And
besides: it’s war, would you rather, I am often asked by supporters of
the kill list, that we have boots on the ground, big expensive,
destructive deadly disastrous land invasions of countries like the Iraq
war? Isn’t the move from wars like Iraq to “surgical strikes” in Yemen
precisely the kind of change we were promised?
This narrow choice between big violence and smaller violence shows, I
think, just how fully we have all implicitly adopted the conceptual
framework of the War on Terror, how much George W. Bush’s advisers
continue to set the terms of our thinking years after they’d been
dispatched from office. Because that argument presupposes that we are at
war and must continue to be at war until an ill-defined enemy is
vanquished.
What, people ask, is the alternative to small war, if not big war? And the answer no one ever seems to even consider is: no war.
If the existence of people out in the world who are actively working to
kill Americans means we are still at war, then it seems to me we will
be at war forever, and will surrender control over whether that is the
state we do in fact want to be in. There’s another alternative: we
can be a nation that declares its war over, that declares itself at
peace and goes about rigorously and energetically using intelligence and
diplomacy and well-resourced police work to protect us from future
attacks.
The Obama administration quite ostentatiously jettisoned the phrase war
on terror from its rhetoric, but it’s preserved and further expanded its
fundamental logic and legal architecture. Even after the troops come
home from Afghanistan, we will still be a nation at war.
In 1832, German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz declared that “War
is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of
that force….a clash of forces freely operating and obedient to no law
but their own.” Much of the history of war and international law in the
last century, particularly after the horror of the second world war, was
an attempt to prove Clausewitz wrong. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves. We
may find ourselves at some point facing a stark choice between the war
we are now fighting and the law which we all at least pretend is the
bedrock of our republic.
I say we choose the law.
Via Glenn Grenwald and my niece Linda
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