05.11 | What Jack Bauer taught Rumsfeld
I have suddenly found myself revisiting an evening in front of the telly last year. It was the second series of the show '24', in which the counter-terrorist hero, Jack Bauer, has one day to find an atomic bomb in Los Angeles. So he shoots a suspect paedophile dead and cuts off his head so as to get "in" with the terrorists. When a colleague objects, Bauer tells him, "That's the problem with people like you, George. You want results, but you never want to get your hands dirty."
Add to this culture the experience of Guantanamo and the abuses at the US detention base at Bagram in Afghanistan, detailed by Human Rights Watch in March, and perhaps we are, after all, looking at a policy and a pathology, which arises from a particular idea of the war on terror. If so, this is the point of departure for liberal interventionists. For me the entire enterprise was undertaken to show that there is a better way, and to give people the chance of experiencing it. To show that getting your hands dirty is not just unnecessary but wrong.
Here's another one of those political newspaper editorials which uses the highly original tactic of comparing [x] politician to either President Palmer or Jack Bauer. Great. We can add it to the one about Tony Blair's "24 hours to save his premiership", the one about the differences between George Bush and David Palmer, and the one which explains why Michael Howard should slowly die in a nuclear explosion. Err, sorry. I made up that last one.
Add to this culture the experience of Guantanamo and the abuses at the US detention base at Bagram in Afghanistan, detailed by Human Rights Watch in March, and perhaps we are, after all, looking at a policy and a pathology, which arises from a particular idea of the war on terror. If so, this is the point of departure for liberal interventionists. For me the entire enterprise was undertaken to show that there is a better way, and to give people the chance of experiencing it. To show that getting your hands dirty is not just unnecessary but wrong.
