President Obama's Advanced Moral Calculus

The Obama Justice Department apparently intends to investigate Bush Administration lawyers for rendering opinions that certain interrogation techniques were legal, now that bien pensantopinion has concluded they were not. They are not investigating those who committed the acts, nor are they investigating those who ordered or tolerated their commission, but instead the lawyers who rendered the opinion. This seems rather unsporting. The Obama Administration is being very careful not to set the precedent that the principals, namely the President and his reports or their Congressional overseers are to be held accountable for their actions. Instead certain mid-level functionaries, people quite lacking the star power of Messrs Obama, Bush orPelosi are to be held accountable for their superior’s sins.

In this approach Mr. Obama is applying a quite advanced moral calculus to the art of statecraft, one that he must have learned while teaching law at the University of Chicago. It certainly overbears the simple moral arithmetic that I have been able to master.

This sophisticated approach also extends to Mr. Obama’s current campaign in Pakistan. Evidently upon Mr. Obama’s accession to the Presidency the pace of Predator drone attacks inPakistan has escalated from 5 per month to up to 30 each month. These attacks on suspected AlQaeda and Taliban kingpins are most often targeted at their residences. I’ve lived in the region and traveled many times to Pakistan. The houses of the elite are large, boxy multi story concrete block affairs. When they are hit by high explosives, they tend to pancake, one floor on top of another. Anyone inside who was not killed by the shock wave or incinerated would likely die of suffocation under tons of concrete. Which could be quite a few people – the homes of the prominent are often crowded with family, servants, retainers and their families. Thus, a single Predator attack can be expected to kill or maim up to a dozen men, women and children.

If I were asked whether I would want to be waterboarded to death versus being burnt or crushed to death, I’m not sure I wouldn’t choose waterboarding. But of course no American captive has ever been waterboarded to death, have they? They’ve been frightened, panicked, in fear of their lives no doubt, but not exterminated, like their Predated colleagues (and their wives, children, servants, servants children, bystanders).

The moral mathematics that demands the prosecution of lawyers who had the temerity to argue their side’s case in a matter of frightening terrorists but views as perfectly normal the deliberate, if incidental incineration and suffocation of innocent women and children has me using my fingers in an effort to catch up. Of course there is a difference: the poor Tragic Victims of CIA frightening were in our grasp, whereas the Predator Villains (child villains, servant villains) were not. With this I am pulling off my socks, hoping that by counting toes I can understand the logic. It is my understanding that our surveillance and rocket technologies have become so good that we can see or otherwise confirm our victims' presence before we fire and once we shoot, we are almost certain to hit them, or someone near them. It is therefore hard for this grade school moral mathematician to see how these remote ‘villains’ are truly is any less in our grasp than a Guantanamo ‘poor tragic victim’ in chains.

Mind you, I am not objecting to the attacks, but unlike the advanced math crowd, I do not claim such moral sophistication that I would assume that they are anything but a dirty, horrible expedient in a nasty war. I don’t for a moment pretend that it is any less vicious to incidentally, but knowingly incinerate innocent bystanders than to torture terror kingpins. But, again, the simple sums that I can do are overborne by such brilliant moral trigonometry that I’m sure a demonstration would make it all clear.

Perhaps our President and his Press can provide the rest of the nation with a quick précis so that we can be elevated to his moral plane.