September 11?
The President of Good & Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush, Peter Singer (2004)

As usual, I'm taking a guess at the date when I finished the book. The original idea for this series of reviews was that I'd be writing soon enough after finishing that I'd remember. After missing all these times, you'd think I'd remember to make a note of it, but I don't. Unlike most of the others, this book I read fairly quickly, not in bits and pieces with interruptions of several days in between. But it was quite a while ago.

Peter Singer starts with the observation that President Bush, more than any American president in recent history, describes his political beliefs and actions in terms of good and evil. For most liberal critics of the President, the response to this is either to admonish Bush for the intellectually primitive act of reducing complex policy questions to simple Manichean morality or to pretend that Bush doesn't really mean what he says and it's only facile rhetoric for the benefit of his yokel audience.

By contrast, Singer takes President Bush at his word, accepting -- at least for the sake of argument -- that his decision-making really is motivated by his belief in good and evil. Having stipulated that, he figures that in order to better understand American policy under Bush, we need to understand the nature of the ethical philosophy to which Bush subscribes. To that end, Singer examines Bush's statements and actions and tries to make sense of them.

The conclusions that Singer ultimately reaches are mostly unflattering to Bush -- that there is no consistent ethical pattern in his various positions, that his actions don't match the moral standards that his statements set forth, etc. -- so in that sense this book belongs alongside the various other anti-Bush books of the political season. But the tone is quite different. Although the evidence being discussed is political, the method of examination is philosophical, with the result that the book is more in the spirit of Thomas Aquinas or John Stuart Mill than Michael Moore or Al Franken. It's a welcome change. I don't generally have much interest in discussions of philosophy by philosophers, but this one held my attention.

When I read the brief biographical information about Singer, the tone of the book becomes less surprising. He is a professor of bioethics, and his many previous books are on ethics and philosophy, not politics. Also, he is an Australian living in America, not a native American, so that probably has something to do with his ability to stay detached from the usual political patterns even while he criticizes the President.

While reading this book, I had a curious sensation which I can't easily explain: The book is exactly the right size. With most of the other books I read -- political and otherwise -- the verbiage is not well tailored to the content. Particularly in popular best sellers rushed to print, there is a lot of writing which seems to be there only to fill space, to show how clever the author is, or to push an argument past the point where the available facts back it up (all of which are habits encouraged in school writing assignments, I can't help noticing). To write in a way which is both clear and concise is not easy, and the exact point where writing is neither insufficient nor excessive is a narrow target. For that reason, when an author misses that target by a little bit to one side or the other, I not only forgive it, but I think of it as perfectly normal. That's why it's so remarkable that Singer hits the target dead on. At the end of every chapter I feel like he has attended to every point necessary to settle the question and no more, and the chapter is over because there is nothing left that needs to be said.

Discussions of war make up about a third of the book -- a significant part, but by no means the entirety. In the course of these, the traditional Catholic notion of "just war" is considered at length. Of the seven conditions this Christian tradition sets for a just war, the one which is most conspicuously contrary to Bush's war policy is the one that says, "Force may be used only after all peaceful alternatives have been tried and exhausted."

I don't intend to argue here which of President Bush and the Catholic Church has more moral authority. I just think it's interesting to note that the former has challenged the latter on this very significant point, and it takes an unorthodox author like Singer to highlight it. Maybe it's just the narrow intellectual world that I inhabit, but I almost never see anything about this in my reading. Sure, peace-loving liberals rail against Bush's militarism with many arguments, but not among them is the fact that Bush's stated policy (in his West Point speech, for example) is in contradiction to a Christian tradition dating back to St Augustine. Doesn't anyone else find that interesting? Maybe Bush is right, and the world really has changed in a way that makes the "just war" doctrine obsolete, but if so, surely that's worth some discussion. I think the reason that we rarely hear about this (or at least I rarely do) is because the sort of people who like to criticize Bush are the same one's who have little or no respect for Christian tradition anyway, so to them "just war" is about as relevant as iconoclasm or alchemy.

But there's more to it than that. A week or two ago, in the course of a discussion of Iraq, someone mentioned in passing that "no one is saying that Bush rushed to war in Afghanistan." That was in one of the blogs I read semi-regularly. I recall that it was not a high-traffic blog, it was one I often post comments to, and it was someone I consider to be generally more anti-Bush than myself. Looking through my list of bookmarks, that seems to narrow the selection down to just Orcinus, but if it was, I can't find the thread now.

Wherever it was, I registered my disagreement in the comments. It's not true that no one is saying that. I'm saying that. If "rush to war" is the same as neglecting to exhaust all peaceful alternatives, Singer is saying that, too.

And yet, Orcinus (or whoever it was) is right. Figuratively speaking, nobody is saying this. As with so many things, the positions are dictated by political tactics. Even among the dedicated left, hardly anyone wants to criticize Bush's approach to attacking Afghanistan. It makes them look too radical. It deprives them of the political cover they need when criticizing the war in Iraq. It looks good to be able to say, "Oh yes, of course no one is disputing that war. We're only disputing this war."

I'm not ready to start a debate about whether making war on Afghanistan was the right choice. I haven't studied the circumstances enough to make a judgment on it. I would point out, however, that it was a choice. The Taliban government was an odious regime, but before Sept 11 it was an odious regime we were able to get along with. There were and are equally odious regimes elsewhere in the world, for example in Myanmar (aka Burma) or Zimbabwe. But gross misrule in Myanmar and Zimbabwe does no harm to American interests beyond the moral offense we take at its wickedness.

