A few days ago, Winds of Change posted one of its regular "Sufi Wisdom" parables, and invited comment. I spotted it a bit too late to get in on the discussion, but it spurred me to write about a point I'd been meaning to make for a while. The parable:

When I first read this parable, I found myself thinking of the case the Bush administration made for the invasion of Iraq. Then I read this line by AST, and the reason for this otherwise incongruent bit of mental association crystallized.

That Saddam Hussein is no longer in control of Iraq is an indisputable Good Thing. That invasion of Iraq was necessary in order to accomplish this is a questionable but not unreasonable position. That Iraq, at some point, still had WMD-related program activities is a fact. That it was a threat sufficient to require us to invade is an opinion that is reasonable, but debatable.

The Bush Administration, for whatever reason, judged that the merits of their case were insufficient to guarantee the outcome they desired. Perhaps they felt they had a dishonest judge (the UN). Perhaps they felt that Americans would not support the invasion if given an honest and open evaluation of the facts. We can conjecture, and such conjectures will always be flavored by our own partisan predilections, but any serious examination of the facts and the administration's public statements reveals that they deceived the American people to get the outcome they desired. This does not invalidate the good that has been accomplished, and should our policies result in a stable and democratic Iraq, they deserve credit for that.

But in seeking what is arguably a noble end, they engaged in a systematic deception of the American people, and indeed, the world.

We also now find new evidence to suggest that they condone pushing the envelope of what is considered torture--or simply of what they can get away with in the pursuit of extracting intelligence:

First of all, let's get one thing out in the open: the memo is genuine. Nobody in the Bush administration has disputed that.

This memo, by itself, is not enough to bury the Bush administration, or anyone in it. This is a draft memo presenting a legal opinion, not a statement of policy. But take it in context, and compare it with the other facts available: the record of abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Bush administration's arguments in favor of holding "enemy combatants" indefinitely; the rendering of suspects (innocent and otherwise) to countries which use torture in order to get around the law; the dishonest, shifting, and often contradictory justifications offered for invading Iraq; the intimidation, threats, and bending of House rules to pass the Medicare bill... and a whole host of issues (such as Florida voting irregularities) which I decline to offer as examples because the facts are sufficiently under contention.

Some would argue that these are not in any way related. I disagree. Taken in context, they reveal an unmistakable pattern: the Bush administration apparently believes that the legality, ethics, and morality of the means to their ends are irrelevant except as a component of risk/benefit analysis.

One of my favorite authors, Daniel Keys Moran, wrote to me and in one of his books that killing is wrong--that even when it's necessary, it's wrong. When you kill, he wrote, you "remove a possibility from the world". I believe that there are some acts which, regardless of necessity or justification or circumstance, rip something away from the soul of the actor. Something which, once lost, can never be regained. The methodical, deliberate torture of another living creature is one such thing. And if human beings can be said to have souls, so can nation-states--for the soul of a nation is its sense of national identity, its raison d'etre, its ideals and driving purpose.

The Holy Trinity of our nation, the three documents which most embody our national soul, are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. In declaring independence from the tyranny of King George, our forefathers famously wrote that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." They did not write that "all men of these colonies" are endowed with these rights. Their visionary belief was that equality and these "unalienable rights" were the birthright of all men. We strive to embody those principles in our laws and actions--sometimes successfully, and sometimes not--not because they are written in the Constitution, or because of an oath to serve it, but because they are right.

The Bill of Rights, Geneva Conventions, Torture Convention, and relevant portions of the UCMJ were all written in that same spirit: a recognition that some rights, dignities, and notions of right and wrong were and should be universal amongst all mankind. That there are some things you simply don't do. The Bush administration demostrates a consistent pattern of using means which defile the spirit and soul of America--and indeed, of civilized nations of laws.

UPDATE: Billmon has a new post up on the Bush administration's torture issue. There's too much to except. Read it all.

And another: Kevin Drum asks some very good questions and makes some excellent points. Among them, the Pot and Kettle angle: