There's not much you can do when the president says we must go to war.
If you are an ordinary, middle-of-the-road, American who gets his news from the usual sources, the radio, the television, the newspapers, you realize that you get only so much and no more information. We have a government with intelligence agencies, and sources, far beyond what you and I have available.
If the president says that a well-known tyrant such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq is hiding nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and you know that he's used biological and chemical weapons against his enemy Iran and the Kurdish people, and the president says that Saddam has been going after nuclear precursor chemicals, and you see that Saddam is acting as though he has something to hide by making life difficult for international inspection teams, and is refusing to cooperate with the international community, what can you do?
You can ask for more proof.
But when Colin M. Powell, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war against Saddam in 1991, when we didn't go to Baghdad when we had the chance, addresses the United Nations and says he has reviewed the proof of WMD in Iraq and it is good, what are you going to do? Call Bush and Powell liars?
No, you don't want to do that. Even if it turns out they weren't lying, but just as wrong as though they had. They both mis-read the evidence.
The president wanted to get Saddam, not because Saddam was leading the war on terror. Saddam terrorized his own people, but not us. He was a boil on our rear, but not a threat to attack us in New York or in Kansas City. That was Osama Bin Laden, and, following 9-11, we were looking for him in the borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan where he was holed up in caves. We invaded Iraq, destroyed the Taliban regime there, the training camps, replaced it with the regime of Hamid Karzai, and that was that, except for the insurgency there as the Taliban didn't lie down and play dead as they were supposed to do. They keep popping up like whack-a-mole.
So we continue to fight in Afghanistan on the border against the Taliban loyal to Osama and themselves. The Taliban do not like to be dethroned by Westerners who believe that women have rights. That's us. They like to control the lives of their women, and it is their women in the most literal sense. They own them.
After 9-11, when Al Qaeda forces from Saudi Arabia recruited by Osama attacked the United States by commandeering fuel laden jet liners out of Boston into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, symbol of the might of America and the West, killing 3,000 innocent civilians, New Yorkers and the surrounding area including the world, the president said that we must get the people responsible for this, these terrorists. And so we invaded Afghanistan to get Osama, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda training camps. Hooray for us, that was the right thing to do.
But the president, George W. Bush, not the brightest bulb, but not the dimmest, either, given choices to pick from on the menu, decided that going after the known bad guys wasn't enough. We had to go after the unknown bad guys as well.
This is where it gets surreal.
We needed to go after Saddam as well as the terrorists. Why? Because he's a bad guy, which we concede. No matter that in an earlier round he was our bad guy, for we can decide to get rid of our bad guys as well as we can adopt them temporarily. In that earlier round Saddam was fighting our enemy Iran which had held hostage our embassy in Teheran in 1979, humiliating Pres. Carter, the rescue team which failed, and the U.S. Saddam was our hero then, fighting and poison gassing Iran troops.
The enemy of our enemy is our friend. Old Arabic saying. Works for us.
So, on top of invading Afghanistan, we invade Iraq. Okay, Mr. President, if you say so. Let not I stand in your way just because you wish us to invade another country that hasn't attacked us. Maybe Saddam needs invading.
So we don't say anything. We've got troops on the ground fighting and it's our team against their team and our team is fighting its way down the road towards Baghdad and the bridge over the river is crossed and the next thing you know there is the statue of Saddam being pulled down with the help of one of our heavy combat vehicles that resembles a troop carrier or a tank, I don't know which, except get that American flag off the head of the toppling statue because this is bad P.R. We don't want to seem to be conquering Iraq, although that's what we did. We want to be seen as helping the former downtrodden Iraqis free themselves from the tyrant who held them in thrall. Thrall means slavery. I looked it up.
So Pres. Bush greets the returning aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln returning from Persian Gulf waters where it helped win the war. Bush flies out on a fighter jet wearing a combat flight suit. He looked like he'd just won the war himself. "Mission Accomplished," read the banner above the podium where the president spoke, giving the appearance that the White House stage-managed a super photo op designed to send the message that here is our great leader, home from the war, victorious, wrapping himself not in a flag, but in an aircraft carrier, no mean trick.
