While the “war on terror” frame is counterproductive, since the Obama administration seems to be conceding to its inevitability, this excerpt from Phil Bobbitt, via Charli Carpenter (the newest Lawyer with Guns and Money), suggests a way to corral the concept to saner ground:
It is often asked, “How can we win a war against terror? Who would surrender? How can we make war against an emotion (terror) or a guerrilla technique (terrorism), neither of which are enemy states?” These questions assume that victory in war is simply a matter of defeating the enemy. In fact, that may be the criterion for winning in football or chess, but not warfare. Victory in war is a matter of achieving the war aim. The war aim in a war against terror is not territory, or access to resources, or conversion to our political way of life. It is the protection of civilians within the rule of law. [emphasis Charli's]
To put it in pocket-Clausewitzian terms, wars, as such, must have clear “political” aims. Killing and/or capturing every terrorist is a tactical, not political, aim. It is also a wildly unrealistic goal given any type of reasonable cost/benefit analysis. Thus, we should recalibrate in a reasoned manner.
In pursuit of this, to his credit, Bobbitt establishes what should be one of the overriding political aims in this fight: maintaining our adherence to the rule of law. This should be a guiding principle regardless of your political leanings.
Ironically, our faithfulness to the rule of law is frequently under siege from those factions that claim that the terrorists “hate us for our freedoms.” Having, ostensibly, established what makes us a target of violence from terrorist groups, the crowd most likely to launch accusations of appeasement seem in a rush to preemptively barter away those freedoms for unclear gains. After all, if some terrorists do in fact despise us for our commitment to the rule of law, doesn’t weakening that commitment count as a clear victory for the terrorists? Not only a victory, but one which the terrorists themselves could never achieve absent our collusion – only we can violate our own principles and change the nature of our society.
For those that do not accept this formulation of terrorist motivations (myself included), and even for many that do but who have not thought through the logical conclusions of the countermeasures they endorse, commitment to the rule of law is something worth fighting to preserve; these are principles that we cherish, a system that vastly improves the quality of our lives, something that sets us apart from the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that we scorn. As some have put it, and where we are at our best, the dedication to the rule of law makes us an aspirational example, a “shining city on a hill.”
The added bonus is that adherence to the rule of law not only preserves and fortifies the nobler aspects of the American experiment, but such principled perseverance and avoidance of the taint of hypocrisy is actually an effective counterterrorism technique in and of itself. Even if fear and intense emotion can obscure that truth. Therefore, the preservation of the rule of law should be a prerequisite when deciding on the tactics and strategy employed in the struggle with groups that employ terrorism.
As to the second prong of Bobbitt’s criteria for victory, Carpenter is right that coming up with the metrics is a bit slippery.
The rule of law part is easy. Don’t torture; don’t arbitrarily detain; don’t let invasiveness of security procedures outweigh security gains. But to make that calculation you need metrics of acceptable security gains. You need some basis for declaring that civilians – ours and theirs – are sufficiently protected. I’m not talking color codes and threat levels. I’m talking about a way of judging how effectively the government has protected against additional terrorist attacks without violating the law.
Here, it is important to recognize that perfect security is likely an unobtainable standard. To quote John Kerry’s quite reasonable (though vilified at the time) characterization:
We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance … As a former law enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end it … [b]ut we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.
That’s actually quite astute, and for that, he was savaged mercilessly by the “liberal” media who misconstrued his ideal objective for his description of reality. Even then, reality is not as bad as advertised. Going by fatalities, we are probably closer than we think to Kerry’s ideal. The bad news is, our tendency to hype the threat of terrorism and overreact to both successful and, remarkably, failed terrorist attacks distorts reality and skews our decision making progress. Paul Campos explains:
It might be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to have a nuanced grasp of statistically based risk analysis, but there is nothing nuanced about two basic facts:
(1) America is a country of 310 million people, in which thousands of horrible things happen every single day; and
(2) The chances that one of those horrible things will be that you’re subjected to a terrorist attack can, for all practical purposes, be calculated as zero.
Consider that on this very day about 6,700 Americans will die. When confronted with this statistic almost everyone reverts to the mindset of the title character’s acquaintances in Tolstoy’s great novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and indulges in the complacent thought that “it is he who is dead and not I.”
Consider then that around 1,900 of the Americans who die today will be less than 65, and that indeed about 140 will be children. Approximately 50 Americans will be murdered today, including several women killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and several children who will die from abuse and neglect. Around 85 of us will commit suicide, and another 120 will die in traffic accidents.
No amount of statistical evidence, however, will make any difference to those who give themselves over to almost completely irrational fears. Such people, and there are apparently a lot of them in America right now, are in fact real victims of terrorism. They also make possible the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice—the cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.
Unfortunately, the politics of cowardice can also make it rational to spend otherwise irrational amounts of resources on further minimizing already minimal risks.
Unfortunately, Dick Cheney and the Republican Party are relentlessly demagoguing the issue in order to ensure that the United States undermines its commitment to the rule of law, while vastly exaggerating the threat posed so as to forestall rational decision making in other arenas as well, such as foreign policy. Imagine the progress we could be making without such impediments.
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