Perhaps I'll post a portion of the transcript later. The portion of the interview that most struck me was Lessig's reluctance to speak out regarding the consequences of current responses to the situation in Iraq. Rather than dealing with the here and now, Lessig tended to dwell on the contention that the war was unjustified to begin with.
As a close second, I found Lessig's defenses of Obama's self-consistency extraordinarily difficult to understand. Lessig allowed that Obama had shifted a couple of positions (campaign finance, telecom immunity) but overall viewed the presumptive Democratic candidate as consistent in his positions. He chided folks such as Hewitt for trying to make Obama appear inconsistent.
In my view, Obama has made Hewitt's job extremely easy.
Slow going, but the transcript finally appeared:
HH: Have you perceived that he’s changed his position about meeting without preconditions with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Castro, et cetera?
LL: I have not perceived that, no. I’ve understood, you know, to be a huge amount of press about whether parsing statements made in particular ways makes it look like they’re inconsistent. But again, you’re part of this spin, and this spin is let’s see how many places we can find inconsistency in order to say see, he’s just a flipping politician.
Lessig buys that "preparations" are not "preconditions" even if the failure of Iran to come through on certain "preparations" would keep the meeting from taking place.
As noted above, Hewitt had trouble getting Lessig to speak to the war issue.HH: Okay, you’ve got two out of six, which is a lot more than most people do. My question is given what you know from The Looming Tower and Robin Wright’s, how does American withdrawal in Iraq make us safer?
LL: You know, I don’t think the question is, I don’t think you can say the withdrawal alone makes us safer. I think what makes us safer is restoring the perception that American is not waging unjustified war. And that certainly is the perception after every precondition for going into the war turned out to be false. So people in the region, people around the world believe we are not justified in going into this war. It was an unjust war, and therefore, waging, continuing to wage an unjust war fuels the other side in their ability to say we are not a just people. Now I believe we are a just people. I believe we believe we waged war for just reasons. But the other side doesn’t believe that, and we give them the Kryptonite to the extent we continue to wage what was an unjustified war.
Note the problem with Lessig's argument. The war is not the same war now that it was at the beginning. Even if you find the sustainment/containment of the Hussein regime acceptable, we are no longer fighting Hussein's gang. That regime was erased. The enemy now is AQI and Shiite extremists backed by Iran.
Does it make sense to retreat from the engagement with AQI and Shiite radicals for the sake of making us appear contrite over deposing Hussein?
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