Okay, I got that part. Our guys won, we showed the bad guys, the president is sharing the deserved glory, and now the war is over, right?
Wrong.
Two-thousand six hundred American lives and three years later there we are in Iraq getting plastered wherever we are, which is mainly Baghdad and Anwar Province to the west.
I agree that most of Iraq is okay, the people trying to support themselves and their families, send their kids to school, etc.
But the small portion of Iraq that makes the paper every day is out of control, or certainly seems so. A hundred civilians a day are tortured and murdered or just blown up with suicide bombs waiting for a bus or a job. And five American soldiers a day just for being on patrol or delivering supplies to other American soldiers holed up in a compound. We have thousands of soldiers in a camp called the Green Zone in Baghdad. God help them if they venture out. They don't. Except in a convoy of armored vehicles which are never quite armored enough. And one or more of them gets blown up.
A nephew of mine was in one of those vehicles when it got rammed and blown up by a suicide bomber. The young man survived with burns but not two of his colleagues, fellow Army troopers. My father worked on the building of the Trade Center. A friend's son was killed in the building. So I tend to pay attention to this generation's war. The last generation's war was Vietnam. Somehow it seems that the dope-smoking hippies who demonstrated and opposed the war made more sense than the people who pushed us forward into it, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger and McNamara. And all the World War II types who believed that fighting communism was a good idea. People like me who didn't oppose the war because, well, we were middle-of-the-road Americans who tended to listen to our president because, well, he was our president, and he was supposed to know more than we knew, right?
Wrong.
The lesson of Vietnam is that you should never listen to your president when he says you must go to war and sacrifice your sons and nephews for a good cause, because the cause is never that good.
The good cause is mixed up with national politics and who gets elected next time.
Oh, no, I will not be the first president from Texas to cut and run, said President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a man of no personal courage who was in Washington in Congress during the Second World War. See Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, Volume I.
And so today we are treated to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who seems like McNamara squared, and Condi Rice, our latter day Kissinger Lite, banging the drums for this war on another "ism."
Opponents are fascists, said Rumsfeld during this past week. There's been this great administration push to sell the war to an American people who have had it up to here, let's call it chest high. We're not gagging on it yet, except for Cindy Sheehan who lost a son in Iraq for a cause she doesn't consider noble. She pickets the president in Crawford, Texas, where he likes to mountain bike and chop wood, the least harmful thing he does.
Today the president, addressing his most supportive audience, World War Two and other veterans, tells them we're fighting fascism, Naziism, and that opponents of his war policies aren't fascists themselves, just misguided and wrong for not agreeing with him.
This is a man who starts a war based on mis-information amounting to as-good-as-lies (because all indicia opposed to WMD and the notion that Saddam was not supporting the 9-11 terrorists was downplayed, and all suggestions, no matter how tainted the source, such as Ahmad Chalabi, were up-played) and now says his critics are wrong.
This is a man whose claim to being a legitimate president were tenuous at best. Bush v. Gore (2000). And you thought what does this have to do with Constitutional law, perhaps. Then he rode his questionably legitimate incumbency to victory in 2004.
And the war goes on. The president says this is the deciding war of the new century, if not millenium. We are fighting not just Saddam. He gone. We're fighting an "ism." Terrorism. The Global War On Terrorists. GWOT. As in Jee-Wot. A bad word in any book.
We're going to blast an ism with high explosive.
You blast an "ism" with words and ideas. Terrorism, Communism, Fascism. The latter two were regimes with armies controlling territory on the ground and invading other territory. You had enemy armies and cities to blast with high explosive.
Terrorism? We're going to kill all the people who don't admire what we're doing in the world?
That's half the country, if not more.
We're creating an awful lot of enemies by going after people who don't like us. We've created an atmosphere of hatred against us and now we're trying to blast the people who breathe our atmosphere.
Isn't there a better way to make progress than to spin our wheels in the mud of our own creation? We're hosing down the mud and creating more mud. I know, I mixed the metaphor. Tough. This ain't poetry. Same point. We're fouling our own nest.
