Fblog Of War

So there's this blog, by law professor Ann Althouse, and I chirped up after Bush's 9/11 address to the nation. If you go to her post and reader comments, and type "shimmy" into your FIND function (rosetta-f), you can get each of mine and the responses. Anyway, I was a little dissatisfied with my presentation, but perhaps part of that comes from the somewhat hostile environment. Anyways, I'm reprinting what I just wrote tonight, because I do like it:


I'd like to say a bit more about law-enforcement vs. war. I think we all agree that part of civil law enforcement is a certain amount of "failure." Not ideal, it's just reality. Politically, I'm not convinced declaring war on bin Laden's mafia was ever a good idea. I mean, who looks strong there? Mightn't radical fairly-local small-timers race to provoke us and join that list?

Once 9/11 happened, folks were ready to accept war. And apparently lots of it. War can work, sure. But I've never been convinced that basically declaring a generation-long war is the best way to neutralize the radical movement, or prevent an attack much worse than 9/11. (It could work, sure.)

Perhaps I'm taking the Bushies' war-rhetoric too literally, or selectively. Certainly I'm not trying to anger anyone with pacifism.

Neither am I nit-picking simply because things aren't going well, or going "as well as we were told they would." That's transient stuff, and somewhat unknowable by me. What I do know is my own level opinion of the Bush administration's background, temperament, approach, and competence. I'm far from infallible in these assessments, but not to act on my own assessments would be negligence and abdication of citizenhood.

I saw some value in the Afghanistan invasion, because not to show strength like that would have possibly invited another attack. Perhaps a larger one. (We also could have done other somehow-forceful and surprising things, I'm sure.) Once Bush started talking about a generation long war, and it's not a stretch to think he means straight-up war, I began to really, really worry. Some bombs, some trucks, a boat, and some box-cutters got America to declare a generation-long war against a vague, amorphous, regenerative, and vaguely phantom enemy. Fantastic. That's kind of out-of-control stuff.

There's no way to know exactly what will come from war. I feel like, having done what we "had to do" in Afghanistan, we are now actively inviting another, bigger attack on us. Probably we'll avoid that.

I'm not fully ready to take that risk, that war-path, but it's not up to me, much. I believe in civil law enforcement because, while it is not fully safe, it is generally safer than war, on balance. The risk/benefit analysis, to me, plays out better than the one for war. Your opinion may differ. Bless you. Luckily, none of us are in charge!

There are many argume--, er, discussion-points I'd love to touch on from this. For one thing, the notion of law-enforcement really needs to be twinned with pretty brilliant positive political action, which I believe this country can, in fact, produce. Call me a patriot. Sadly, the Bushies seem to be incapable of delivering this most valuable element. So perhaps once we were stuck with Bush+Osama we were simply stuck with the start of a generation-long war.

[I'll leave out the closing cuss-word] that.

Extreme Courage Under Fire

From today's NYTimes:

[Rep. Duncan Hunter [R], who heads the House Armed Services Committee] presented the military lawyers with various scenarios in which it might be necessary to withhold evidence from the accused if it would expose classified information. But the service's top lawyers said other alternatives must be explored -- or the case dropped.

''I believe the accused should see that evidence,'' said Maj. Gen. Scott Black, the Army's Judge Advocate General.

Black and the other lawyers said such an allowance was a fundamental right in other court systems and would meet requirements under the Geneva Conventions.

But Hunter suggested that such a requirement could hamper prosecutions.

''Some of these acts of complicity in terrorist acts are very small pieces . . . and you don't have a lot of evidence,'' he said. The chairman repeated a scenario where the only piece of evidence would expose the identity of a secret agent and asked whether it would make sense to drop the case entirely.

''You get to the end of the trail, then yes sir, you do,'' Black responded.



That is awesomeness. Feel free to cheer in your chair. Go ahead, do it. Even just a little. It feels good to huzzah the best of America.

(And, under this same heading, here's something for the broadbanders out there.)

Enjoy

Have I mentioned this before? My "mother of all conspiracy theories?"

Well, here it is: Islam calls for the return of Jesus, too.

That's all.

I hesitate to call it a consp-theo, to coin an awkwardness, because it's just a tidbit, a nugget, a sliver of possible meaning.

I distrust consp-theos for the same reasons I distrust religions: they tend to work backwards from a premise, or from a social group's wish-fulfillment. Sometimes they just work spirally, or sideways, starting from a bunch of hogwash. Or they just don't work in any way I'd want to be part of. Followers often seem to want to avoid rigorous investigation of the details of reality, or to be myopically relating to a jumbled mass of details over which they obsess.

Of course, perfectly reasonable folks can give credence to a conspiracy theory or a religious faith. But they tend to do it as part of a larger, more widely acceptable framework of expectations and viewpoints. At least as far as I can tell.

So what to make of my tidbit, my nugget, my sliver of possible meaning?

Well, if you take the Republican rapturist evangelicals, and the Project For A New American Century, and the petro-military-industrial complex, and the various divisions within Islam (seemingly as inter-conflicted and intra-corrupted as any Christian wackjobs you can name); and the masses of violent men huddled around the capitols and hot-spots of the world, yearning to breathe strong in large or small worlds of their own terrible creation; and if you accept the tendency of major world events to be the results not so much of orchestration, but of half-obvious/half-hidden bee-hives of cross-purposed activities, focussed on a few principles held more-or-less in common...

...Then perhaps my tidbit become a worrisome little bee in yr bonnet, at least one sleepless night per month

Basically, what I worries me is that powerful people on both sides of this War Of Terror have a shared and deeply-held belief that things getting much, much worse in the world is merely a sign of that things are about to get much, much better. Magically. (Yikes!)

That's all.

And it's prolly nothing.

But trouble?