Oh! Ca-Can The War Be Over Now
The Jihad war rages on, but the War on Terror is over, we have traded it
in for the war on conservative patriots and Christians.
Opinion
By de Andréa
June 25, 2013
There is no longer a national-security
consensus — no longer the political support for wartime defense measures, much
less offensive combat operations. While our
enemy continues to fight, our will to defend ourselves and/or break the enemy’s
back has vanished. After a contentious
week, that much is clear.
The controversy swirling around the shadowy
intelligence programs hasn’t gotten to the bottom of those programs, but it
tells us everything we need to know about. . .us and well…our
government and where were going.
At the risk of using a worn out metaphor,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dog that did not bark is like no other to describe this
week, though, the lack of a bark was loud and clear. For a variety of reasons, many of the
protagonists have developed amnesia about how we came to have the programs now
provoking all the cage rattling: the debates over the PATRIOT Act and FISA (the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and the IRS. In the end will anything be done about
it? No!
After a series of attacks through the
Nineties, which we all but ignored, then the 9/11 atrocities destroyed the World Trade
Center , struck the
Pentagon, and killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
In that savage clarity, our nation finally realized that what I’ve
called “kinetic fundamental Islam” — a combination of militant Jihadists and
their Sharia-supremacist enablers — was at war with the United States ,
this was not a religion of peace but that became a distorted view of religious
rights. The PATRIOT Act was a product of
our vigorous and persuasive contention, on the national-security right, that
the challenge was an enemy force, not a criminal-justice problem. That challenge demanded a national
war-footing, not a judicial due-process.
It was precisely this contention,
moreover, that beat back the Left’s effort to intrude the Judiciary into the
collection of foreign intelligence— constitutionally, a paradigm executive
function when Obama overhauled FISA in 2009.
In fits and starts over the years,
progressives and libertarians have aligned against the war, for different
reasons. Programmed as well as hardwired
to find American fault in every dispute, the Left is sympathetic to Islamic supremacist’s
indictment against the United
States , if not its barbaric methods. Libertarians have been wary because war
inexorably enhances the power of the state at the expense of liberty — big
Government might be more to be feared than Islamic Jihad.
That this fear is overstated does not
mean it is frivolous. It is real, and
has been stoked to a fare-thee-well by the so-called “War on Terror.” The label itself betrays our cravenness. Unwilling to name the enemy for fear of
giving offense, Obama may have framed the challenge not as an aggressor but as
an aggressive tactic but Obama said we are certainly not at war with Islam, and who would
challenge him except me. It
encouraged Americans to go on with their lives as normal (lest “the terrorists
win”).
Necessarily, this ensured that the
public would notice the war only in the government’s defense measures against
the tactic. These were thus certain to become more
onerous; after all that was how politicians too timid to say “Islam” or “Jihad”
proved they were tough
on . . . er . . . a’…“violent
extremism.”
But these defense measures, erosions of
liberty and privacy, could be abided only as long as the public felt profoundly
threatened. That feeling would certainly
not last, no matter how long we had troops on faraway battlefields. If the public was not (a) invested in victory
over our enemies; (b) persuaded that being molested at the airport and similar
indignities had something to do with achieving victory; and (c) convinced that
the lack of similar-scale attacks in the years after 9/11 was due to our defense
measures.
The most compelling claim against the
war effort, argued jointly by progressives and libertarians, was that there was
no conceivable conclusion to a war of this nature. Wars against traditional enemies end when the
enemy — usually, a nation-state — surrenders or strikes a treaty. But how can a war against a tactic end? It doesn’t…
Consequently, the argument went, the War
on Terror would go on indefinitely, and with it the metastasizing security
state. This argument is now muted on the
Left. Bush-deranged progressives turn
out to be quite comfortable with a security state as long as one of their own
is running it. But now that the left is
in charge, for libertarians the argument has grown ever more heated.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Nothing, not even war, happens in a
vacuum. Over the last six years, as
libertarian and conservative angst churned over surveillance, detention,
military commissions, and drone attacks, the progressive-lite GOP establishment
gave way to hardcore Obama statism; as I said, we have traded in the war
against terror, for the war on conservative patriots and Christians. As a result, libertarians, quite
appropriately, have become a hugely influential opposition faction. They are a big part of the Tea Party’s
energy, and the Tea Party is the dynamo of the Right. Increasingly, as the Right’s ne plus ultra has become
stopping Big Government’s advance, conservatives and Republicans have been more
willing to overlook libertarian objections to adhesive security measures —
sometimes, even to see a good deal of sense in them.
Thanks for listening – de Andréa
Copyright © 2013
by Bottom Line Publishing - Permission to reprint in whole or in part is
gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
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