When America plays cop in the world...

...it can end up having the same effects that cops sometimes do at home.

WaPo:

Ahmad’s relatives are among the civilians killed in events that are being documented with an unprecedented level of precision in a new accounting of the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State. Using U.S. military geolocation data being made public for the first time, U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars has pinpointed locations, some of them to within a meter squared, for hundreds of strikes resulting in more than 1,400 civilian deaths.

Throughout the campaign, strikes took place in crowded urban environments, where it was more difficult to distinguish between civilian and Islamic State targets. They also occurred in remote or militant-controlled areas, which complicated intelligence gathering and target verification.

Let me explain myself.

When police officers in America shoot unarmed civilians, they frequently end up unpenalized because the law gives great leeway to agents of the state who use lethal force when they "reasonably" feel like their personal safety is under threat. As we have seen, that "reasonably" stretches a long way, to almost unreasonable lengths.

Similarly, it appears that in the fight against ISIS -- a genuinely terrible, deadly organization -- the United States has decided to err on the side of its own safety, the the degree that the safety of non-American innocents becomes, well, not nearly as high as a priority as it should be.

It is probably the case that each individual targeting decision can be individually justified. Taken together, though, this number of civilian deaths is unconscionable. 

"At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror"

Good lord, the damage we do in the name of our own safety:

“This has been one of the major forms of damage, of course along with the deaths and injuries, that have been caused by these wars,” said David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University and the lead author of the report. “It tells us that U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.”

While the United States is not the sole cause for the migration from these countries, the authors say it has played either a dominant or contributing role in these conflicts.

Vine says that while having these numbers is helpful, it does not offer any insight into what kinds of lives displaced people are living. “Every day you live in a refugee camp is a day it’s been degraded compared to what it once was,” he said. “It’s another day you’re separated from your home and your home land.”

I will always believe that the War on Terror has created a lot of enemies the United States might not otherwise have had. In the name of national security, we have made ourselves less safe. Dumb.

We can use our laws to detain alleged terrorists. They can't use our laws to get undetained.

NYT:

A federal appeals court panel has ruled for the first time that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are not entitled to due process, adopting a George W. Bush-era view of detainee rights that could affect the eventual trial of the men charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“The Due Process Clause may not be invoked by alien without property or presence in the sovereign territory of the United States,” Judge Rao wrote, a position also taken by Judge A. Raymond Randolph.

The reach of American courts extends throughout the world. The reach of America's rights before a court does not. 

Do Americans even know we're at war in Somalia?

NYT: 

The Pentagon has admitted for the third time that its bombing campaign against terrorist groups in Somalia, which has been underway for more than a decade, had caused civilian casualties there, a military report said on Tuesday.

“Our goal is to always minimize impact to civilians,” Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the commander of Africa Command, said in the report. “Unfortunately, we believe our operations caused the inadvertent death of one person and injury to three others who we did not intend to target.”

A couple of observations: First, I hate how the Pentagon language about a terrible tragedy that has caused grief for an innocent family -- or families -- is treated as a technical oopsie. This is horrific. It is not a clerical error. We shouldn't treat it as such.

On a related note: I do wonder how many enemies the United States creates -- versus the number it eliminates -- with these kinds of attacks. Do Americans even know we're at war in Somalia?

The War on Terror comes home

Republicans are starting to sound scary. This is a sitting congressman:

And this is a senator who stands a decent chance of being president someday.

The first tweet advocates "hunting down" American citizens as though they were opponents in the misbegotten "war on terror." Cotton, meanwhile, served in the Army in Iraq, which was was war-on-terror-adjacent.

One thing that was notable about America's war on terror efforts is how cruel they often were. Dick Cheney told us we'd have to work the "dark side," and so we did -- at Baghram, Gitmo, and at secret torture sites around the world. Civil libertarians opposed these actions in real time, and a few low-level soldiers were prosecuted. But nobody in a position of real responsibility was held accountable, and indeed, pundits like Marc Thiessen made their names and careers defending the torture regime. When Barack Obama took office, he declined to prosecute the war criminals in his predecessor's administration, citing a need to "look forward." Admittedly, I thought that was the right approach at the time.

Now, though, the chickens are coming home to roost. Some leading American conservatives don't want to merely unleash the worst techniques of the war on terror against foreign terrorists -- they're ready to bring those techniques home.

Who's gonna stop them?

Gary Schmitt, the forever war, and the First Amendment

Let's gut the First Amendment forever! That's not precisely what Gary Schmitt says today in The Weekly Standard, but that about covers the gist of it:

Congress and the president should enact a statute that straightforwardly makes it illegal to publish or circulate materials that support, praise, or advocate terrorism as long as we are still formally at war with al Qaeda and its allies.

