What’s interesting to me is how Lincoln’s views about how best to conduct warfare – even brutal civil warfare where the survival of the state itself was at stake – changed over time. You can imagine how he’d be ridiculed for flip-flopping today, when, in fact, he was simply responding to new needs and past lessons. The lesson for us is surely that war need not degenerate into total destruction and cruelty. Some laws – such as the absolute prohibition of torture – are necessary if we are not to lose sight of what we’re fighting for in the first place. Money quote:
For the past seven years, America has repeated the journey Lincoln completed in 24 grueling months. Strong majorities of Americans now call for the dismantling of detention facilities at Guantanamo. Even stronger majorities oppose the use of torture in interrogations. As a nation, we have walked in Lincoln’s footsteps, down an uncertain path from skepticism about the laws of war to a rediscovery of their pragmatic mix of toughness and humanity. President Obama, in his inaugural address, pledged to reconcile our interests and our ideals. This is precisely what Lincoln’s laws of war sought to accomplish, rejecting lawlessness while relentlessly pursuing threats to our way of life.
The rage many of us rightly felt after 9/11 was a very difficult force to handle, and the last president let it get the better of him. But it is not easy to wage war with sufficient force to win while retaining our soul and a calm assessment of our self-interest. And it is not easy to publicly change position in the face of new evidence and fresh facts. But we must and should – and democracy allows us to adjust by changing leaders as well. I wrote the day of 9/11 words of anger but even then, the nagging sense of what the West still demands – restraint – was tugging at my frontal cortex:
The one silver lining of this is that we may perhaps be shaken out of our self-indulgent preoccupations and be reminded of what really matters: our freedom, our security, our integrity as a democratic society. This means we must be vigilant not to let our civil liberties collapse under the understandable desire for action. To surrender to that temptation is part of what these killers want … The task in front of us to somehow stay civilized while not shrinking from the face of extinguishing – by sheer force if necessary – the forces that would eclipse us.
That was at 9.46 pm September 11 2001.
The Dish 