huh--i seem to remember that, during the cold war, the folk who wore white hats characterized the folk who wore black hats--you know, stalin et al--as being evil because they approached politics using an "ends justify the means" rationality. at that time, this rationality was framed as a kind of "anything goes" element within a type of ideological fanaticism.
it is pretty funny to read precisely this type of argument being floated above to justify the end-run around all legal parameters that cowboy george and his administration engineered in order to invade iraq. but it seems to track other modes of drift in argument...
Quote:
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In war the ends always justify the means
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except that this memo--tip of an iceberg--was not written in the context of a war, but prior to, as a reflection on/about the process of constructing a (false) case *for* war.
unless what you mean by this argument, ustwo, to the extent that it is one, that war starts from the instant anyone thinks about war. in which case, the idea of war means nothing---it is a kind of psychological state, a formalised snippiness----only incidentally is war an actual event---for your argument to hold, war is a curiously nebulous thing the primary function of which is to legitimate any and all actions undertaken by an administration that you agree with politically--i expect that your definition of war would be very very different if, say, a democrat was in the white house. but that is the advantage of a nebulous idea--it is wholly instrumental from the outset, and in its use--the ends justify the means---right?
at this point, the right only has "saddam hussein was a bad man" to legitimate its actions. well that and the rove response, which is to pretend that questions about the legitimacy of the war were somehow "answered" in the last election--which assumes that this information about distorting information as a function of a decision to go to war based on nothing was already in the public sphere before novemebr--which of course it wasnt, not in this obvious and detailed a way. so two arguments really: the end justifies the means, and we already had this debate.
both these arguments are simply nuts.
what they point to is the amazing ability to avoid dissonant information that seems characteristic of conservative ideology--why face unpleasant facts when you can always just turn on fox news, which will not bother you with it?---this of course as an argument is at once not much different from the "war" argument above--for all the years of husseins rule that saw him a convenient tool of american foreign policy, he might have been a dickhead, but he was our dickhead and so nothing was said about him, about his actions--not even the infamous use of gas, which the reagan administration knew full well about and said nothing about because, at the time, the argument that it was directed against a military target was enough. after the invasion of kuwait, however he stopped being convenient and so became evil incarnate. hussein himself was a miserable, brutal piece character the entire time--what changed was the american relation to him.
is iraq better off without saddam hussein? probably. of course it is hard to know what is really going on in iraq still because the pooled press is still relaying defense department talking points in the main. there are arguments that iraq is sliding toward civil war. this would be a complete fiasco. but i am sure the right will "take the long view" on this.
but even if iraq were a rosy, lovely situation now (it obviously is not) would this in any way justify the extralegal activities of the bush administration? not in the slightest.
but maybe this is why the nebulous category "war" and the pseudo-argument attached to it above makes sense: it is nothing other than an empty slogan that enables a refusal to think about unpleasant information.