Author Archives: Vanessa Wills

March 11, 2025 · 18:19

“Moral Clarity” and America’s So-Called “War on Terror”

The Debate Stage

Below is an excerpt from a transcript of the April 2007 debate held among candidates in the 2008 Democratic Presidential primary. The whole transcript is worth revisiting—the most racist and imperialist positions expressed still pale in comparison to how far the party has swung rightward, now. But I was particularly struck by this one moment of actual moral clarity expressed onstage.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Senator Gravel, at a forum earlier this year — I want to get this right — you said it doesn’t matter whether you are elected president or not. So then why are you here tonight? Shouldn’t debates be for candidates who are in the race to win the race?

SENATOR MIKE GRAVEL: Brian, you’re right, I made that statement. But that’s before I had a chance to stand with them a couple of three times. It’s like going into the Senate, you know the first time you get there you’re all excited — “My God, how did I ever get here?” And then, about six months later, you say, “How the hell did the rest of them get here?” (Laughter.) And I got to tell you, after standing up with them, some of these people frighten me! They frighten me!

When you have mainline candidates that turn around and say that there’s nothing off the table with respect to Iran, that’s code for using nukes, nuclear devices.

I got to tell you, I’m president of the United States, there will be no preemptive wars with nuclear devices. To my mind, it’s immoral, and it’s been immoral for the last 50 years as part of American foreign policy.

MR. WILLIAMS: Let’s use a little moderator discretion here. Senator Gravel, that’s a weighty charge. Who on this stage exactly tonight worries you so much?

MR. GRAVEL: Well, I would say the top tier ones, the top tier ones. (Laughter.) They’ve made statements — oh, Joe [Biden], I’ll include you too. You have a certain arrogance. You want to — you want to tell the Iraqis how to run their country. I got to tell you, we should just plain get out. Just plain get out.

It’s their country. They’re asking us to leave, and we insist on staying there.

And why not get out? What harm is it going to do? Oh, you hear the statement, “Well, my God, these soldiers will have died in vain.” The entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. And they’re dying in vain right this very second. Do you know what’s worse than a soldier dying in vain? It’s more soldiers dying in vain, that’s what’s worse.

MR. WILLIAMS: Senator Gravel, thank you.

The moral clarity in these remarks derives from a principled commitment to antiwar politics that is totally absent among the elites of the Democratic Party today, just as it was then. Instead, the Democratic Party better represents the “moral clarity” of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, the latter of whom responded to 9/11 by instituting a national registry to track, harass, and detain Arabs and Muslims, by legitimizing torture, and by waging a murderously immoral and destructive war in Iraq.

Bush’s domestic policy legacy is brutal authoritarianism and a vicious attack on America’s infrastructure of individual rights and due process. That is his “moral clarity.” Further, the belief that Arabs and Muslims belong to a group which deserves brutal, collective punishment is a central cornerstone of the so-called “War on Terror” and of 21st century American ruling class ideology, which both mainstream parties have consistently projected and defended (as, for example, in the case of President Obama’s extrajudicial killing of Anwar al-Awlaki).

April 12, 2003 Anti-War protest in Washington, DC; photograph by Ben Schumin

This authoritarian logic was once widely considered to be the horrifying purview of the Republican party, but with Democrats’ open embrace of “Dubya’s” foreign policy, it must now be understood to be the water in which all mainstream politicians swim. The idea that Arabs and Muslims are human beings who surely deserve the same human rights as anybody else is apparently a very radical idea upheld only by a left “fringe” which is vilified and persecuted for saying it.

As we see in the state abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, the treatment of Arabs and Muslims after 9/11 clearly constitutes, in the eyes of the Trump administration, a model to be imposed on the groups it targets for persecution. Khalil’s arrest was itself of course already preceded by Trump sending undocumented immigrants to be warehoused at Guantanamo, a place that should have been torn down brick by brick the minute Bush was ejected from the White House but wasn’t, because Bush’s “moral clarity” remained. But before that, we already had the Israeli state’s still-ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a monumental crime that the Biden administration bankrolled, orchestrated, and vigorously defended, waging and encouraging attacks organized by liberal institutions and meted out against the spring 2024 protest movement that sprang up in opposition to the killing.

