It was inevitable that the debate about whether to torture would be replaced, sooner or later, by the debate over whether torture had been an acceptable policy, once torture was no longer the policy. Now is that time. The long knives of moral outrage are out and about on the issue of whether to investigate and prosecute those who wrote the legal memos that justified torture and those who authorized torture and those who carried out torture. The liberals are righteous in their call for a special prosecutor to go after the political miscreants; justice demands no less, just as justice demanded the Nuremberg Trials and an apology for the Japanese internments. The conservatives  are full of moral righteousness in their belief that the people who safeguarded the nation are being persecuted now precisely because they accomplished their goal of keeping the United States safe from attack ever since 9/11. Only whining liberals insensitive to the tough world of security matters would think otherwise.

Arguments that boil down to alternative sentiments are difficult to answer. It is perhaps worth observing, though, for the sake of objectivity, that liberal goals are rarely accomplished when causes célèbre are not in the cause of a social movement. Jailing Martin Luther King, Jr. was a scandal only because the time had arrived to move past jailing black leaders as the solution to social unrest. Their cause rather than their spokespeople needed to be answered, and the segregationist South never could come up with a rejoinder, and so it died, at least officially. The Dreyfus Affair, which is usually cited as an instance where the liberal side won, was an instance of a public scandal that was just a leading point for a general social movement in France whereby the forces of secularism, education and the middle class for a moment wrested control of France from its nationalists, which were the party of religion, the military, the Church and the countryside, a fracture that would remain in French society until de Gaulle constructed a regime that was based on the centralized and meritocratic state that had dominated French society during the Ancien Regime.

There are many cases closer to home that tell us that making a scandal out of a political issue does not work out very well for progressive forces. We can recount much of recent history. Yes, Nixon was forced to resign, and that was a very good thing, but it is also to be remembered that Jerry Ford decided not to prosecute him, an act unpopular at the time but since then recognized as an act of statesmanship. Did we want to eat up years in recriminations? The American President may have to deal with a number of issues at the same time, but the American public tends to become preoccupied with one issue at a time. To have prosecuted Nixon would have kept his name and face on the nightly news for years and prevented any recovery from precisely the sort of paranoid and self-serving thinking and feeling that his pardon, at last, freed us from, allowing us not to have Nixon to kick around anymore.

And what did Watergate provide precedent for? Iran Contra, the investigation of which petered out not because there wasn’t enough information to indict the Secretary of Defense as well as impeach the President, but because no one wanted to face that again. It also led Republicans to a get even mentality that had them impeach Clinton simply because they could, and so besmirch a Democratic President in the same way one of their own had been besmirched, Clinton surviving, in part, because he was a much more likeable person than Nixon, Clinton possessed by more forgivable vices than the secretive arrogance and sly dealings which were Nixon’s way.

Remember that the Supreme Court had said, in its infinite obtuseness, that it was alright for the Paula Jones suit to go ahead while Clinton was still in office. The President would be inconvenienced only to the extent that he would have to spend a few hours offering testimony or sitting for a deposition. They took no account of the political crisis that a debate about the meaning of “is” by lawyers more than by Clinton would brew. It robbed the President of much of what he might have done in the first few years of his second term.

The lesson is not to sell the time an administration has in office too cheaply. Obama has enough on his plate that he needs all the time he can muster to focus the American people as well as Congress on his own agenda, not the agenda of righting the wrongs of the past—which, as a practical matter, he has done by abolishing torture and moving for more accountability in the Justice Department and making the Defense Department more responsive to the White House than was the case when it was run jointly by Chaney and Rumsfeld.

What would the investigations of torture look like? Dick Chaney and George Bush are the two most accountable people. They, after all, were the ones who authorized torture. Those who carried it out had legal guidance that what they were doing was permissible. The people who wrote the legal memos were offering their opinions on what the law was. Are we now going to embark on prosecuting people who offer their legal judgment, even if they were stretching points so as to justify what had been thought both immoral and illegal? That would not be too unlike prosecuting defense attorneys if their clients are found guilty. The one who does the crime or who masterminds the crime are criminals, not those who try to argue the crime was not a crime at all.

If that is the case, then do we want to reintroduce Chaney and Bush into the center ring? To what effect? We already know the characters of these two people, and those will not have changed since the beginning of 2009. Chaney will calmly claim that what he did was preserve America while Obama is endangering it (which Chaney is already doing on Fox News) and Bush will show himself out to lunch. The dignities of the offices those people held are too important to have them brought back for trials. What was done was done. Moreover, that would create quite a precedent: bringing in ex-officials, once an administration changes, to be prosecuted for what were essentially political decisions, which in this case was that the American people would prefer torture to the risk of another 9/11, which might indeed have been the case in 2001 and 2002 and 2003. Certainly, the Congress did not see fit to look too closely at what was going on. Are you going to prosecute all those Republican Congressman who stood in the way of investigating the Administration?

Obama has brought some fresh air to Washington. Why foul it with memories of the past? I know this argument is not very palatable to those who remember the Holocaust or other world events that seem to warrant war crime trials. Justice must be done so that never again will it happen and so the nation can be reconciled to its past. I, for one, would have followed Churchill’s advice and had the leading Nazis shot on sight. Moreover, genocides have happened again, despite Nuremberg; and nations are not easily reconciled to their past. The Germans have been extremely conscientious at doing so, as have the South Africans. It took us a very long time to acknowledge slavery or the Japanese internments. Leave this scandal--torture in Iraq--alone for ten or twenty years. History can take care of itself, even though I know that point is not acceptable to those who think of history as a construction of the victors or, at the least, having to be pressed by the present if it is to speak accurately about the past. I am not so sure that the repression of history works so well once the powers that repress it are removed. The Catholic Church took its time but finally “forgave” Galileo once it had lost its power to control things for a few centuries. Lincoln was reconstructed as a great man by the time he died, and Grant retained his reputation as a great man despite what happened when he was President. It shouldn’t take very long for history to write the record of torture. The obituaries of Chaney and Bush will include, in their first graphs, not only that their administration bogged down in Iraq after the nation was assaulted on 9/11, but that they authorized torture as part of their post 9/11 measures. I have confidence that disgrace will be the verdict history delivers on them. That is the verdict that is the important one.