reaction against using it, but it is the proper word to describe what happens when someone gives an order to eliminate a key member of another state/army/organization.

Andrew doesn’t want to call it that, because he seems to think that calling it assassination undermines the argument that it is a legitimate act of war, but it is often during wartime when key members of the other side are targeted for assassination. Andrew defines assassination in a sufficiently narrow way that it can’t ever apply in wartime. The Assassins were engaged in warfare against their enemies. Killing by stealth and surprise was their preferred tactic, because it was effective and compensated for their military weakness. Essentially, Andrew has been repeatedly making the argument that killing al-Awlaki is legitimate because he is a key member of Al Qaeda, but then furiously denies that killing him would be an assassination. If he weren’t a key member of Al Qaeda, it wouldn’t be an asassination, but would simply be a murder. Most critics of this outrageous power-grab are willing to concede that al-Awlaki is what the government claims that he is, but it doesn’t follow that the government gets to have unreviewable authority to order the assassination.

In my last post, I compared the unwillingness to call assassination by its proper name with the refusal to call torture by its proper name. That still makes sense to me, but it confused things a bit. Defenders of torture were never really willing to defend torture by name, so they had to keep re-defining torture to include fewer and fewer things. What we have in the current debate is a preference to avoid using a word because it has associations with illicit killing, but at the same time the act is not necessarily illicit in the context of war. So in this debate the correct word has to be avoided because it makes the administration’s claim sound worse. It is the nature of the claim to unreviewable authority to order deaths on secret evidence rather than the name of the type of killing that is truly outrageous.

My insistence on calling such killings assassinations comes from a weariness with our culture’s habit of dressing up everything with euphemisms. Even though it was/is a war of aggression, the invasion of Iraq is not called a war of aggression, our continued combat presence in Iraq is re-defined as “residual forces” because we have decided to declare an end to combat operations, and occupation is called nation-building. People use euphemisms for two main reasons: to put others at ease, or to put oneself at ease with something that is genuinely disturbing. Calling these killings assassinations doesn’t concede all that much, which is why it is all the more remarkable that supporters of the administration’s power-grab keep rejecting it.

We should all be able to agree that it is the power-grab, rather than the specific reason for the power-grab, that is troubling and outrageous. Indeed, the more legitimate of a target al-Awlaki is, the less justifiable the administration’s claim becomes.