The image I see of Rumsfeld is a cartoon image from last week. A skull in a helmet, the skull of Rumsfeld. Calling his critics fascists. This is the sign of a man on the way out. He's lost it with the American people. Either he has or I'm way out of step, and I'll take my chances.
Remove Rumsfeld, said a critic two weeks ago. That's like removing one leg of a chair. No good. Chair falls down. Remove whole chair. Out of path. Move on.
Sorry for sounding like Charlie Chan. Chan right.
Here's the WaPo article on the president's talk to the American Legion today.
What do you do when your president says we must go to war against an "ism" instead of an enemy with an army on the ground?
Not much you can do but watch and wait.
And when we get into the inevitable quagmire while fighting phantoms and true believers, then we can shake our heads and ask why we didn't speak up earlier.
As in Vietnam.
If it's any consolation, and it isn't, Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain, the quintessential American of the century before the one you grew up in, opposed the Annexation of the Philippines following our War Against Spain, 1898, where we attacked Spain which did not attack us. Something about a pretext, we blew up one of our own warships, USS Maine, parked in the harbor of Cuba (owned as a colony by Spain). America, reasoned Twain, was a nation of colonies which rebelled from Britain because to be a colony was to be enslaved. Government without representation. America had no business going into the slave trade. Again. We'd had a terrible civil war (from which Twain enlisted for the South, but "skedaddled" - his term - after meeting U.S. Grant, almost, and headed west to San Francisco and Virginia City, where he learned to write).
America ignored Mark Twain. After WWII we gave back the Philippines to the Filipinos. My wife, Marie, is from the Philippines. I've visited the Philippines. I've studied the Philippines. See Stanley Karnow's "In Our Image." On our Bridge-Walks (see the banner above left), we visit the memorial above the embarkation piers at Fort Mason, built to supply our Army in the Philippines with troops and supplies. We walk through the Presidio of San Francisco, home of the troops who occupied the Philippines. The Presidio is now the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Formerly our bastion of imperialism.
I wish I believed a word my president says.
Unfortunately I don't believe him. It's not that I think he lied to me. But he told me near-lies. Falsehoods that he convinced himself to believe, that I may have been willing to believe when supported by Colin Powell, who I trusted. But I don't trust Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or Rice, any more than I can throw the bunch of them. And Colin, the only one I admired, has omelette all over his face.
There's no one left to believe.
Paul Wolfowitz? Head of the World Bank? Richard Perle? Irving Kristol, the Neo-Conservative editor of the Weekly Standard? The people who gave us the war? They want another war. Iran is next. And Syria for good measure.
Al Qaeda is the bad guy. Osama. Not "ism." Maybe "ism," but not with troops in the Middle East.
If the president wants to tell me that the real reason we're there and fighting all these wars, and it's never just one but a whole string of wars, is because it's about the oil, stupid, and power, let him tell me that. Let him tell the world that. But don't tell me it's about this "ism" of Anti-Americanism that we keep creating and calling Terrorism. We're making more enemies than we can kill. And we have a lot of killing power.
Give me a war I can get behind, one I can say, "I'm proud to see my sons die in this one." Yeah, right. Have you got a war here that you are willing to see your sons, and nephews die in? For what? Because the world needs a big dog, and we're today's big dog? How legitimate is that?
Constitutional law, incidentally, is about nothing but legitimacy.
See Shield of Achilles, by Phillip M. Bobbitt, about whom we'll talk more. He's a historian and professor of Constitutional Law, U. of Texas.
I was asked today, and accepted, the duty to teach an advanced Constitutional Law course next summer as a fifteen hour, one-unit elective, to emphasize history, politics, and pending issues. That's what I've been doing all along. The school has finally caught on and legitimized or legitimated my ongoing effort.
Constitutional Law is not only all around us, it thoroughly suffuses our being, deep in our bones. It's the sum of our view of what's right, and not right, about the world we live in, and our country, and right and wrong. That's what Constitutional Law is, and it's there whether we study it or not. Constitutional Law is the water to a fish. Can a fish see the water? It helps if the fish is lifted out of the water, but he can no more do that than we can. That's why we have the French, British, and Germans, however. But not the Italians. We go there on vacation.
This one isn't cutting it.
