Inactive Theory & Practice
Kofi Annan's 'Moral Innocence' vs. George Bush's 'Hard Bigotry'
I sometimes wonder whether I should rename this blog "Double-Standards Watch": I seem to spend more time on discussing them than anything else.
Consider in this light a Sept. 8 editorial in The New York Times discussing Paul Volcker's findings with respect to Kofi Annan's handling of the oil-for-food scandal:
The secretary general's failures were not ethical lapses, but they were significant. Neither Mr. Annan nor his top aides exercised meaningful oversight, for example, over the oil-for-food program. Nor did they formally report what they knew about kickbacks to the Security Council. They made only minimal efforts to discuss sanctions violations with Iraqi officials.
A gem of understatement, isn't it? Dereliction of duty, we are told, is not an "ethical lapse." It is but a morally-neutral failure--even when the official in question is being paid a hefty salary precisely "to exercise meaningful oversight" over a sanctions/inspections policy, and even when the policy in question involved matters of life, death, and liberty. Such magnanimity of language! Would that all of us might have such forgiving critics.
Recall that the UN sanctions policy against Iraq in the 1990s cost the lives of somewhere between 80,000 (the low figure) and 500,000 (the high figure) Iraqis, and that Annan's "significant" non-ethical lapses prolonged the longevity of the Iraqi regime while intensifying the misery and death of the Iraqi people. The style and substance of the Times's editorial suggests that mass death and the prolongation of tyranny should be a matter of quiet understatement. A mature editorialist wags his or her finger at Annan for his...well, mistakes, and leaves it at that. No need to get hot and heavy with the moralistic rhetoric. No purpose served by waxing indignant. If you don't succeed at first at exercising oversight over a sanctions program, try, try again. Right?
Right. With those lessons in mind, proceed to this morning's editorial on the failures of George Bush, entitled "Hard Bigotry of No Expectations". Here we confront an entirely different approach to political discourse, along both stylistic and substantive dimensions:
Only a president with no expectation that the federal government should step up after a crisis could have stripped the Federal Emergency Management Agency bare, appointed as its director a political crony who could not even adequatley represent the breeders of Arabian horses, and announced that the director was doing a splendid job while bodies floated in the floodwaters....
Since his failure to notice the Katrina disaster, Mr. Bush has stopped bragging that he doesn't read or watch the news. If he's paying attention now, he should get a message from the outrage over Katrina and shrinking support for his policies in Iraq: The American public has much higher expectations than he does for the president and his government.
My, my. Someone over at the Times is a bit hot under the collar about that scoundrel George Bush, aren't they? But maybe someone at the Times needs to get a bit of a grip on his or her normative standards.
The Bush editorial tells us that Bush's administrative failures, unlike Annan's, are decidedly not morally neutral. They are derelictions of duty that amount to bigotry. But what evidence has the Times adduced that the one failure is any different than the other? None. As per usual with such editorials, the crucial claim consists of nothing more than a brazen assertion put forth in high dudgeon but backed by...nothing. It is, in a sense, futile to look for evidence in a context such as this. What we have here is a will to emote unconstrained by evidential or normative considerations.
I'm hardly one to want to let George Bush off the hook. I'm proud to say that I neither voted for him nor ever seriously considered the possibility. I didn't vote for Kofi Annan, either--and wouldn't have, even if he'd been an elected official. What I find puzzling is this: why is Annan's dereliction of duty accurately described while he himself is exonerated in the blandest imaginable prose? And why is Bush's dereliction of duty exaggerated while he's doused with sarcasm?
I have no fundamental objection to the first paragraph in the Times's Bush editorial. It's all true.
As for the second paragraph, are we really supposed to take seriously the suggestion that Bush didn't "notice" Katrina? When Bush says that he doesn't watch or read the news, are we really to assume that he has no alternative news sources to newspapers and the electronic media? Considering the way in which the media itself relies ubiquitously for news coverage on "government sources," isn't it downright stupid to suggest that the country's top government official lacks independent access to the news when he has access to every official in government? Is it fair to focus all of the "outrage" on Bush--as opposed to the government officials, e.g., Nagin and Blanco, who were present at the scene and legally responsible for it? Finally, isn't it juvenile to suggest that the president isn't "paying attention" to public opinion--when the Times is usually among the first to complain that he pays too much attention to it?
These rhetorical questions have fairly obvious answers, and all of the answers point implicitly to the fact that we're dealing with editorial writers who seem to have lost whatever tenuous mooring they might ever have had to the idea of intellectual or moral standards. It shouldn't be so difficult to criticize either Kofi Annan or George W. Bush. Neither is exactly a paragon of intellect, competence or moral probity. But you will undoubtedly have a great deal of trouble getting this simple matter straight if you have an a priori ideological attachment to the idea that Kofi Annan is a basically OK right-thinking guy while George Bush is Evil Incarnate.
Like the Times's editorialists, I have higher standards than either Kofi Annan or George Bush seem capable of satisfying. I also have higher intellectual standards than the Times seems capable of conceiving. At a certain point, having heard the self-indulgent and self-justifying blather of some of these editorialists once too often (the Executive Editor and Assistant Managing Editor have recently leapt into print to defend the Times's journalistic authority against that eternal irritant, the blogging critic), one simply wants to say: put up or shut up, for God's sake. You think bloggers have low standards? Ever try reading yourselves?
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