Schmitt says such a statute could be "narrowly drawn" so that we don't go back to the bad old days of seditious libel. Maybe. But we still don't know which circumstances would cause the United States Congress to end the "war" authorizations spelled out in the AUMF and various other laws. Given the way our leaders have interpreted that so far, it might be a crime to praise the Muslim Uighurs who have rebelled against the Chinese government, or the Chechnyan Muslims who have revolted against rule from Moscow. More likely it might be used to prosecute Americans who praise Hamas. And that's where we start to get into plausibly scary territory.

Generally speaking: We don't know that the "war" will ever end. Which means a statute that sunsets when the war does is basically a statute on the books forever. Wanna draw First Amendment considerations a little more narrowly? You may well have the power to do so. Just don't pretend it's a temporary state of affairs.

Obama, civil liberties, and security

Over at No Left Turns, Bill Voegeli offers a thoughtful response to my Philly Post piece decrying President Obama's signing of the NDAA. I suggested Obama had betrayed the cause of civil liberties; Voegeli sees it a bit differently. If I'm reading it correctly, his argument is two-fold:

• The now-bipartisan embrace of once-unthinkable security measures represents a considered response to the terror threat that the United States faces. "National security is a hard, grave business. Candidates who spoke as glibly as bloggers and editorialists about respecting boundaries regardless of the consequences become far less categorical when they're in important positions of national power and must confront just how horrific those consequences might be."

• Secondly, that we're at war, and sometimes during war the Constitution is set aside in order to save it. "Drawing the lines and rightly understanding the nation's exigencies is not merely a post-9/11 problem. The most famous example is Abraham Lincoln suspending the writ of habeus corpus - first by executive order, later according to congressional enactment - as secession and civil war consumed the nation in 1861. He defended his actions in a message to Congress: 'The whole of the laws which were required to be faithfully executed, were being resisted, and failing of execution, in nearly one-third of the States. Must they be allowed to finally fail of execution, even had it been perfectly clear, that by the use of the means necessary to their execution, some single law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen's liberty, that practically, it relieves more of the guilty, than of the innocent, should, to a very limited extent, be violated? To state the question more directly, are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the [president's] official oath [of office] be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law, would tend to preserve it?'"

Let's take the second point first. More than a decade after 9/11, it seems apparent to me that a "war" framework for dealing with terrorism badly serves the United States and its citizens. War, after all, is an emergency: Lincoln had a sense that the emergency would end when he set aside habeas corpus; FDR had the same sense when he gave Nazi saboteurs a kangaroo trial during 1942 and confined Japanese-Americans to prison camps.  Sooner or later, the war would be over—and eventually the excesses undertaken in the national defense would recede into a half-embarrassing history generally understood to be at odds with the longer, stronger narrative of American liberty. It's a pattern that's repeated itself over and over again throughout the country's history.

America has spent more days at war with Al Qaeda than we did enmeshed in the Civil War and World War II combined. There is no end in sight. I have no reason to believe that the "emergency" represented by the War on Terror will end in my lifetime. So the "temporary" excesses—the setting aside of certain Constitutional safeguards—doesn't appear to be temporary at all. It's the new normal, one that is a clear departure from 200 years of an American journey toward greater-liberty.

What's remarkable about the NDAA and its expanded detention powers for government is that it comes at a time when Al Qaeda has essentially been defeated. To use Voegeli's Civil War reference, it's as though General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appamattox—and then the federal government decided it was really, really time to get serious about cracking down on insurgents. And it's a further indication that the war will go on forever, even when the men and group that initiated have vanished from both the earth and operational effectiveness.

But there are, clearly, still bad men out there who will try to do bad things to America. Given the current dynamics of American politics and law, as long as there is even one non-state terrorist attempting to harm the United States, we remain at war. Our laws and policies—our Constitution—can be held hostage by a few people with bad intent. That's where we're at. Whatever the deficiencies of the "crime" approach to terrorism, it at least didn't trap us in an unending emergency. To use an old trope: "Tell me how this ends." If you can, I might be more sympathetic to the excesses, knowing eventually they'll end. But nobody really can, and I'm not.

Which leads us to the behavior of the political establishment.

One might see the bipartisan consensus for the NDAA as proof of its wisdom. But one might also take a look at how political incentives have developed since 9/11, where even unsuccessful attack attempts have been used as proof of a president's supposed weakness. The president and Congress have decided they have more to lose, politically, by not being "tough" than they do by being steadfast about America's history of civil liberties. That, of course, means they've judged the American public is more interested in safety than civil liberties.

At some point, I guess, I have to accept that. My viewpoint on these matters probably isn't the majority viewpoint.

