missed radio times today but read its online program summary.

here's some of what it says on hour 1's guest:

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER has returned to Princeton University, where she was dean of the Woodrow Wilson School before joining the State Department as its first female policy planning chief. And since leaving, Slaughter has become one of the more outspoken critics of the Obama Administration’s delayed decision to intervene in Libya. Slaughter wrote an influential op-ed in The New York Times on March 13th titled, “Fiddling While Libya Burns.”

looked her up on wikipedia and found this:

In 2003, Slaughter publicly defended the impending Iraq invasion as "legitimate," apart from the question of whether it was illegal. Slaughter later advocated moving past the earlier debate on the Iraq invasion, a position criticized by some who opposed the war as self-serving.

one of those critics (in 2008) was glenn greenwald, who compared her unfavorably to andrew sullivan, who he said "deserves credit for being one of the earliest and most candid acknowledgers of error with regard to his war advocacy." greenwald added that sullivan "has re-thought and repudiated some of the core premises that led him to endorse the invasion" of iraq and cited a couple paragraphs of evidence:

[Saddam] was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and that unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in anything much but self-righteousness. I saw war's unknowable consequences far too glibly.

Granted, this is still a utilitarian calculus (war is justified when the benefits outweigh the costs, and I erred by assigning insufficient costs to war), but at least it acknowledges and expresses remorse for one of the central failures of war advocates: namely, the failure to regard war with horror (due largely to the lack of personal costs incurred by most war advocates) and thus to oppose it reflexively except in those extremely rare instances where it is necessary for self-defense, because of how monstrous it is and because of the virtual certainty that, at best, it will only replace one evil with another.

at first my eyes zoomed in on "war is justified when the benefits outweigh the costs...." then i got hung up on "oppose it reflexively except in those extremely rare instances where it is necessary for self-defense,..." eventually i concluded that pretty much the whole paragraph is problematic.

it reminds me of a pendulum swinging back and forth. it passes thru the equilibrium position at the midpoint of every swing, but it never stops there. it keeps going till it runs out of energy, turns round, and heads back toward equilibrium once more.

sullivan, in his self-criticism, first misses the mark then tries to recover then overshoots again and again. even when he talks about "those extremely rare instances where it is necessary" he adds "for self-defense" and thus limits necessity itself. what about defense of those too weak to defend themselves?

ethics is so complicated. [if you want a good fictional illustration of how complicated it can get, try the philosopher's apprentice by james morrow.]

what slaughter and sullivan and probably greenwald (and, yes, you and i) forgot is that when we speak abstractly about war we are talking about human beings.

is that fitting for april 1?