LAW FOR WAR

Robert Marquand of the ‘Christian Science Monitor’ reports on something that has probably escaped Our recall; it probably escaped Our attention when it happened.

In 2002 – under the urging of Jesse Helms – Congress passed a law “enabling United States forces to unilaterally storm into peaceful Holland to liberate American soldiers held for war crimes”.

Think about this for a minute.

A law authorizing the unilateral invasion of another country is a law authorizing an act of war. Congress, on top of everything else – the Patriot Act, the Authorization to Use Military Force – legislated approval for an act of war against … Holland.

And, as is now standard procedure in Congressional skullduggery these days, the Bill is actually given a 'sensitive' title: the "American Service Members Protection Act". They might has well have gone the whole way and named it - as in sex offense legislation - after somebody: the Joe Smith Protection Act or the GI Joe Protection Act. Whatever. It is a sleazy way of sliding this poison blade into the public law and the public consciousness. And wasn't one of Hitler's first Acts entitled "An Emergency Act for the Protection of the German People and Nation"? What was not to like?

And what would Holland have had to do to merit this invasion? The International Criminal Court (ICC), sitting at the Hague, would have to detain US troops for war crimes. That is something that happens to other countries, the ones whose troops commit war crimes for bad reasons.

Of course at that time the ICC wasn’t actually set up, and it would only have jurisdiction over signatories’ forces.

But amazingly, that didn’t stop Congress from legislating the first war in America’s history to be started because an International Court might possibly have the temerity to prosecute war crimes.

There are two possibilities: Congress knew that they were passing such a bizarre law even though the triggering-situation was impossible. Or Congress did not know that the triggering-situation was impossible.

If Congress did not know that the triggering situation was impossible, then they were treacherously negligent in the amount of ignorance into which they allowed themselves to fall. With staffs and ‘experts’ numbering in the thousands, hired precisely to advise them, the Congresspersons would have absolutely no excuse for not-knowing that the scenario that Helms presented to them was impossible.

If, on the other hand, Congress knew that they were passing a bill authorizing war despite knowing that the triggering-situation they chose could never happen … then I would say that such behavior is cause for Our profound concern.

Did they know that war crimes were going to be committed? That the whole war itself might be construed as a war crime? Did they assume that war crimes would be committed by Our troops? Torture? Did Cheney tell Helms to get this passed as a pre-emptive 'solution' to war crimes because he intended that war crimes would be committed? Why else would a country do something as historically weird as legislatively authorize a war against international justice-keepers before engaging on its chosen war? Not even the Soviets went this far.

I had mentioned in recent Posts that this country and its citizenry over the past few decades have lost their capacity for ‘seriousness’ and had no justification for considering themselves as ‘serious’ about discharging their responsibilities. We have lost not only the appearance of ‘gravitas’ and the reputation for ‘gravitas’, but We have lost the actual capacity for it.

Here is the United States Congress knowingly passing a ‘fake’ law – making a ‘fake’ threat of war against an allied nation – and thereby committing the full faith and credit of the United States of America to what is in effect a publicity stunt.

Had they no concept of how serious a matter ‘war’ is for a nation? For this nation?

Had they no awareness of what a monstrous ‘message’ they were sending to the rest of the world and its governments?

Had they no concern for the precedent they were setting, not only in national legislation but in international law and in the legislative agendas of other nations around the world?

Has legislation descended to this? To some sort of ‘show’?

Yes, I think it has. And I think that what has been going on in this country for 40 years has brought it about. In their brandishing of ‘deconstruction’ in the service of winning political space and ultimate power for their ‘revolution’, the Second Wave Feminists led the way for Identity Politics to disregard the validity and legitimacy of any laws or principles that stood in the way of their demands; that stood in the way of their ultimate visions of revenge and political supremacy. ‘Law’ and ‘Justice’ were derided as tools of ‘oppression’ and as nothing but the phony ‘abstractions’ used by the ‘oppressors’ to 'oppress' ‘the oppressed’.

Although Congress would never willingly part with its ‘authority’, it began to debase itself bit by bit, as it deferred time after time with a straight or ‘sensitive’ face to assorted rants and demands. ‘Laws’ were passed without thought or foresight or even deliberation, simply to placate or pander to this or that ‘Identity’, this or that part of ‘the base’.

And since the revolutionary mindset of deconstruction saw all law-making as merely a form of oppressors’ charade, as play-acting, the pols began to accept that toxic position themselves. And of course, if the law-making was a ‘charade’, then so were the law-makers. Debasement was underway.

And the theory of revolutionary agitprop, taken straight from the playbooks of Communist and Nazi political agitation, held that the only use of ‘law’ was to ‘send a message’. Rationality, justice, fairness, proportion, precedent, consequences … none of these were allowed to influence the passage of laws that were sending the Politically Correct ‘message’.

