Driving back from D.C. yesterday, the munificence of satellite radio brought me the entire MSNBC afternoon lineup. And, it should be noted for the eternal record that I think yesterday's Hardball was a Beltway circle-jerk of sufficient enthusiasm that it's a wonder that Matthews and any of his guests have an intact rotator cuff left. If it wasn't the host's praising the "intellectual heft" of Peggy Noonan, or telling Senator Tom — Not The Nuttiest As Long As Inhofe Is Alive — Coburn that the Matthews children think Coburn is the bee's knees, it was the normally sensible Howard Fineman bestowing the mantle of "responsible and interesting" conservative on Christopher Ruddy, whose previous gig consisted of committing such public indecencies on the corpse of poor Vince Foster that even Ruddy's other Clintonian penis-chasers thought him nutty, and who now presides over Newsmax, where birtherism got so out of control that even Bill O'Reilly got fed up with him. Responsible? Interesting? These people all need to be deprogrammed.
On Martin Bashir's show, they put together a panel to discuss the president's program of using killer drones overseas. The panel consisted of the host, NBC military analyst "Jack" Jacobs, and Michael O'Hanlon, a career "liberal hawk" last seen promoting himself, and the war in Iraq simultaneously, which should have gotten him shunned by decent people for the rest of his life. But because this is the Beltway, where the only way to fail is up, he has been redeemed again to give us his wisdom on killing brown people by mechanical proxy. It is, I guess, and improvement over his previous gig, which was to give us his wisdom on killing brown people through the proxy of other people's children. There was nobody on the show opposed to the policy. What follows was a moral nightmare.
First, there was Brooks, talking about precision, and how the best part of the program was that the decisions were made "at the very top." (Somebody is going to have to explain to me the moral difference between Barack Obama's selecting who should live and who should die, and LBJ's picking bombing targets in North Vietnam, and the precision of the weapons in question is not an answer.) Jacobs even dragged the "just war" theory into the discussion, which is a sure sign of internal moral qualms. "We've all read our Augustine and our Thomas Aquinas and agree that this is a just war and can approve the use of these weapons."
Actually, Augustine was a lot tougher sell than Jacobs apparently is. There are three conditions through which Augustine said a "just war" could be waged. I think Jacobs might have had a harder time in Hippo than he did in the studio yesterday
Distinction: Non-combatants (civilians) can never be the targets of any combat action. Proportionality: The harm the just belligerent visits upon the aggressor cannot be greater than that suffered by the victim of the aggressor's actions that caused, or resulted in, the war. Military necessity: Combat actions must be undertaken only for legitimate military purposes, such as the reduction or elimination of enemy armed forces. Terrorism or destruction of cities with no military target are not justified.
When you hear a military man start talking about "just war," hang onto your wallet. It has been the alibi for Christianized killing since the first Christians joined up in the imperial legions.
But O'Hanlon was the real prize. First, he cautioned us against trusting the devious foreigners upon whom we are dropping high explosives. Most of the estimated 2,500 people we've killed were probably terrorists. "I think the vast majority of them were," O'Hanlon puffed. "It's hard to know. (Ed. Note — Not if you live in Waziristan, it's not.) One thing to keep in mind is that the Pakistani press has exaggerated the number of civilian casualties."
And if there's one thing that Michael O'Hanlon knows about, it's how a country's press can be stampeded into an irrational frenzy by official government misinformation, by god.
Came the end, though, and Bashir asked him about the "moral justification" for the use of drones. O'Hanlon answered him by saying, essentially, that only American lives count.
"You've actually seen a trend in warfare over the last 20 years that we try to keep our forces out of harm's way. Drones are just the latest manifestation of that ... I don't really think that's what new about drones. What's new about drones is that we're using them in a form of undeclared war in a country where we are not at war and where the indigenous government is not altogether happy about our doing it."
That, mind you, was the answer to a question of "moral justification." The weapons are new and we're using them in a place where people are getting testy about getting blown up. My god, do we need better elites.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
