One Question for the Candidates

As this is the most intensely watched, hotly debated, and historically significant election in the history of America, it seems only appropriate that an intense, hot, and historically significant question be asked of the candidates.

As a generation looks for guidance not from their elders as they would have in times past but from electronic resources and historical artefacts online, a name that keeps cropping up in the discussion of the identity of America and the conduct of modern America is that of Noam Chomsky. He, being the opinionated and celebrated educator from MIT can be quoted, "if the standards of the Nuremberg trials were applied, then every post-World War II American President," including your husband, Senator Clinton, and the sometime archetype for your Presidential bid, JFK, Senator Obama, [and the people who held you as a prisoner of war, Senator McCain,] "would have been hanged as a war criminal." The crimes for which the Nuremberg "war crimes" statues are applied are a matter of historical record and can be repeated if necessary. The crimes for which the current administration might be held accountable is also repeatable, should that be requested. Here, I don't seek debate about the requirements of the position of the presidency. It is an unenviable position on many occasions. Nor do I seek a political parrying or pillorying of the idea that tough decisions, viewed from a distance, constitute war crimes. What I seek is an answer to a question that will resonate for generations in the eyes of those that will live in the aftermath of America being called to task about its conduct overseas.

The question at hand is one that ought to have been asked by an intrepid individual in 2004. Certainly there are no two words that sunk the John Kerry's bid for the Presidency faster than "global test," in response to a question about engaging in a pre-emptive war. This was just before we were really, really sure that the Iraq war was a really, really big lie. Yet, a notion remains, that the conduct of America, as a citizen in a global community and as an extension of the powers held by the office of the President of the United States, is as much an element in the practice of national security and the war on Terror as is the maintenance of America's interests. A President behaving as a war criminal, thus, invites or incites or exacerbates terrorism -- a tool of desperation, lest we forget -- in the homeland.

My question is this: Can four generations of Americans, and the myriad people of the world, look to any of you to uphold international agreements and not to commit war crimes in the course of your Presidency?