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heroic mission and moral certainty that allows them to labor in the shadowier world of moral
gray; to engage in surface dissimulations in the service of a higher truth.
I am working from the premise that at some level, the current political controversy over
the justice of the war in Iraq, and specifically the doctrine of preemption, is inscrutable when
abstracted from the processes of its formulation. Indeed, even the seemingly more
straightforward question of whether President Bush led the United States in military action
against Iraq “under false pretenses” cannot be answered adequately without first addressing the
prior epistemological premises and ontological commitments that are at the heart of the declared
War on Terror. It is my hope, then, that reflections on the conduct of foreign policy in this story
bound context affords some important distance, allowing in turn an empathetic depth to an
analysis of elites’ decisionmaking processes, and the complex political commitments underlying
this policy transformation.
For while to understand is not necessarily to condone, Neta Crawford argues persuasively
that for those who believe the current administration’s policies to be unjust and fundamentally
wrongheaded, the way out of the present morass must go deeper than the specific terms of the
debate on the use of force in Iraq, or any other particular manifestation of the counterterrorism
campaign:
Feminists [and other critics] would focus on the socialization of both parties to a conflict, asking
how actors’ understanding of themselves and the other were constructed and maintained…. Thus
the force of the pacifist and feminist objection to just war theory is that we should spend much less
time deciding when and how to fight wars…and much more effort on avoiding war altogether.
5
Ultimately, then, any resolution of the present controversy will require one to look beyond, or
perhaps simply down from, the headlines. This essay is in the spirit of Crawford’s challenge, and
will have succeeded in its purpose if it affords such a perspicacious moment of reflection into the
identities the administration constructs and assumes in its War on Terror.
Convention