I did a post yesterday, in the moment, foolishly giving Obama a break, prospectively, if Israel is to bomb Iran. Two of my intellectual betters demurred. Jack Ross:
I'm closer to Antony Loewenstein than to you on this one. If it happened, Obama's
responsibility would depend on how one defined the word; what might
matter more is how he responded after the fact. Biden was just trying to speak diplomatese and doing badly, with
Mullen coming in to do it better. As a rule in all things, I totally
don't get why a large section of the media, especially on the right,
jumps up and down hysterically whenever Biden has a senior moment.
David Bromwich:
If Obama commands or consents to the bombing of Iran, he is responsible. Moral judgment is only intelligible as moral if you infer the motive from the action. You can't read in the motive you are comfortable with "against the very grain of" actions. That way lies a no-fault system of self-justification. It is the same argument the apologists for the Iraq war use to justify Bush. (Obama in Iran, of course, would be not a whit less guilty than Bush in Iraq, who also had the lobby to contend with). A version of the same argument has been offered by willfully sympathetic liberals to palliate the monstrous acts ordered by Cheney, Addington, Haynes, etc., on the ground that these men did what they did out of a "deep concern for their country." Obama unhappily is one of the people who have spoken that excuse for them. But, morally, we are what we do–not what we say we meant. And this must hold so long as moral identity has any meaning. If I do a thing but later say that I did not mean to and would have preferred not to, the person who extends his approval to me for my good intentions has drained the word "I" of all meaning.
