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Obama: Warrior Or Assassin?
 Good news from the Voldemort Affair (the unpleasantness formerly known as the Global War on Terror, these days it appears to be some kind of contretemps with Those Who Must Not Be Named). I am so-o-o-o-o stealing that. It's not plagiarism when you announce you're going to steal it up front, is it?
Deader than a rock, from what we hear. Over at Salon.com, Good Gawd! They're still around? Who reads them? All the right-minded folks who read Newsweek, of course... Glenn Greenwald greeted this news by calling President B.O. an assassin. President Sparafucile? Somehow it doesn't work for me... After all, Mr. Al-Awlaki was a US citizen and was never convicted in a court of law of those offenses for which the alleged terrorist was allegedly killed. According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, also joining Mr. Greenwald in the assassin-identification business was Texas Congressman Ron Paul. That's a pretty fastidious approach, alright. It avoids getting blood on your hands by drooling pablum down the chin. Pontius Pilate approves. Part of me is glad to see Mssrs. Greenwald and Paul engaging so cordially in this rare moment of bipartisan harmony. They should spend more time together. They make a cute couple. I'm looking forward to buying them a toaster. And it is always good to see ideas in Special Providence confirmed in real life; in that book on the American foreign policy tradition I wrote that Jeffersonians on the right and the left often unite in their condemnation of what they see as executive excess. I used Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in the book as I recall; now I can update those examples.  People kinda backed off doing that when Buchanan decided he wasn't a Republican anymore. Nader, in the meantime, has become such a joke that even lefties giggle.But I fear I am one of the mindless hordes Mr. Greenwald invokes when he, like Paul, mourns that so many Americans will think the death of Al-Awlaki is good news. My throat's still raw from all the ululation. What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-AwlakiAgain I note with praise and thanks Mr. Greenwald's sense of fair play as he steps in to make a favorable contrast between GOP debate audiences and the liberal editorialists who praised President B.O.'s drone campaign -- and reminds us that whatever faults it may have Texas does have a judicial system in which accused criminals have rights. Much more of this from the often acerbic Mr. Greenwald and historians will begin to describe our times as an "era of good feelings" in which bipartisan civility reigned supreme. ... rather than as an era in which theory regularly triumphed over practice... But having said all this, and wanting to emphasize that both in Special Providence and elsewhere I argue that the Jeffersonian critiques from Ron Paul, Glenn Greenwald and others of executive excess in foreign affairs stand in a long and completely legitimate tradition of American foreign policy, it nevertheless seems to me that they are wrong in this case.  It nevertheless seems to me that the sun continues to rise in the east and that the woods are foul with bear poop. Somebody should call the EPA.Perhaps this is just further proof of how mindless I am, but it does seem to me that Al-Awlaki and his buds are at war with the people of the United States and that in war, people not only die: it is sometimes your duty to kill them. "Duty" is the key word there. It's at the end of a very long stick of social change. In 1941 my Dad had a duty to get drafted and shipped off the fight Nazis. Our cultural pantheon included Mom, the Boy Scouts, Apple Pie, Truth, Justice, and the American Way. After 70 years of battering Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism. Mom has become a role model for both girls and boys, has taken a lesbian lover, and has a life outside the home as a pole dancer. The Boy Scouts are ucky because they refuse to allow homosexual predators to swarm around boys just as they're trying to figure what the hell puberty's doing to them. Truth has become relative. Justice has crumbled in the face of rehabilitation and counterintuitive compassion. Practices that would have tripped a gag reflex at Buchenwald now have their own validity, which makes any "American" way just one approach among many and who's to say which is better? It's an age of sympathetic vampires and evil clowns, where duty is a tenuous concept that applies only to what's best (or even what feels best) for you.  That the Al-Qaeda groupies are levying war against the United States without benefit of a government does not make them less legitimate targets for missiles, bullets and any other instruments of execution we may have lying around: the irresponsibility, the contempt for all legal norms, the chaotic and anarchic nature of the danger they pose and the sheer wickedness of waging private war make them even more legitimate targets with even fewer rights than combatants fighting under legal governments that observe the laws of war.To my knowledge, no American "captured" by either al-Qaeda or the Taliban has escaped alive. Geneva Conventions apply only to the civilized, while today's Vandals, Avars and Huns get to do things the 622 A.D. way. Mr. Al-Awlaki chose to make himself what used to be called an outlaw; a person at war with society who is no longer protected by the laws he seeks to destroy. He was not a criminal who has broken some particular set of laws; He means not just a criminal who broke a particular set of laws...  he was an enemy seeking to destroy all the laws and the institutions that create them. His fiery sermons inspired numerous jihadists, like Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, to attack Americans. He was personally involved with planning the attempted Christmas Day bombing in 2009 and he mentored several of the 9/11 bombers. That he was at war with the United States may not have been proved in a criminal court but is not really up for debate.Once you join the enemy army you're cut off from the rules governing your own people. You get to live by theirs, and your old side, the one you were born and bred to, gets to shoot you out of hand if they catch you. By waging private war against the United States, he placed himself in jeopardy, and our Chief Magistrate, obedient to the commitments he made when he took his oath of office, fulfilled his solemn duty by returning Mr. Al-Awlaki to his maker by the most effective means at hand. Once you're outside your own country and living in the enemy camp you get what the enemy gets. What's complicated about that?It's because you've become an enemy, whether you've submitted a letter of resignation from civilization or not.