But I remain irritated, to say the least, that there are many people in American politics who see creeping tyranny in EPA regulations but are happy to support indefinite detention. Kim Jong-Il, after all, isn't reviled because he made North Koreans fill out paperwork on toxic chemical spills.

And given the eternal nature of the War on Terror, we shouldn't fool ourselves that we're on the same path of liberty that Americans have imperfectly been trodding for a couple of centuries. We're choosing a slightly different path, in the name of security. Most of us might not even notice the difference in our daily lives—we probably won't see the differences except in occasional Pulitzer-winning newspaper stories about how "other" people have been made to suffer—but it will be different all the same. We're not setting aside the Constitution and law in order to save them; we're simply setting them aside.

Maybe we'll be safer. We'll certainly be less free. When the next attack succeeds—somewhere, eventually, it will—the laws will be tightened even further. And so on and so forth, with cries of "freedom" escaping our lips the whole time, even as we forget what we once thought that word meant.

Updated: I misspelled Voegeli's name in the first edition of this post. My apologies.

Max Boot bemoans our lost victory in Afghanistan

Boot is so exasperated with those weak appeasers in the Obama Administration:

One of the most discomfiting aspects of the forthcoming U.S. pullout from Iraq is what it portends for Afghanistan. In a nutshell, it appears more and more likely that Obama will pull out of Afghanistan too, even though the war there is far from won. Thus we read in the Wall Street Journal today: “The Obama administration is exploring a shift in the military’s mission in Afghanistan to an advisory role as soon as next year, senior officials said, a move that would scale back U.S. combat duties well ahead of their scheduled conclusion at the end of 2014.” 

 The Afghan army is capable but still needs time to develop. If we pull out too fast the army could fracture and the entire country could be plunged into a civil war which would, among other possible consequences, allow Afghan territory to once again become a haven for Al Qaeda and other transnational terrorist groups. 

That seems a high price to pay for the president to be able to campaign for reelection on a promise of having ended George W. Bush’s wars. In reality these are America’s wars and they cannot be ended with a unilateral pullout—our premature departure simply risks handing an unearned victory to our enemies.

Maybe Max Boot should contemplate the possibility that we've already won in Afghanistan.

Do I mean that Afghanistan has become a Jeffersonian democracy, or that the Taliban have been decisively routed? No. But those weren't the goals of the war when we started. We invaded the country with the hope of destroying or capturing the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, and to punish the Taliban regime for harboring those perpetrators.

Mission. Accomplished.

Boot's second paragraph—"The Afghan army is capable but still needs time to develop"—could've been written any time in the last 10 years, and I predict it will be equally applicable 10 years from now. In certain respects, Afghanistan as a nation-state is a lost cause. So the wisest thing to do is for the United States to invest its diminishing resources in ways that offer our optimal chances at security.

I'm not sure there's enough original Al Qaeda left to have a "haven" anywhere, but the job of the United States isn't to keep Al Qaeda from existing—an impossible task—but to suppress, discourage, and defend against Al Qaeda's attacks. Given that the "homeland" terror attacks of recent years have been small-bore operations—one guy with explosive underwear, one guy leaving an SUV in Times Square, and one self-radicalized Army officer attacking his colleagues—there's very little to suggest that Al Qaeda needs a whole country as a haven, or that mooring of tens of thousands of troops in that country is  a wise use of our resources.

We have been in Afghanistan a decade. We have accomplished the vast majority of what we'll probably accomplish there. And it's not like we're ceding the ground to terrorists: Obama plans to leave counterterror operations in place—there's just going to be a whole lot less nation-building. It's an imperfect ending, but it may be the best we can hope for.

Does terrorism justify exempting the Defense Department from budget cuts?

That's what Bentley Rayburn suggests at National Review today:

Congress should remember that we are still facing very real threats. Today, we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fighting al-Qaeda across the globe using intelligence and special-operations forces backed up with Predator drones and other modern technologies. We’re also protecting the nascent democratic movements in Libya and elsewhere, expanding operations to hot spots like Yemen, and rotating home a fighting force worn down by a decade of repeated, extended combat deployments.

Terror attacks are on the rise as the threat spreads around the globe — according to the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 2,534 terror attacks worldwide in 2010, nearly triple the 945 recorded five years ago.

I found that last paragraph interesting, so I went to the National Counterterrorism Center website. I couldn't verify Rayburn's numbers, but I did find a couple of other very interesting charts in the NTC's report on 2010 activity.

Like this one:

And this one:

So: Barely any non-military Americans were killed in terrorist incidents around the world in 2010—and 13 of the 15 who did die, died in Afghanistan. (One in Iraq, one in Uganda.) No private-citizen Americans were kidnapped.

