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Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

There is absolutely nothing defensible about what Pat Robertson said on Monday. His remarks deserve the kind of response they have gotten from Reverend Graylan Scott Haglar and Rep. Barbara Lee, who rightly said that "the call for murder from someone who claims to be a man of God is an insult to people of faith everywhere.”

I also think, however, that these kinds of public pile-ons, where everyone and his dog hastens to agree that so-and-so is a dog, have limited value. Yes, Robertson's remarks deserve to be--must be--condemned by every right-thinking person. But that's just the thing: because everyone agrees about that, condemning Robertson's remarks easily becomes a reassuring kind of confirmation that "I am a right-thinking person." And when that happens, when criticism becomes so unanimous and overweening that the offender stands alone with his sin, the ability to examine ourselves quickly weakens. The same kind of thing happened, I suggested, with the comments of Sen. Dick Durbin earlier this summer. The condemnation there was not nearly as unanimous as the condemnation of Robertson's comments seem to be. But in Durbin's case, too, the collective rush to say that we Americans, in all our righteous fury, simply will not stand for that, makes us rush right past the uncomfortable question of what we do stand for, what we have stood for in the past.

The responses of government officials to Robertson's remarks have been unanimous. They do "not represent the policy of the United States." Assassination of democratically elected leaders is "against the law. Our department doesn't do that type of thing." But what is the policy of the United States? What kinds of things are done in our name? Are they morally superior to the wrong of murdering a head of state who is regarded as a threat to our security? Those are the kinds of disturbing questions that are easily put out of mind during fifteen-minute hates, no matter at whom they are directed.

Here is the stated national security policy of the Bush administration: the United States does not have to suffer an attack before striking militarily at a target deemed to pose an imminent threat to the nation. "The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively."

Now, I'm aware that preemptive military strikes are theoretically distinguishable from assassinations. But it is harder to distinguish them than it should be. For example, is the difference that a military strike is preceded by a formal declaration of war? The American invasion of Iraq, defended by its architects as a preemptive strike against an imminent threat, was preceded by no such declaration, and one of its earliest events was a series of decapitation attempts on a head of state. Those assassination attempts were defended as consistent with the national security strategy of the United States as outlined by this administration; were they different from the talk of assassination now being condemned by administration officials as not the policy of the United States?

I'm aware that a careful account could be given that would distinguish between what Robertson is calling for in the case of Chavez and what the Bush administration actively tried to do in the case of Saddam Hussein. Presumably, for supporters of the Bush administration's policy on "preemptive strikes," the difference would hinge on Chavez's being democratically elected.

But here's my point: piling on Pat Robertson gives the administration an opportunity to wash its hands of such "inappropriate" remarks, to distance itself from the clear outer boundaries of acceptable policy, and thus to shield its policy from examination by saying that it at least does not stand for that. I'm not saying that the Bush administration is responsible for what Robertson said (Pat alone must answer for that). But if you systematically redefine our national security strategy to justify preemptive strikes against states and heads of states, if you erode respect for international law by refusing to participate in international criminal courts, if you routinely set aside conventions of warfare as not applicable to us while wryly noting that we abide by them anyway, if you arrogate and explicitly articulate the right to change regimes when they pose threats to us, even when the rest of the world is not convinced that they do ... if you do all these things over the course of four years, then it's a bit much to slack your jaw when Pat Robertson floats crazy proposals for assassination and say "Gosh golly gee, did he say that out loud? That's illegal! We don't do that! He's definitely not one of us."

If you're the Bush administration, you have to be willing to ask the harder question: once we start relaxing the accepted conventions of just warfare and flouting international law and institutions, can we be surprised that fringe elements of our constituency will start to push things this far? And if you're a concerned American, you have to be willing to ask: if I don't agree with Pat Robertson's national security strategy, do I agree with President Bush's? If so, what reasons do I have for viewing the two strategies as morally and legally distinct?