Being forced into the cattle chute and groped when I want to fly somewhere is a much greater infringement of my civil rights than Anwar al-Awlaki swallowing a Hellfire in another country. Every President of the United States, including Thomas Jefferson and probable Ron Paul hero John Tyler (the only ex-president who stood with the Confederacy in the Civil War) would have taken a similar step in similar conditions, and I have no doubt that every Congress ever elected would have backed them up. Abraham Lincoln did not order the Kearsarge to arrest the Confederate sailors on the Alabama and return them to the US for a civil trial; he ordered the Navy to sink Confederate ships without serving them arrest warrants, without getting grand jury indictments, without reading them their rights and without giving them the opportunity to send their lawyers into court to get injunctions against the attack. ... and Lincoln took the same sort of heat (only worse) from the same sort of people who're bitching and moaning today...  I am neither a lawyer nor a judge, but it does not take much special knowledge to understand that Mr. Awlaki had placed himself well beyond the protections of criminal law. Starting with being outside the boundaries of the U.S... Had he been captured, and dragged as it were unwillingly back under the umbrella of American law, it might have been different, and he could have been tried for treason or other crimes. But Mr. Obama was under no obligation to risk the lives of American soldiers to save Mr. Awlaki from himself and restore to him the protection of the laws he despised, nor was he under any obligation to forbear and allow Mr. Awlaki to continue his activities until such time as Interpol or some other recognized law enforcement agency could serve him a warrant and take him into custody.  How many terrorists has Interpol arrested? Actually, Interpol doesn't really arrest people -- there is no Man from U.N.C.L.E. They issue paper, which makes its way to police agencies at the national level, which then disseminates the paper to other agencies at provincial levels, which further disseminate paper to local levels. All of the dissemination at each level is subject to local law and politix, and overriding all is the question of whether the police bureaucracy happens to feel like rounding up the miscreant or even disseminating the paper. Dawood Ibrahim continues existing quite openly in Pakistain, despite multiple Interpol warrants and despite the fact that Indian intel agencies are able to discover his addresses, phone numbers, the names of his closest associates and their addresses and phone numbers, and the addresses and phone numbers of their mistresses and "special" dancing boys, all of which is beyond the power of Pak intel agencies to discover... Both Congressman Paul and Mr. Greenwald do, I think, have a legitimate beef with the President. The President is clearly acting like a man who is fighting a war. He is bringing down fiery death from the skies against any foe he can locate. This is not the normal behavior of a Chief Magistrate faithfully executing the laws. It is the behavior of a president locked in a bitter struggle against a dangerous foe. President B.O. cannot have it both ways. If he is our chief law enforcement officer leading the investigation of a global criminal network known as Al-Qaeda, then his actions are subject to one set of restrictions and one kind of review. Perhaps an Al-Awlaki can be killed resisting arrest, but the Greenwald-Paul questions about assassinations make some sense if we are in the middle of a complex law enforcement operation against an organized crime entity comparable to the mafia or perhaps to a narco mob.Being Chief Magistrate implies you've actually got a country to be in charge of. There won't be any luxury vacations for Michelle and the girlies with the black flag of Islam flying over the White House. Probably if you live there you notice the flagpole every day. It changes the outlook. But if the President is acting as Commander in Chief in a Congressionally authorized quasi-war (quasi because Al Qaeda is not a state), then his actions fall under another set of guidelines altogether. I don't think the war's "quasi" at all. The Visigoths weren't a "state," either, which meant squat to the Romans in 410 A.D.For that matter, Islam was not a "state" in 622 A.D. Unlike the Visigoths and unlike Mohammed himself, al-Qaeda did declare war on us "crusaders and Jews." The President has created some of the confusion in our debate. Make no mistake... Frequently during the campaign, sometimes even in office, he has spoken as if he is the head of a criminal investigation team. When it comes to actual decisions, however, he acts like a military leader at war.  