I was (very probably) wrong.
Many months ago, I argued in this monologue that war in Iraq, despite its likely ill effects, was relatively worthwhile. I bought the bottom line of the journalists while also questioning the veracity of the administration. It was a thinking-man’s line of poor thought: if the papers and the government say it’s true, it must be pretty true. I was wrong and I’m willing to admit that war in Iraq was built on trumped-up charges of state sponsored terrorism, fear-mongering, and logic based on belief instead of evidence.
Leon Wieseltier writes in this week’s The New Republic a similarly kind of weak-kneed mea culpa. Much of the piece is typically astringent and non-linear journalism but one paragraph, with regard to the murder of children, spoke to me clearly, thoughtfully, and elegantly and I wish it were mine:
Of course one’s own dead mean more than the other’s dead, but the other’s dead cannot mean nothing. The primacy of the obligation to one’s own, the natural solidarity of the same, the love that precedes principle: These fundamental attainments of human association should not be taken to suggest that moral consciousness is essentially tribal. Indeed, the knowledge of our own mystic bonds is what enables us to imagine the mystic bonds of others. Since we are particular in our affections and our affiliations, we can understand particularity of affection and affiliation in general. A general understanding of particularity: That is a fine definition of universalism, and there are no escapes from universalism, except willed ones.

I can’t help but compare the aesthetics and insanity of the superbly hyped Subservient Chicken with many of the photos taken at Abu Ghraib. Milliions of people have recently “discovered” the Burger King-sponsored site, which allows visitors to control, punish, or humiliate a person in a chicken suit. By typing in commands within the site, the chicken-man abides, slowly, deliberately, and reluctantly. The photos taken at the infamous Abu Ghraib seem to show the same basic disregard for life, the same lack of shame, and the same power-wielding effect on how others are seen and can be seen.
(Susan Sontag recently wrote about the photos in the Times’ Magazine but her argument is more political than it is philosophical; it is also less interesting than it could be because of this. While she does talk about the photographs of torture and sex in the context of contemporary pornography, she somehow loses track of the “artistry” of these photographs and what the aesthetic of humiliation means to all of us.)