The Other McCain

Two of the biggest hysterics on the ‘Net have gotten into a squabble that began last week with a dispute over President Obama’s anti-terrorism policies.

We pause to ask the important question: Who gives a rat’s ass?

The notion that the opinions of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald could — or should — influence U.S. national security policy is either laughable or frightening. Would any American sleep soundly, knowing that influential officials at the Pentagon or CIA were following an online debate between these two? That neither Sullivan nor Greenwald has any such actual influence, I prayerfully hope we may take for granted.

So we enter this argument with the knowledge that the squabble is moot, as most pundit-fights are, insofar as they have anything to do with what U.S. officials are actually going to do. Rather, Sullivan and Greenwald are in a pissing match, each intending to prove himself intellectually and morally superior to the other. It started when Sullivan jumped into someone else’s argument and concluded:

My concern has always been with the power to detain without due process and torture, not the regrettable necessity of killing the enemy in a hot and dangerous war.

A distinction important only to Sullivan, you see. I’ve often remarked that all these debates about the “rights” of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could have been avoided if a CIA operative had put a 9-mm slug through his skull at the time of his capture. Dead men don’t file habeas corpus complaints.

That KSM is an “enemy in a hot and dangerous war,” who will deny? And if no patriotic person could have objected to the U.S. killing KSM, why these concerns over his being detained and waterboarded?

Despite the questional nature of Sully’s concerns, he was nonetheless arguing in defense of a “hard” war policy, and in this he is certainly right. Our enemies ought to tremble in fear at the thought of provoking our national wrath, and I don’t want the men who wage war on our behalf to be hamstrung by rules designed to protect the “civil rights” of foreigners who are trying to kill us.

(Interrupting myself: Am I the only one who sees a bright line between the rights of American citizens and the alleged “rights” of foreigners who are trying to kill us? To hell with them and their “rights.” They’re foreigners.)

In making his argument, Sullivan had implicitly criticized the thin-skinned and self-righteous Greenwald, who then changed the subject to Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam who is believed to have served as spiritual mentor to some of the 9/11 terrorists.

Al-Awlaki is admittedly a special case, although one easily amenable to the Bullet-Through-the-Skull theoryl of counter-terrorism policy, and President Obama apparently agrees: Just shoot the bastard and be done with him.

(Interrupting myself again: Imagine what mischief might have been forstalled had the FBI pursued such a policy with Bill Ayers.)

Here we see the truth of the maxim, hard cases make bad law. Trying to establish a binding policy principle or legal precedent on the basis of exceptional cases is a fool’s errand.

Rather, we ought to consider that the goal of policy and law is to protect the innocent. Is anyone seriously arguing al-Awlaki’s innocence? If we grant that terrorism is a means of war, and that al-Awlaki is an enemy, the case resolves itself quite easily: Bullet Through the Skull.

Yet intellectuals live to argue and Sullivan argued point-by-point in response to Greenwald. Citing legal precedent back to Greenwald — who fancies himself the Clarence Darrow of the blogosphere — is always a bad move. And Greenwald, having already changed the subject once, changes it yet again, going on at some length about a certain African terrorism suspect.

Again, the absurdity of all this is the apparent belief of Sullivan and Greenwald that their dispute has any relevance to actual policy. We have no reason to believe that anyone in authority pays attention to either of these characters.

And thank God for that.