To the extent that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had any more effect on us than these other regimes did, it was only in that Afghanistan was home to anti-American terrorist groups who do affect us, and the Afghan government failed to stamp them out. This is something it had in common with Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Yet our strategy with Afghanistan was quite different from our strategy with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It didn't have to be. We had normal relations with Afghanistan in 2001. To have leaned hard on the government to cooperate with us in rooting out the terrorists was a plausible option. The Taliban were not an active sponsor of al-Qaeda. The Taliban movement had a strong isolationist streak very different from al-Qaeda's global mission. Even before Sept 11, the various Taliban leaders were split over al-Qaeda; some supported it, some opposed it.

President Bush made a decision, one which he reiterated in the debate tonight when he said, "We've upheld the doctrine that said if you harbor a terrorist, you're equally as guilty as the terrorist." The Taliban were not the terrorists, and the Taliban did not attack us. They did, however, govern a country in which resided the leadership of terrorist group that did attack us, and it not entirely clear how much the Taliban welcomed that leader's presence. Shortly after the attack, Bush delivered an ultimatum to the government of Afghanistan, demanding that they turn over Osama bin Laden to American justice. The Taliban stalled for time, saying that they would consider doing so, but first they'd like to see the evidence against bin Laden. Bush did not provide that evidence. It did come out later, but he didn't wait for that. Instead, he proceeded to gather forces and attacked a few days later. That was a choice.

Some of my readers, I know, will say it was the right choice, and damn good thing that someone finally made it. Perhaps. It's entirely possible that the pro-al-Qaeda faction among the Taliban leadership would have prevailed, and we would have been obliged to attack them anyway. But we didn't wait to find out, and our impatience has the consequence of blurring the distinction of who exactly is the enemy. If the Taliban had said, "Yes, Osama bin Laden attacked you, but we decline to hand him over because we're OK with that", then we and the world would know that the Taliban had declared themselves our enemy. Because we didn't wait, we don't really know that.

Today, even the liberals who support the war in Afghanistan say it's OK because "they're the ones who attacked us". I know that the Taliban have squelched human rights in Afghanistan, forced women to wear extreme burqas, and brutally executed petty criminals, but prior to our invasion did any pro-Taliban Afghan actually attack any American? That's not just a rhetorical question. I really don't know the answer. If anyone out there does, I'd like to hear it.

Both this book and Perfectly Legal employ a strange new form of footnotes that I'm starting to see. I guess I should call them endnotes, since they aren't technically footnotes unless they appear at the bottom of the same page that references them. Typically, a book's endnotes appear at the end of the book (or occasionally at the end of each chapter) in smaller type and numbered sequentially. These same numbers appear as superscripts in the main text of the book, keying the notes.

In these two books, there are no superscripts at all. From reading the main text alone, you'd have no way of knowing that the endnotes exist. But when you get to the back of the book, there they are. They are in the same size type as the rest of the book, and they are numbered by page number. So if you're reading along and you wonder about the source of a quote, you go to the notes section in the back and see if there's a note for that page. Maybe there is or maybe there isn't. You have no way of knowing except by looking. Very strange.

In this book, the endnotes section is titled "Sources". They aren't even called notes at all. I forgot to check what the title of the notes section was in Perfectly Legal. I did check the publisher, and I see that both books are published by a division of Penguin. Perhaps this strange new style of notes is a Penguin-specific innovation.

Not much has changed in the books I'm reading, but a lot has changed in what I've got available. As I mentioned here before, my standard habit has been that whenever I notice a book title that interests me, I place a hold on it at the local library and I designate that hold as inactive. Every now and then, when I'm ready for something new to read, I go online and look at my list of holds, and pick the ones I want to activate, whereupon the book shows up at my local branch within a couple of days.

About a week ago, the King County Library changed to a new computer system for its catalog, and one of the consequences is that the "inactive" specification no longer exists. When I called the library to inquire, I found out that this is a system-wide phenomenon and they're hoping to rectify it soon. In the meantime, all of my inactive holds -- along with everyone else's -- became active. I noticed it in time to cancel a few, but I still ended up with a half dozen more books than I was ready for.

They're basically in two categories: the Middle East books and the U.S. politics books. The first category includes the two by M.E. Yapp; A Short History of Modern Egypt, which I now see really is quite short; and Lords of the Horizon, a fairly new summary history of the Ottoman Empire targeted at the general reader. In the second category is Battle Ready, Worse Than Watergate, and The Republican Noise Machine. In addition to these there's still the Pinker and Kay books that I had already started.

It's hard to say which of these I'm most likely to actually read. There's no way I'll read them all, unless I make a point of devoting several extra hours a day just to reading. As appealing as that sounds, it's not really practical. Least likely to be finished, I'd guess, is Battle Ready. As much as Gen Zinni intrigues me, I'm pretty much tired of reading about Iraq. I might have thought the same of Worse Than Watergate, except that a recent discussion with REG about the culture of secrecy in Washington has repiqued my interest there. Sadly, it's also likely that the Yapp books will be backburnered again. I like them as references, but they're pretty tough to just sit down and read cover to cover.

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