He gets a daily intel brief and he meets with military staff regularly. In the movies these are often two different meetings, in practice I believe they're usually concurrent. (I can't say for sure; I only ever addressed one morning intel brief, by video...) It's not a matter of the generals showing up to be given orders by the commander-in-chief. The usual procedure is for the generals to bring options to the CinC. These are "sold," sometimes by spiffy-looking staff officers chosen for their presentation skills, other times by the actual smart guys. In most cases I believe an "executive decision" consists of "Let's go with Major Whatsisname's approach and see if it works. If it does, then we'll put some more emphasis on it. For backup we'll keep LTC Hoodat's plan."  At some point in the Bush administration the use of drones went beyond the "put a missile up a camel's ass" point when Major Brilliant put an extra coat of spit shine on his shoes and wore his best uniform for his big appearance. He made the point that battles are often won by skirmishers degrading the enemy command structure. We can't get snipers into position to pot al-Qaeda's command structure, but we have the technology -- continuously being improved -- to put rockets over the target area inhabited by the big turbans. Big shots as intel sources are overrated. The most important intel associated with them is their location. The geolocation and the collection and dissemination process -- both also being continuously improved -- mean that a fix can go from the collector to the targeter within seconds, a process that used to take an hour or better back in Vietnam days. Bush at some point told Major Brilliant to "go for it," at the same time keeping two or three plans just about as good in reserve. The rest is history. Major (Now LTC(P), assuming his career hasn't been assassinated by jealous pretty boyz) Brilliant's approach started showing good results almost from the first -- remember how they thought they'd gotten Zawahiri on what in my memory is the first use of drones in FATA? Since then the intel's been improving, the technology's been improving, the skill of the operators has been improving, there's been a long string of sudden job openings among the turbans, and suddenly B.O.'s a military genius. Go figure. Greenwald and Paul appear to believe that he is a policeman and needs to start acting more like one; I believe he is a war leader and needs to start talking more like one. Politically he's constrained to wimpery. With the economy such a shambles his lefty constituency's all he's got, and they hate the idea of U.S. military success.  Via Meadia applauds President B.O. for killing America's enemies as fast as he can -- and I have no fear that a future US President will use that precedent to send a Hellfire missile through the windows of the stately Mead manor in Queens. I don't even think American stock market swindlers and tax evaders lounging on the Riviera need to worry about a Predator strike bringing their peaceful retirements to a premature close. Roman Polanski does not need to move to an undisclosed bunker underground. This isn't a slippery slope; it is war.Not until Polanksi decides that Jihad is the Only Way... Two years ago, the idea that America was in a war might have seemed like one of those anachronistic Bushisms which could be swept underfoot by the New Age of Light and Reason--Guantanamo and military tribunals would have to go as well. With Anwar al-Awlaki dead, the Obama Administration has again demonstrated that it can fight the Lord Voldemort War pretty well; it just can't quite bring itself to make the case for what it must do.  It's difficult to Restore Our Reputation with pablum dripping from your chin, isn't it?The President can speak forcefully about force; I've said time and again... his Nobel Peace Prize address on the continuing importance of war is a case in point. Make no mistake! He needs to do more of this at home; It'd be a game changer... if a war is important enough to fight it is important enough to defend and explain. You can keep your present plan. Posted by: 2011-10-03 |
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| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=330923 |
... Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, al-Awlaki