View from the other side

Okay, enough pacifist-bashing. A significant part of me wants to agree with that point of view, and I'd describe myself as generally against war. But if we truly want to stand for a progressive and civilized way of life, we have to be able to stomach the fact that such a stand might sometimes require crude and primitive means of enforcing those values.

Whether the Western world actually lives up to the values it professes to champion, however, is another question, and a legitimate one at that. From my point of view, there is no better societal system than a pluralistic democracy fueled by a market economy, with the inevitable inequities caused by the latter reined in by prudent dashes of social responsibility. In principle, this describes countries such as Canada, Japan, the U.S. and most of Europe, among many others. Specific practices (for example, what constitutes a "prudent dash of social responsibility) vary, but the idea is the same - physical, intellectual and economic freedom.

Which brings me to what is arguably the greatest tragedy resulting from the "war on terror" and the Iraq occupation: America's abdication of its own value system. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and warrantless wiretapping all reveal the fundamental lie in the Bush administration's argument that the terror war is a fight for freedom. A government that tasks its legal counsel with developing a constitutional argument for torture cannot expect to be taken seriously when it denounces the atrocities of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. 

The war hawks often talk about preserving the "American way of life," but by stripping away the freedoms of their own citizens, they've done more damage to American values than any terrorist ever could. That's the tragedy of the Iraq war and the "war on terror" so far - a country so bent on protecting self-preservation that it's destroying itself from the inside out.