Redstate

By TheSophist Posted in War — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

In a recent post of mine, I have had the pleasure to engage in civil, reasoned discourse about the propriety of using or not using torture in our War against Irhabis. In that discussion, it struck me that there is an unspoken assumption that underlies all of our thoughts about the War, about what's right and wrong, and about our policies.

This cuts across partisan lines, and across the left-right divide as well, and is something that bears consideration, especially on the eve of 4th of July.

I recently attended an event where I met a gentleman who had just spent three years in Baghdad helping the reconstruction of Iraq. I won't get into what he did there, but suffice to say that he looked around the room where glittering people in glittering clothes were sipping cool drinks while ensconced in the comfort of a wood-paneled drawing room, and wondered how this scene could be on the same planet as the world he had so recently left. We got into conversation about what people, particularly Americans, simply take for granted.

As many longtime Redstaters know, I am an immigrant. My father more-or-less fled South Korea because of an unfortunate comment he made critical of the Chun Doo-hwan military dictatorship while drinking with colleagues after work. (And yes, I'm fully aware that the Chun regime, and the ones before his, were supported by the United States during the Cold War.) I am sitting here in the comfort of my office, typing on this computer, in large part because some 39,000 American soldiers* gave their lives in the Korean War to stop the Communist takeover of the peninsula. For their sacrifice, I am eternally grateful, perhaps in a way that native-born Americans simply cannot understand.

I can write on this blog that George Bush is the dumbest President we've ever had, that Congress is a corrupt organization, and the entire Supreme Court should be impeached... and not fear the knock in the middle of the night. Or having my boss call me into his office for a "discrete conversation".

This right to speak my mind without fear of retribution, and many other rights (although they are under assault by the Statists on both the Left and the Right) that I simply take for granted, is not the norm in human history. And it isn't the norm in the world we live in today.

We all know (at least vaguely) the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

But how often we forget that self-evident these truths may be, but self-enforcing they are not. How many of us remember that 85,000 brand-new Americans had to give their lives in order to secure these truths, these liberties? How many of us remember the darkness of the Delaware crossing, with General Howe having decimated Washington's troops in New York and New Jersey and finally having chased the Continental Army into Pennsylvania? Those truths seemed anything but self-evident that dark winter.

It is one thing to proclaim liberty; it is another thing altogether to secure it. Like any infant, American Liberty was born through blood, gore, tears, and agony.

Some three hundred years later, we sit back and adore the beauty that infant Liberty has become. America is the envy of the world for its wealth, for its power, and for the freedoms that its people enjoy. And many of us have forgotten that the perfumed beauty we admire was born in blood. We seem to think it was always so beautiful, always so lovely, and always destined to be as She is today.

As an immigrant... let me assure you that this is not the case. In large part, American Liberty exists because of the fortunate circumstance of her homeland: secured by large oceans on both sides, and yet blessed with every natural resource, America was and remains in a unique environment for Liberty to flourish as she has.

Other peoples, other nations, also wanted freedom and liberty. It isn't as if the Korean people (to take one example) somehow love oppression, enjoy not being able to speak your mind, and detest the free press. But when beset by enemies that do not have to cross mighty oceans, such niceties take a back seat to sheer survival.

When existential threats are a fact of life, freedom must often be sacrificed.

This is what most Americans seem not to understand.

So we come to the present war, that Norman Podhoretz has called World War IV. Over the past seven years, since 9/11 woke me up to the fact of the war, I have had numerous conversations with friends and colleagues (and others) on all sides of the War issue.

So many people on the Left, good people all of them, simply do not believe that this is an existential struggle. As one of them wrote me, "When Al Qaeda is rolling tanks down Fifth Avenue, I'll be right there with guns ablazing." They deride our enemies as bunch of losers hiding in caves. Even the wider terror network, they see as a group of hoodlums that can no more destroy America than some random group of gangsters could.

They ridicule the "right-wing rhetoric" that proclaims the words and deeds of our political opponents as "surrender". Who would we even surrender TO, they snicker, even if we wanted to.

Even amongst us on the Right, we are so confident in our victory that we believe that what is at stake is the remaking of the Muslim world, not the survival of America. We see things as an anti-insurgency battle, and emphasize "hearts and minds". Existential struggle is merely high-flown rhetoric. All of those things are true -- we must win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world to win. We should remake that part of the world. We should behave as a superpower ought to, and win every battle.

What all of these well-meaning people do not understand is that America the political construct with a flag and an army and so on may survive. But America as we all take for granted, America as set forth on July 4, 1776, may not. America the nation may survive, no matter what, but American Liberty -- that fragile beauty born in blood -- may not.

Nothing drove this point home more powerfully for me than reading War and Decision by Douglas Feith. He recounts the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and the thinking that was going on inside the White House, the Pentagon, and other organs of national power.