The United States has never actually disavowed or opposed terror. In fact, terror is the go-to, the weapon of choice for archreactionaries seeking to impose their sense of order onto the rest of us. It is in this country’s DNA; just look at the history of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. Real efforts to combat terrorism in the United States would thwart—not valorize—the hordes of white supremacists who stormed the Capitol building on January 6 because they worried the usual ways of disenfranchising Black and Brown voters might not be enough to install their favorite hero into power. It would not proclaim that there were “very fine people on both sides”—that is, fascists and antifascists—in Charlottesville.

We must finally bring to an end Bush’s (and Obama’s, Biden’s, and Trump’s) so-called “War on Terror,” which is really a war of racist terror meted out against those who dissent from America’s genocidal and imperialist foreign policy.

Fascism and America’s Love of Thrift

A recent viral New York Times article describing the conflict between Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency on the one side, and Trump’s appointed heads of federal agencies on the other, characterizes the core of their disagreement in the following way:

“Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.”

And I find myself thinking: My, but the American love of thrift is really something!

So, here is a prediction. Once conditions inside the United States have collapsed to such a calamitous degree that the one thing everybody can agree on is that it’s all gone to shit, one by one a contingent will grow of powerful people all saying the same thing:

“I didn’t mean any harm! I only wanted to cut back on the waste and the fraud! That’s not even to mention the abuse! Wouldn’t you? Can you blame me?”

What they won’t add is, “And besides! How was I supposed to know the leopards would eat my face?”

A Mission Statement

I have thought for a while of starting a newsletter, but frankly, I wasn’t sure the world needed another or, even if it did, it needed a newsletter from me.

But as the past few weeks have unfolded, I increasingly find myself having what seem to me like new insights in my research areas of moral, social, and political philosophy. Many of my friends and close associates have taken me aside to let me know how much they appreciate these insights when I share them. So this has given me the idea that perhaps there are more people out there, beyond the community of moral and rational inquirers already existing around me, who would find value in what I have to say.U.S. liberalism in the Twenty-First Century seems to have abandoned its own purported conception of the good—and to have abandoned the world’s people right along with that.

What now? Now that official liberalism has largely tucked itself away somewhere safe and deep behind the layers of far-right, fascist reaction, do we the “unofficial” simply seek to realize, totally unreconstructed, its notion of the good—one that its most powerful proponents seem already to have left for dead?

Or do we take this opportunity to see things freshly, as they are today? Do we develop our political analysis in relation to a rapidly changing reality, one swept by winds uncovering features that had already lain hidden below the surface of a previous time? These are characteristics, tendencies, and hard truths of our society which we could not see before but that we must now, if we are to be scientific, incorporate into our understandings of both past and present so that we may have some chance of survival in the future.

I’ll probably post about recipes and film sometimes, too.

My friend, Mia; what Black women mean to one another

[CONTENT NOTICE: Mention of suicide]

I met Mia Fuqua for the first time on two separate occasions. On the second of these, she caught my eye as we stood in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning, a forty-two-story Gothic skyscraper straight out of Gotham City, and the main academic building at the University of Pittsburgh. Among the throng of workers and students milling about the elevator bank, Mia stood out. She was dressed beautifully, stood straight and tall, and radiated confidence. So as I sometimes do when spotting a fellow Black woman in a predominantly white space, I walked up to Mia, told her my name, and asked her about herself. Almost from that moment in 2011, we were friends.

At that time, Mia was a staff member in the School of Social Work, and I was a graduate student in Pitt’s Department of Philosophy. Once a week or so, we would lunch at spots around our campus in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. We were of similar age and we’d talk about our careers, our dreams, our fears, our plans, our partners. Mia was funny, beautiful, kind, and strong. She was the kind of Black woman who made you think, “It is really a great, great thing to get to be a Black woman. A blessing.”

