The Big Picture and the Closeup

To read the groupthinkers’ policy statements from the decade preceding 9/11, it appears that they believed it was time for the U.S. to establish that it had the military power to do anything it pleased in the Middle East. Somehow this would guarantee our access to oil, assure Israel’s survival, and perpetuate our ascendancy over what the hawks’ fellow-traveler journalist Christopher Hitchens has called “Islamo-fascism.” And apparently Iraq was to be the showcase for this program. But within the echo-chamber that was the hawks’ ruminations, the fundamental truth is that there is no fundamental truth.

The legend has it that one of the Ptolemies ordained that the police would seize every book brought by each traveler into Alexandria, have it swiftly copied by scribes standing by at the library, and then return it to its owner, much as the Ptolemies’ successors in the field of American law, the West folks in Minnesota, engorge and process each new addition to the agreed legal canon. But centralizing all that information also magnified its exposure. We know the titles of many books that did not make it down through time to us because they were “preserved” in just such a fashion at Alexandria.

And here is the moral, strategic, and tactical problem: How we can expect the world to accord full faith and credit to that court’s eventual verdict when we establish and countenance tribunals that are themselves human rights violations? A question urgently worth pondering.

In the global war on terror or, as the Bush Administration likes to call it, the GWOT, the U.S. aspires to the situation of a National League team in interleague play — relaxed rules. This time we consider three aspects of the relaxed GWOT away game we are playing these days: foreign assassinations, extraordinary rendition, and prisoner export.

Katrina holds huge lessons for us, and they are both perennial and urgent. We should be respecting nature more, and not trying so very hard to bend it to our commercial purposes. We should be recognizing the coming demise of a fossil fuel economy, and ending the kind of foreign and military policy that will leave us undefended against nature’s worst. We should be waging war on poverty again, and not on the poor, and we should be demanding accountability of the rich, not giving them further tax cuts. There is nothing new in these lessons, but there is doubtless something newly urgent. They say that hurricanes are increasing in size and frequency; Katrina’s kin will be calling again soon.

When the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in February 2004 on our various Iraqi detention centers, they noted that at all of them, there seemed to be a single playbook – the real playbook – of practices focusing on the sexual and religious humiliation of those detainees deemed “high value,” i.e. most likely to yield Actionable Intel.

But we had better be prepared for the consequences. Someone, somewhere, is going to try us, quite seriously, for war crimes. And somewhere else, someone is going to commit war crimes against our soldiers because we fail to recognize their own combatants as POWs. And it won’t be pretty.

To make something disappear, have it occur off the books, on someone else’s balance sheet. This approach works equally well if you want to make a war disappear. Use Special Ops forces, or foreign proxies.

Without the aid of the courts, Congress is no match for the Executive. Presidents decide, period. Congress, outgunned by the Executive and deserted by the Judiciary, goes along. The Framers would have been dismayed.

The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column |  Next Big Picture Column   War Powers Page | Previous War Powers Column | Next War Powers Column  War Powers, War Lies: A Series  Part 4: Willingly Deceived     Published in the Maryland Daily Record April 29, 2005             Last time, we considered the dishonesty of President Lyndon Johnson in […]