This had taken root long before 9-11. As early as 1994 Joe Biden defended his Violence Against Women legislation by admitting that “it may be a bad law, but it sends a great message” (parts of the law were later found unconstitutional). Even now, Senator Leahy’s Judiciary Committee has said that it will re-consider aspects of sex-offender legislation that are incoherent, conflicting, unworkable, greatly vulnerable to effective constitutional challenge, and– even in the eyes of law enforcement and public safety officials – largely incapable of achieving their stated legislative aim of increasing the safety of children. In addition, by the by, to introducing eerily Soviet concepts of law and jurisprudence into the heart of American practice.

These laws were passed by Congress with substantial majorities – although, probably, with very little serious thought, let alone deliberation.

I’m thinking that the one large reason Congressional Democrats went along with the stunning legislation of the Bush-era Unitary Executive was that they were by then known to their Republican colleagues as having passed large numbers of verrrry iffy laws simply to ‘send a message’. When the Bush-era legislation was slapped onto their desks, they were already in the habit of ‘sending messages’ and really didn’t have a solid ground on which to refuse the Republican ‘message’ in the service of a Unitary Executive’s increasing grab for power.

And by 9-11, large swaths of the public were used to it all, and even thought that it was a good idea. And this was in addition to large swaths of the public who still might entertain the ‘quaint’ belief that Congress doesn’t pass laws unless it has carefully considered them.

Careful and deliberate consideration ‘went away’ a long time before. Indeed, Brown v. Board of Education probably had the lethal if unintended consequence of validating what the ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ politics of the later Sixties would bray: that ‘deliberation’ and ‘deliberateness’ were merely ploys to keep the ‘oppressed’ in a state of ‘oppression’ by the ‘oppressors’. Easier to demand with the French Revolution: Ecrasez les infames. No wonder We’ve fallen so far from the ideals of the Framers.

So to 2002. A United States Congress passes a law that it either knows is unnecessary or doesn’t realize is unnecessary: Authorizing an act of invasive war against an allied nation.

But what the hey? That’s what they thought there in the Beltway. It’s just for ‘looks’. It’s just a play ‘to the gallery’, to give the folks back home, the ‘voters’, a sense that their elected representatives were on the job and earning their pay and perks. Oy. Ach.

It’s not about ‘war’. It’s just about ‘the message’. Nobody’s supposed to take it seriously.

Well … so much isn’t taken seriously anymore.

And the consequences are serious. And will get more serious.

BUCK-STOPPING

Over on Salon, Glenn Greenwald reports that the Army is permanently assigning a Brigade Combat Team to “NorthCom”, the new military command responsible for deploying troops domestically, i.e. inside the United States itself. (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/24/army/index.html).

The troops will be using suppression equipment recently developed to subdue ‘persons’ non-lethally. Of course, they would presumably also be available to help out in floods and fires, but somehow I don’t see them fighting brush-fires in Southern California or rowing boats in floods or standing around guarding property after a particularly big hurricane.

Among senators who voted for this enhanced degradation of the already-gutted Posse Comitatus statute – the military cannot deploy forces against the citizenry, an idea We got after having put up with King George III sending redcoats and Hessians (think Blackwater with pointy hats) among Us back in the 18th century – was Ted Kennedy. Not to single the gentleman out, but it strikes me that his vote is symbolic of the danger posed to Us by the so-called Left, by the (no-longer) ‘liberal’ elements in the national government, and by their recently constructed National Nanny State.

There has been a traditional fear of an authoritarian take-over of the United States from within. Historically, it was imagined that it would either come from the American communists and socialists or from the ‘rich’ who feared the ‘rule of the mob’ and – more specifically – having to share the wealth that they had amassed (not often through prayer, good works, and a life of exemplary Christian virtue). In the late 19th century, troops of the National Guard (as it was then constituted) or federal troops were sent to put down labor agitation and protect the property of corporations and of the great magnates of the First Gilded Age.

The construction of the National Security State starting in the late 1940s raised the theoretical possibility that the national government would actually deploy the military domestically in order to prevent ‘communist’ agitation among traditionally disaffected groups (workers, ‘negroes’).

Ironically, it was a Republican president, and former five-star general, Dwight Eisenhower, who sent the Army back into the South during the civil-rights struggles of the 1950s, in order to protect the ‘negroes’ from the official depredations of Southern law enforcement bent on maintaining Jim Crow. Cocky Southron cops suddenly lost their swagger and choked on their chaw when faced with armed combat columns deployed in assorted military vehicles that had last seen similar service advancing down the highways and byways of Hitler’s crumbling Germany less than 15 years before. And there in the South those columns were moving down roads that had last seen military action when General Sherman’s army – among others – came marching through, singing their Republic’s battle-hymn.

But Eisenhower’s deployment was made only after it became brutally and consistently clear that local Southern government was – to put it charitably – not up to the task of enforcing the laws that were passed to protect the rights of ‘negroes’ almost a century before, following the South’s not-winning the Civil War. It wasn’t as if the South had been blind-sided by any new-fangled laws suddenly and slyly passed without public attention. A very concrete federal promise to the nation’s black citizens, made 90-plus years before, was finally being fulfilled – and nobody (except perhaps the long-suffering Southern blacks themselves) had any claim to being surprised.

