WurfWhile

Matt Yglesias points to today’s New York Times article about dissent in Condoleezza Rice’s State Department. My guess is that Condoleezza Rice keeps dissenting Philip D. Zelikow around for two basic reasons. First, to make it appear that the State Department is open to some sort of reason (aka opposition views to Bush Administration policies). Secondly, to find out what the other side is thinking (and perhaps to flush out the other side, in government and outside of it, when they otherwise might be hiding).

The Bush Administration doesn’t believe in alternative viewpoints, however reasonable, and Condoleezza Rice has a long history of using ‘facts’ from any sources to support a pre-determined viewpoint (Washington Monthly’s crucial link in its blog entry is out of date - use this link for the review of Rice’s book). It’s why Rice holds a prominent role in the Bush Administration and was promoted. There is a true meeting of the minds - they don’t care about the facts, they don’t brook true dissent and they certainly don’t encourage it. Condoleezza Rice says that she believes history will absolve the Bush Administration* - conveniently she can keep saying it, and obfuscating history, until she is no longer around, when it doesn’t matter to her anymore.

Notes:

* I know some of you may not be New Republic subscribers - so here’s some of the sense of my link from Jeffrey Herf’s “Future Perfect” article:

“…[O]n the second day of the [Condoleezza Rice confirmation for Secretary of State] hearings, [Senator Joe] Biden managed to elicit an unexpected and revealing response from Rice, when he said that the U.S. government has to both ‘level with the American people’ and ‘be honest with the world.’ ‘Otherwise,’ Biden added, ‘we’ll do terrible damage beyond what we’ve already done to our credibility.’ Rice then offered the following retort:

‘I said yesterday, Senator, we’ve made a lot of decisions in this period of time. Some of them have been very good. Some of them have not been very good. Some of them have been bad decisions, I’m sure. I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment but in how it all adds up. And that’s just strongly the way I feel about big historical changes. I’m being as straightforward with you as I possibly can. [emphasis added by Herf]

Rice may have spent two days brilliantly avoiding straight answers, but when she said this, she sounded as if she really believed it. After all, Rice noted, she was being as straightforward as she possibly could be. And that makes the statement all the more troubling.

The idea that a decision cannot be judged at the moment but only retrospectively opens a slippery slope of justification. The future Secretary of State was indulging an understanding of politics favored by advocates of a Hegelian view of history - most of whom have, in the last century, been communists. In his lectures on the philosophy of history delivered in the early nineteenth century, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel argued that history was a slaughter bench on which the happiness of individuals was sacrificed. (He also claimed that the course of history comprised the teleological unfolding of God’s plan on earth at whose endpoint all human beings would be free, an idea that also appears to have some supporters in Washington.) The achievement of freedom, or in the case of the communists, the classless society, justified the sacrifices on the path to its perfection - as if such perfection could not, in the end, have come about without those sacrifices. In the aftermath of the Soviet victory in World War II, communist apologists, including sophisticated French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued that the victory of 1945 either justified or sent into oblivion the horrors and crimes of the Stalin years. Stalin’s decision to sign the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler and his refusal to recognize the imminence of the Nazi invasion were blunders of unprecedented proportions that contributed to the capture of three million Soviet prisoners of war in 1941, two million of whom died. If the Soviet regime had been a democracy, Joseph Stalin would have been quickly ousted from office, just as Neville Chamberlain was defeated following the failure of his appeasement policy. Yet in 1945, in the glow of victory, Stalin was presented as a great genius whose wise decisions in the end worked out. Fidel Castro captured this communist faith in the redeeming power of history in one pithy phrase: ‘History will absolve me.’

The capacity of history to absolve political actors is a cynical and immoral doctrine. No one can know for sure how political decisions will turn out. Iraq may emerge as a stable democracy. Yet that fact would not justify having gone to war in spring 2003 based on false premises. It would not excuse the woeful lack of preparation for battle after the major combat operations. Nor would such success justify the use of torture. Nor would it absolve the leading officials of the Bush administration, including Rice, who declined to share their uncertainties about the facts in Iraq with the public. Nor would it excuse their decision to allow rampant speculation that Saddam had something to do with September 11 to percolate among Americans. Nor would it render moot their assertions, made with far more confidence than the facts allowed, that the threat was so imminent that a war could not be delayed until fall 2003 or spring 2004.
….
By contrast, the major historical changes that the United States helped to bring about in Europe, the defeat of Nazism and communism, rested largely on decisions that were plausible at the time they were made. Success was not the unintended consequence of decisions based on poor historical reasoning or avoidance of fact. For half a century, the Soviet Union lived in part on the prestige that came from its terribly costly victory over Nazism. In recent decades, however, the world has come to view the idea that decisions can be judged solely on how things turn out with the disdain that it deserves.

Under any circumstances, we would deserve a Secretary of State who rejects this cynical doctrine that is fit for communism but not for a liberal democracy. But Rice’s views are particularly problematic now. How can our diplomats win a war of ideas against Muslim totalitarianism when their boss flirts with a view of history that, for decades, was used to rationalize the worst injustices of totalitarian regimes? Hegel and the Hegelians of the twentieth century were wrong: The prospect of future success does not absolve leaders from responsibility for contemporary error. Nor does it offer a standard by which American foreign policy should be judged.”

To sum up, this isn’t even as ‘good’ as “the ends justify the means” because under the Bush Administration/Rice doctrine the “means” are whatever they say they are - and the “ends” end when they say they do. It’s interesting how as you go further left and further right you sometimes end up closer on the political spectrum.