We went to see Rocky Horror together at the Hollywood Theatre in Dormont, to gorge ourselves on the buffet at India Garden, to page through the beer list thick as a bible at the Sharp Edge. I learned that she had a beautiful singing voice and had majored in Opera in college. I learned that her family had lived in Pittsburgh for generations. I learned that she was a breathtakingly skilled and graceful salsa dancer, sought after as a partner in salsa clubs across the country. I learned that she’d taught herself Hindi and traveled to India. And one day, I learned that Mia was completely entranced by Bollywood films, that she had a video rental membership at local Indian grocery store, Kohli’s, and that one of her favorite films of all time was the iconic coming-of-age romance, “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.” Just like a woman I’d known and lost touch with nine years before, named “Mia.”

Stunned, I asked Mia whether she had ever been a member of a Christian youth group. She answered that she had, and my mind flashed back to the early fall of 2002, when I was riding the 61B back home from the Cathedral of Learning, and a young Black woman my age introduced herself to me and struck up a conversation. She’d told me about her Christian youth group and invited me to attend one of their meetings. I was not yet an atheist. I was a twenty-one-year-old who’d just moved to a strange, new city, and was intrigued by the prospect of meeting more upbeat, friendly, young people of color like this woman who had just approached me on the bus.

In that fall of 2002, Mia invited me to potlucks at her home, to praise services with her youth group, and to come over and watch her favorite movie: “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.” This was all just over the span of two months or so; as I realized the youth group held little interest for me, I drifted away and we lost touch.

That all came rushing back to me again in 2011. Funnily enough, Mia never recalled anything about that first time we’d known one another; she only ever remembered the second. This was fitting, in a way, because it was this second time around that our friendship “stuck.” We had both evolved over the intervening years in ways that made us more compatible as friends and capable of a deeper understanding of one another.

This time, even when I moved across the state in the summer of 2012, we stayed in touch, catching up over texts and phone conversations. When I returned to Pittsburgh, as I did a few times a year, I’d call her up and we’d meet for lunch or drinks. I went back for her wedding, where she was inimitably “Mia,” blowing kisses into the audience, hamming it up as she waved her hand like a beauty queen, blessing her admirers as she sashayed down the aisle to marry a man she deeply loved. I felt so incredibly fortunate to have her friendship in my life, and to be a friend to her. She was brave, unbowed, determined, whip-smart, and deeply kind. She was in every way an inspiration, and I thought, if Mia Fuqua can live her Black womanhood so fearlessly, then so can I. I wanted for us always to be friends, cheering each other on.

The last time I saw Mia alive was in the summer of 2013. I called to let her know I’d be visiting the city, and we got together to catch up over burgers on Pittsburgh’s South Side. Even years later, I vividly recall my brows knitting together with concern as she described how she’d come upon stumbling blocks, personal and professional challenges in key areas of her life. I shared advice and offered commiseration—I could identify closely with so much of the pain she shouldered. She was melancholy, but she was holding it together, and forging ahead, like she always did. Like Black women always do.

On January 21, 2014, I received the news that Mia had died. It seemed impossible. Later, I learned that Mia had died by suicide. That made even less sense. Mia was strong, brave, and brilliant. She was a blazing bright light, an inspiration. If Mia couldn’t make it, if she couldn’t win her battle, what chance did I have? What chance did any Black woman have?

For four years, I have both tried and tried not to understand what it means to me that Mia is gone. Maybe part of me will always be afraid of that question: what does it mean when a person who inspired you to fight for your place in this world, decides it’s finally time to leave it, and you?

On the day of Mia’s memorial service, the funeral home was full of young, brilliant, ambitious Black women gathered from across the country, asking themselves and one another that very question, often out loud. I found respite from my grief in the community Mia had built up around her. I am deeply fortunate to still be friends with several of the women I met on that day, which feels like a last gift from Mia.

It is now about four years since Mia passed, sixteen years since the first time we met, and seven years since the second time, the time when I knew we were destined to be friends for life. Every day, I still struggle to understand what a world without Mia is. I think of my own challenges and how they slowly grind away at me. I itch, feeling the incessant wear and tear of racial trauma as dead Black bodies pile up and it occurs to me that in a quiet way, in a hidden way, Mia’s passing was one of those casualties.

Mia Fuqua was my friend, and I struggle still to understand what it means that she is gone.

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