But that was then.

Nowadays, We have some claim – but only some – to being surprised. And not by local government, but by the federal government. As part of its long surrender of its fundamental prerogatives as the core Branch of government, Congress now permits the deployment of troops – although, of course, We shouldn’t worry and should Just Trust Them – or Just Trust the President. That’s worked so well for Us recently. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, the economy, 9/11 itself, the Military Commissions and military law … mah mah mah, a stunnin’ record of resoundin’ success indeed. Lawdy, lawdy.

Now the Southerners have pretty much taken over the military, abetted by their fundamentalist chaplains whose essential theological illumination is that if there’s an American-flag patch on the shoulder than whatever is done is God’s will, and whoever disagrees is an agent of Satan. As if the Divinity spoke His mind as clearly as Goring when he took over the German police: “Henceforth, a bullet fired from a police revolver is to be considered my bullet”. Ach, let us to pray, ja?

Maybe there was nobody else. After 30 or 40 years of the Identities deconstructing any ‘traditional American’ identity common to all of Us, it was only the Southerners who kept any sort of palpable tradition of American identity alive. Of course, that tradition came heavily larded with classic Southern characteristics of small-town small-souledness, Romantic militarism, a tribalistic sentimentality so thick as to mask the violence lurking just beneath, and a fundamentalist religion that urges obedience to the powers that be and that finds a ‘patriotism’ thus encumbered to be its only sacrament. We so need more better options.

But Southern ‘patriotism’ is not the only kind there is. And while We can’t wait another couple-three decades for whatever new ‘patriotism’ was going to eventually be cooked up out of the deconstructed left-overs of Identity-politics, there are models left Us by the Founders, by Mr. Lincoln, by Martin Luther King, among others. And Mr. Eisenhower certainly gave it his best shot, though nothing is perfect. Surely there’s enough there to at least re-start the fire in Our common hearth. When We are cold, We don’t function so well. And even if We are now so poor that We don’t have more than two sticks to rub together, well – the laws of nature holding steady, that should be enough. And “Inshallah” (to respectfully quote a recent public statement of a U.S. military judge) We might experience a communal drawing-together against the darkness such as inspired the earliest generations of Our people.

But getting back to Mr. Kennedy’s support for undoing Posse Comitatus. I worry very much that it betokens more than an instance of political horse-trading or a fit of absence of mind (or character). Rather, it indicates an ominous strategic decision among not a few Democrats (the party that’s supposed to be for ‘democracy’, sorta like the name says): Let the Republicans take the heat now, and then when we’re in the White House and in control of Congress, and people finally wake up to see just how much we’ve screwed up over the decades (because it’s all gonna come out, especially if we can’t fix everything we’ve broke now), and take to the streets, then we can ‘legally’ send in the Marines to save our swag and our seats and somehow keep the party going. Neat. Certainly the type of shrewd two-fer for which Mr. Kennedy is noted. Not much on the Big Picture, or consequences, but then he’s had so little experience with such things. Shrewd tactics have served him well enough all this time.

The National Nanny State, a creature of the ‘left’, although cloaked in ‘sensitivity’ and concern for ‘pain’ is every bit as capable of violence as the National Security State. A bomb dropped in a “humanitarian intervention” kills just as surely as a bomb dropped for the sake of imperial ambitions and “oil”. The children at Waco died just as surely in the flames even though Janet Reno (later) intoned her concern that they were being ‘abused’ and thus she wanted to help; all that can be said about that assertion is that in terms of absolute numbers her ‘rescue’ didn’t kill as many children as a rescue run by the Russians – not exactly setting a high bar.

And back here at home, just how hard is it to imagine that the troops at some point in the not-too-distant future will be deployed against assumed criminals – easy targets like, oh, say, sex offenders. There – who can argue with that? And then with political demonstrators whose ideas are ‘inappropriate’ and perhaps scaring ‘the children’? After all, if soccer-parents these days approve of ‘correct’ teachers gutting fairy-tales to remove evil step-mothers, witches, abandonment, abuse, and death – well, you wouldn’t want ‘the children’ exposed to Thomas Paine on the evening news, would you? Eugene Debs? The Bill of Rights? Why expose them to all that? Better to let the troops take those ‘agitators’ and malcontents away to where the nice folks at KBR have built a special camp for them. It’s being done for the children. After all, we’re decent folk here.

And somehow thus We are back to the troops marching into the South down deceptively sunny roads all those decades ago. Funny how History moves.

They will come for a lot of Us, one fine day. Unless things are stopped now. Unless We stop them. Senator Leahy – and there are others like him – is doing his bit. And fulfilling his sworn responsibility. A ray of light in a gathering gloom from which no ‘New World’ shall come to Our rescue.

We are the New World. The buck stops here. But not the Constitution. Unless We fail.