On p. 69 of the book, Feith writes:

I looked at our new terrorism problem this way: If America were not a liberal democracy, a country that recognizes the worth and political equality of its individual citizens and respects their civil liberties, it would cease to be America. Our country is not so much a land and a people as it is a way of life that embodies an idea -- the idea of individual freedom.

...

Because of our historical good fortune, Americans have long enjoyed a high degree of public safety. We have become accustomed to thinking that our civil liberties are not only sacred but unshakable. But a community's freedom is affected by circumstances. Throughout history, civil liberties have yielded to society's desire for the state to fulfill its fundamental duty of providing security. This has been the case even in America, the "land of the free." Even such an uncompromising champion of liberty as the English philosopher John Stuart Mill bowed to the demands of public safety. Our Constitution and the judges that interpret it often seem to say that our freedoms are absolute, but when danger becomes oppressive, people will recall the quip that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, fearing another attack, our government acted to eliminate vulnerabilities the hijackers had turned to their advantage. It shut down air travel throughout the U.S. It arrested people for violations of immigration rules that would have been tolerated in less stressful times. It restricted the issuance of visas, limiting not only the freedom of foreigners to travel, but also the freedom of Americans to host them.

...

Beyond its human and material costs, terrorism exploits -- and therefore endangers -- the openness and trust that allow us to enjoy freedom and prosperity. If another 9/11 happened, especially an attack using nuclear or biological weapons, who could doubt that our society would respond by further increasing the powers of the government and inevitably constricting civil liberties? As has happened often in the past, security measures that once seemed outrageous could quickly become routine. And there was a possible ratchet effect worth worrying about: Burdensome security measures aren't always rolled back even after the threat diminishes.

The people who are fretting about habeas rights of terrorists, wringing their hands over rendition, or waterboarding, or the Patriot Act are not thinking about what we would do should some terror organization succeed in blowing up a neutron bomb in downtown Minneapolis. Or infecting New York subway system with bioweapons.

Even having 300,000 people dead from engineered smallpox isn't going to "destroy the country" in the sense of the United States surrendering. If anything, we would get even angrier, and really start to fight.

But imagine the lockdowns, the security checkpoints, the enormously expanded police powers we would grant the government. Even under an Obama Administration (or perhaps... especially under an Obama Administration), the loss of civil liberties would be astonishing.

Do libertarians worry that the NSA is intercepting phone calls originating abroad? Wait till the government mandates that every phone call be recorded and filtered, because that was how the bad guys managed to sneak biological weapons into the subways. Worried about Gitmo and habeas rights of illegal combatants? With 300,000 dead, Americans would gladly abrogate habeas rights of citizens in order to prevent another such attack. Constantly worried about supposed "Islamophobia"? We put Japanese-Americans into concentration camps in WW II, and they never successfully carried out any serious attack against Americans. If the irhabis kill 300,000 of our people, do you seriously think that the ACLU would utter a peep as we round up all Arabs and Arab-looking people and put them into concentration camps, and start administering loyalty oaths? Let me put it this way: if they did, the ACLU would be in those camps next to the innocent Arabs.

Imagine that we failed to learn about the bio-weapon attack because the mastermind was sitting in Gitmo, but we didn't waterboard the SOB. Do you really think we wouldn't pull out the hot irons and the rack after that?

After all, this is a nation willing to countenance laws restricting the rights of restaurant and bar owners to allow smoking in their private establishments, based on the theory that second-hand smoking causes cancer to waitresses who work there.

Believe me, America can become a police state.

And that nation, my friends, is not America. At least not as we know it. Not as we think of her. The flag will remain, the Capitol will still stand, and the White House will still be there. But we will no longer be America. We will have lost the existential struggle.

2008 is an election year, and above all else, we are confronted with this choice: do we do the rough things necessary to protect Liberty, or do we satisfy our moral vanity and risk losing it all? Do we continue to allow the judiciary to impose their sense of propriety on the hard men doing hard work, to see them reverse course completely after the next big attack and bless the creation of a police state? Do we hope for the best and rely on the better angels in our enemies? Or do we refuse to take the chance?

Because despite our best efforts, despite vigilance, despite everything, we may fail. We cannot defend against every attack so long as we live in an open society.

Without guarantees, without certainty, I will choose to take fewer risks with freedom, the most precious of American inheritances. Liberty, born in blood, sustained on sacrifice and good fortune, should not be the victim of negligent homicide. She may still be lost, but let it not be because we failed to do our duty by her.

Let us, on this Independence Day, pause to consider just how fortunate we all have been. Let us pause to consider just how wonderful the blessings of Liberty are, and pause to recognize just how fragile she really is. Let us be confident of victory, but warn ourselves against overconfidence.

Above all, let us be grateful for the extraordinary blessing of America, because to be an American is to have won the historical lottery. And let us not take our freedoms for granted.

God bless America.

-TS

* Not to mention the 92,000 wounded, 8,176 MIA, and 7,245 POW's of the Korean War.