"The Greater Good": Part III

When all of the arguments made by the Bush administration ultimately proved to be baseless, viz., there were no weapons of mass destruction found, there was no direct link to Al Qaeda, there was no rose petal parade into the "liberated" cities of Iraq, there really was only one argument of last resort: the greater good. How justify the death of 3,000 Americans and the injuring of countless more, how justify the invasion of a sovereign nation thousands of miles from our borders, how justify the devastation to that nation's infrastructure and cultural heritage, how justify killing thousands of its innocent civilians and the spawning of sectarian violence and near civil war? The greater good. Again, it is not my purpose here to argue the merits of the argument, it is to look at the nature of the argument being made. "The world is a better place without Sadaam Hussein in power" has become the mantra of the war cabal in Washington. Rarely, if ever, are the policymakers asked to prove this or to provide hard evidence that this is the case. "Better place" is merely a corollary of "greater good," and is, at the end of the day (as they like to say) a conversation closer. Those beyond the pale, beyond the inner circles of decision making, are merely asked to believe, to trust, to obey, to be loyal. Belief, trust, obedience and loyalty are the hallmarks of men and women in uniform. The over 300 firefighters lost at the World Trade Center and the numerous other police and security workers who died took an oath to protect the citizenry, and few, if any, paused to question the wisdom of their actions. We see such men and women as heros, just as much as we see military men and women who risk their lives in the course of fulfilling their roles as heros. But can this ethos go too far, can it expand beyond its necessary sphere and come to represent a danger to the very society it promises to protect?