Debate Evades Dark Realities

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect a U.S. presidential debate to deal substantively – and honestly – with wrongful actions by the American government, even at the end of George W. Bush’s eight-year reign as one of the planet’s preeminent rogue operatives.

The acceptable political parameters may allow some tactical disagreements (Barack Obama saying the Iraq War “took our eye off the ball”) or even some implied moral criticism (John McCain saying he opposed Bush “on torture of prisoners”).

But there’s no place for a serious discussion of wholesale U.S. war crimes, such as Bush’s decision to launch an aggressive war under false pretenses, the sort of offense that the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II called the “supreme” international crime.

In a healthy democracy, moderator Jim Lehrer might have been expected to ask Obama and McCain whether President Bush should be shipped off to The Hague for a trial as a war criminal or whether he should be put before American courts to face serious criminal charges, such as violation of anti-torture statutes.

There might be a question, too, about hypocrisy: how can Obama and McCain so righteously condemn Russia for its alleged aggression against Georgia (after Georgia attacked the pro-Russian province of South Ossetia) when the United States has asserted its right not only to invade Iraq (under Bush) but to attack Yugoslavia when it was throttling a separatist movement in Kosovo (as Bill Clinton did)? More