Rational Philosophy

On what we choose to do and how those choices define us.

This is the best picture, make that the only picture I could find of George Bush’s White House reception yesterday for Major League Soccer’s league champions the Houston Dynamos. Although apparently Bush “brought the entire roster into the Oval Office and took individual pictures with each player.” Bush was also present a few weeks ago at the team’s ring ceremony.

But then the Dynamos are a Texas team, no matter that Bush is in the White House, and no matter that while he was receiving the Dynamos Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the accused and self-claimed architect of the September 11 attacks, five years after his capture appeared before a military court in Guantanamo bay. And no matter that a Senate panel after five years of investigation finally released its findings in which it accused President Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others of deceiving or misleading the American public in various ways about the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and about Iraq’s threat to the region and the world.

So I’ve been sitting here wondering what made Khalid Mohammad choose to plot and execute such acts of terror, even assuming that he’s taking credit for more than he should. And wondering too what would make the Bush administration take matters of such dire significance into their own hands, acting with such careless, callous and criminal imperiousness. The war has destabilized the region, killed thousands of innocents, and perhaps put us at greater risk of future terrorist attacks.

If, as it seems possible, what underlies both motives is a lack of perspective, a lack of humanity (Khalid Mohammad sees America as unholy, unworthy of compassion, Bush’s crowd sees the Islamic world the same way) why do we feel strongly that there is a difference?

(When I start to equate the two too directly I remind myself that Bush feted his home state Dynamos, Saddam’s son tortured Iraq’s soccer team.)

Khalid Shaikh Mohammad wasn’t born a terrorist. So when and how did it happen? After leaving his native Kuwait as a teenager he moved to North Carolina and studied engineering. At some point as a young adult he made a series of choices about what he believed which culminated in a single-minded dedication to acts of violence against the West in the name of his religion. If we summon up a picture of him in a sleepy North Carolina suburb, a newly minted engineer, picking up the newspaper and perusing the job listings, one can imagine him having made a different set of choices, perhaps ending up living a more or less peaceful life.

But he made a choice to believe in something bigger than himself, bigger than any act of terror he could dream up. His choice was so powerful and freeing that he seems never to have looked back, never to have doubted whether it was right.

As a young man George Bush was a screw up. He excelled only at failure as far as we can tell. But Bush too made a series of choices. He chose to sober up. He chose to go into politics. And he chose to commit himself to religious faith as an influence and guide, something bigger than himself.

The similarity then, the reason we deplore the terrorism of Khalid Mohammad and the duplicity and bloody recklessness of the Bush administration is that both have chosen to forgo personal responsibility in favor of ideological responsibility.

If ever we were to go seeking a definition of evil, this might be it — to choose to set aside one’s personal conscience, to deliberately let it go, so that one can experience the freedom of living by a creed.