Posted by
JDComments on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 11:55:07 AM
There is slowly [well, not that slowly] emerging a tremendous philosophical difference in how people are viewing the War on Terror. On one side there are those who consider it WWIII, on the other side are those who see it as a particularly nasty crime. If you feel it is indeed a war, you support the secret detention camps, the SWIFT program for tracing financial transactions, the NSA auditing of telephone calls without warrants and all the other actions we are taking which are pushing, though hopefully not breaking, the boundaries set by the Constitution. After all, all is fair in love and war, and as flippant as that sounds, it is true. War is a terrible existential condition, no matter how much we have tried to make it politically correct and humane through such things as the Geneva Conventions, involving institutions and organizations whose sole purpose is to kill, maim and destroy to achieve an objective. Crime is something we accept as aberrant behavior which we seek to deter through laws, but which we prosecute after the fact in most cases [there are conspiracy prosecutions, but they usually are applied to organize crime or financial malfeasance, and in most cases, they too, are part of the prosecution after the crime has been committed]. The difference is fundamental, and is reflected in how we deal with war and crime. We WAIT for crimes to happen, and therefore the tools we utilize include probable cause and proof. We can wait because, even under the most extreme of circumstances, such as an Exxon, or a serial killer, the overall cost to society is minuscule in terms of either wealth or life, and we, as a people, have decided that our liberties are too valuable to trade off just to prevent crime. War, on the other hand, involves anticipating and countering the enemy BEFORE he has acted, because waiting exacts too high a toll. The death and destruction it entails cannot be accepted, and here our liberties can be sacrificed to some degree, as Lincoln did by suspending the Writ of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War, if we think that by doing so we can protect ourselves.Such things as probable cause are a nicety which cannot be afforded unless we want to get used to counting bodies.
Therefore, if we are to use the right tools in defeating it, we must decide: Is the War on Terror a criminal or martial matter? Can we afford to use the tools our liberal [with a decidedly small "L"] society has formulated for handling criminals, or must be resort to the arsenal of techniques we reserve for that most heinous of organized human activities, warfare? The answer, I believe, like so much in our modern world, is determined by technology. One hundred years ago the Islamic fanatics we are facing could have been treated as criminals for most intents and purposes because the destruction they would have been capable of inflicting would have been minimal. However, because of briefcase size nuclear bombs, and biological and chemical weapons, today the damage they are potentially able to cause is comparable to any battle in history. For good or bad, the same technology which has put into the individual's hands the computing power of a mainframe from 40 years ago has also placed in those hands the destructive power of an army division, if not more. Therefore, to treat the disparate factions which make up the Islamic Terrorists as criminals is wishful thinking which we cannot afford to engage in since there is no margin of error in this battle. It is war, as hard as that is to accept by some who wonder why we are making such a big deal out of sleeper cells made up of young men who seem to be more talk than action in most cases, such as the group that was stopped in Miami but accept this we must because we cannot wait for a nuclear explosion to give us probable cause.