I’m going to do a brief post about false equivalency, and I want to preface this by saying that I am against the Obama drone war and the ongoing program of detainee detention and (I’m certain) abuse. This would be wrong under any president, and no less under this one. In addition to being morally bankrupt, it is strategically incoherent; worse, detrimental to our long term security. We are, in essence, investing in future generations of terrorists, determined to do us harm based on the carnage we have carried out on their persons, their families, their communities.
That said, I also want to take issue with this argument I keep hearing that this administration is as bad as the last one with respect to extralegal killing, aggressive foreign policy, etc. It is bad enough to be against, bad enough to protest, but if we are comparing Obama with Bush II, there is simply no comparison. It was Bush who started both the Afghan and the Iraq wars, one of which we are still engaged in. These actions alone resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, uncounted thousands of abused detainees, both at the hands of U.S. personnel and under the merciless attentions of our grisly allies.
There is a tendency to minimize the crimes of the Bush era. Joe Scarborough, for instance, talked this week about the last adminstration having waterboarded “three people”. This is ludicrous. Of course, the most famous instances were those three high-value detainees he’s referencing, but there certainly were other instances of waterboarding, and many, many more instances of far worse abuses in Baghram, in Abu Garaib, and elsewhere. We like to shrink the past down to a digestible size, but this is just willful ignorance. Make no mistake – If there were an effective International Criminal Court, Bush/Cheney would be in line ahead of Obama. But they would all be in that line.
We can acknowledge that both administrations are dead wrong on this. But when it comes to comparisons, don’t even go there.
luv u,
jp
