Redstate...
Some Thoughts on
Inheritance
Posted by Academic Elephant
Thursday, May 5th
“Inheritance” is a neutral word–it can be bad and good depending on the
circumstance. You don’t get to pick what you get any more than you can
pick your parents. On the one hand, you have things like photo albums
and trusts funds. On the other you have the lasting repercussions of
bad behavior, the sins of the father if you will, that can reach down
across generations. Most of us inherit a combination of the two from
our predecessors, hopefully with more of the former than the
This construct applies to presidents as well. You begin the job
basically beholden to your predecessor, who has created the
circumstances under which you have to try to do your job. Indeed, your
first year is in many ways the political equivalent of adolescence, as
you try to break away from the existing model and establish your own
identity. This process can be particularly dramatic when you have
successive presidents of opposing political parties.
So we have seen President Obama rebel against the Bush administration
legacy throughout both his campaign and his first twenty-seven months
in office. Calling attention to his inherited burdens, particularly at
home but also abroad, has been a constant refrain in Obama’s rhetoric,
an inevitable codicil to any policy announcement. To date, these
references have been exclusively negative and pejorative, and to be
honest many Americans suffering from an extended economic downturn and
weary of the lengthy foreign wars have tended to accept these
statements at face value.
The events of the last five days strongly suggest that there was
something else in that heritage, something of great and lasting value
even if it was shrouded and reviled like some ugly and unwanted family
object foisted on a new generation with no taste for such things. In
this case, rather than a breakfront or silver service we are talking
about detention operations in the global war on terror, that impossibly
difficult but unavoidable challenge President Bush and his
administration confronted in the years after 9/11.
Those who grappled with this issue have been the most reviled of the
previous administration. While Treasury Secretaries and budget
directors go largely unreviled, anyone who had to deal with detainees,
their capture, incarceration and interrogation, have been roundly
attacked as at best ignorant and parochial, and at worst eager to
torment innocents in a dark campaign to subvert our most precious
values, our true jewels of civil liberties.
Compared to the worst monsters in history–i.e. Pol Pot, the Nazis–they
have had few defenders as it has seemed a losing battle to try to argue
for what has been widely accepted as “torture”, a corrupt and defunct
practice. It has been so easy to disavow these activities, perhaps with
the caveat that such things might have seemed necessary in the early
days after 9/11 when we feared another attack, but that attack didn’t
come and even if we dont utterly condemn, we know better.
Now that our most deadly enemy rests with the fishes thanks to the
intelligence gathered from those detainees, a welcome development
removing both a real and present security threat and a painful shared
psychological burden, these policies emerge in a different light.
Rather than a shameful inheritance, they have been a gift,
painstakingly crafted behind layers of classification and legal
necessity. As time and events peel those layers away like so many
layers of tarnish, we might want to be prepared for more unexpected
revelations that make the easy poses of moral superiority that have
been so fashionable over the past seven years increasingly
uncomfortable and difficult to defend.
While it is naive to expect President Obama will overtly acknowledge
this heritage either today at Ground Zero or at anytime in the coming
election season, we can hope that his actions will speak more loudly
than his words. As he has recognized the necessity of the DoD detention
facility at Guantanamo he may now understand the necessity of those CIA
interrogators who are still under investigation for the very practices
that ultimately got Osama bin Laden. Perhaps today when he stands where
his predecessor stood in those terrible days after the 9/11 attacks he
will understand what he has truly inherited.
Read it at Redstate
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