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.
