It’s hard to think of another nation as principled as the United States: the system of government and values, as set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is a richly conceived philosophy, many of whose propositions and imperatives are not only known by rote but also profoundly grasped by her citizens.
The Enlightenment values upon which the American system rests are equally impeccable: Freedom, Equality, and the Dignity of the Individual. One cannot find fault with them.
But the massacres of Baghdad and Blacksburg alike illustrate the difficulty we face: our ideals confound human frailty: as time wears on, the gap between Principle and Reality grows wider.
In Iraq, the right thing to do was to depose Saddam Hussein–but we were patently the wrong people to do it: in fact, the only right people to do it were the Iraqis. Taking their history away from them proved catastrophic.
At home, meanwhile, the moral laxity of our response to the Virginia Tech massacre (i.e. the refusal to examine our gun culture) exposes the danger of attachment to principles that may seem eternal and necessary but are anything but. We need to outgrow our childish fascination with firearms, together with the delusions of power it embodies.
The principle is not the issue: we are.