Notes
Notes 1. THE UNREFLECTIVE LIFE: THE SLEEP OF REASON 1. Colin Powell, with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 144. Reportedly, Major Colin Powell as the assistant G3 in December 1967 had responded to allegations of the massacre from Tom Glen by saying that nothing happened. 2. Powell, My American Journey, 143. 3. William R. Peers, My Lai Inquiry (New York: Norton, 1979), 208. 4. Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 5. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 6. Roger Spiller, An Instinct for War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 386. 7. “Shock and Awe” is a term that gained currency in 1996 due a book published by a retired Naval officer, Harlan K. Ullman, and a retired Army officer, James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996). The book is now out of print, but the text is in the public domain and available for perusal on the National Defense University Web site. 8. Grotius worked against the skeptics to ground morality in a sensus communis; Hume worked against a popular religious morality to establish secular ethics grounded in human nature; Bentham worked to improve the poor state of affairs in England; and Kant worked to defeat the problems associated with any heteronomous moral system, creating a sophisticated justifiable morality, grounded in reason and available to everyone. “But one cannot require pure practical reason to be subordinate to speculative reason and so reverse the order, since all interest is ultimately practical and 187 even that of speculative reason is only conditional and is complete in practical use alone.” Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 102, 5:121. 9. John Rawls uses the term “moral error.” “Fifty Years after Hiroshima,” John Rawls: Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),572. “It is sometimes said that questioning the bombing of Hiroshima is an insult to the American troops who fought the war. This is hard to understand. We should be able to look back and consider our faults after fifty years. We expect the Japanese and the Germans to do that—‘Vergangenheitsverarbeitung,’ as the Germans say. Why shouldn’t we? It can’t be that we think we waged the war without moral error.” [Emphasis on “moral error” mine.] 10. William Bennett, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (New York: Doubleday, 2002). 11. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 25. 12. Field Manual 1, The Army (Washington, DC 2001). 13. Leonard Wong and Douglas Johnson II, “Serving the American People: A Historical View of the Army Profession,” The Future of the Army Profession, eds. Don M. Snyder and Gayle Watkins, (Boston: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing, 2002), 70. 14. The Army’s foundational field manual states, “The ability to close with and destroy enemy forces, occupy territory, and control populations achieves moral dominace over enemy will and destroys means to resist.” FM 1, The Army (Washington, DC, 2001). In a section on building trust, the context of morals is emotional or psychological when it says that soldiers develop trust when they “know their commander will support their decisions physically and morally.” FM 6-0, Mission Command, Command and Control of Army Force (Washington, DC, 2003). It was vital for the American military to “gain moral ascendancy over Noriega’s forces.” From FM 3-0, Operations, (Washington, DC 2001). 15. President Bill Clinton, the Army Chief of Staff’s Command Sergeant Major Gene McKinney, Army Major General Hale, the Air Force chief of staff, and Air Force bomber pilot Kelley Flynn are some of the key figures here. 16. The error of hanging an innocent person can be called a Type I error, similar to the usage in the natural and social sciences, the mistake being the ascription of a false positive (a phrase used in this context is in the movie Minority Report), or, in ordinary language, seeing something that is not there. The error of letting a guilty person go free can be called a Type II error, the mistake of missing what is actually there. Michael Meyerson, Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on our Chaotic Constitution (New York: Norton, 2002), 39. 17. “Then General Westmoreland showed me a copy of a letter from Ron Ridenhour, an ex-GI who had been...
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