Which is to say: It sure doesn't look like Americans are the targets of all this rising terroristic activity.

That's not to say that the United States doesn't have a legitimate concern with this trend. And these numbers don't include uniformed U.S. personnel who died in terror attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the charts above raise the question of whether rising terroristic activity "worldwide" is an actual threat to American security. That's the metric that should determine defense spending priorities: A civil war in the Congo—tragic as that is—doesn't necessarily count.

But the arguments by Rayburn and Max Boot and other hawks rest on the presumption that the United States military should remain a globe-spanning colossus. That's an issue that should be on the table. Our interests—and our security—doesn't stop at our borders. But neither are they infinite. Certainly our resources aren't. Nor should the defense budget be.

John Yoo's red herring

The former Bush Administration torture advocate thinks Obama is a wuss for actually trying to justify the assassination of an American citizen:

It may be that the Obama administration thinks that U.S. citizens who join the enemy are entitled to special rules — like those that apply to the police, instead of those that apply to the military. But this would be wrong too. As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week, ever since the Civil War, our national leaders and the Supreme Court have agreed that a citizen who joins the enemy must suffer the consequences of his belligerency, with the same status as that of an alien enemy. Think of the incentives that the strange Obama hybrid rule creates. Our al-Qaeda enemy will want to recruit American agents, who will benefit from criminal-justice rules that give them advantages in carrying out operations against us (like the right to remain silent, to Miranda and lawyers, to a speedy jury trial, etc.). Our troops and agents in the field may well hesitate in the field, as they will not be able to tell in the heat of the moment whether an enemy is American or not.

I call BS. Nobody—nobody—disputes the right of American troops to engage enemy combatants in battle on an actual battlefield. If that's what Yoo means by the heat of the moment—and it seems so—then there's no dispute. If Anwar al-Awlaki had been charging against American troops in Afghanistan, AK-47 in hand, there would be no debate to be had. The chance that an American soldier will hesitate in that moment, wondering if the enemy is an American citizen, is virtually nil. And Yoo—once again—is disingenuous for suggesting so.

The debate comes in murkier areas. If reports are to be believed, al-Awlaki was tracked by American drones for weeks while officials waited to get a clear shot at him that wouldn't result in massive collateral damage. That's admirable if true, but it's also something less than a "heat of the moment" situation: American officials were able to make a considered decision to assassinate the man. And because of that, it's more than fair to question the process by which al-Awlaki was targeted.

But this is the world Yoo inhabits. There are precious few ticking time bombs, yet they always justify extreme action where considered processes might serve Americans better.

Where is the 'battleground' anyway?

Mario Loyola knows:

For purposes of combat actions such as the targeted killing of Awlaki, the battleground in our war against al-Qaeda is not “everywhere.” It is in those few countries that either willingly or unwillingly provide significant safe havens for al-Qaeda. Yemen is in the first rank of that group of countries, along with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia. 

All I can say is: Germany, we're coming for you. London, you might see some Predator drones in your skies. Toronto, get ready for some Hellfire missiles.

Suicide Bombers May Not Always Hate Freedom

These findings shouldn't be all that surprising. It's human nature: People don't like outsiders coming into their country and running things. Careful diplomatic talk about sovereignty isn't all that useful if people in Kabul or Baghdad see that it's actually American troops keeping order; that's going to rub folks the wrong way.

That doesn't mean America never fights abroad. But if we want to be greeted as liberators, we should liberate and leave. And if we don't think ahead of time that's possible -- after an honest accounting of the facts instead of Rumsfeldian apathy to the concept -- then we need to calculate whether such an intervention is really likely to be worth it. In most cases, it probably won't.

The ACLU and Jonah Goldberg's Assassination Straw Man

Jonah Goldberg's debating partner.

Toward the end of an otherwise-modest column on the government's plan to assassinate an American citizen affiliated with Al Qaeda, Jonah Goldberg stacks the deck:

Some civil libertarians seem to think we can never, ever kill an American citizen without a trial by jury (and perhaps not even then). That would have been silly during the days of conventional warfare. Now it's plain crazy.

Perhaps "some" civil libertarians believe that, but it's not the position of the ACLU, which has brought the lawsuit challenging the government's plan. In its complaint (PDF) asking for an injunction, the organization acknowledges there are times when due process will be skipped:

Outside of armed conflict, both the Constitution and international law
prohibit targeted killing except as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific, and
imminent threats of death or serious physical injury. The summary use of force is lawful
in these narrow circumstances only because the imminence of the threat makes judicial
process infeasible.

In other words, you can kill your enemy on the battlefield, when he's also trying to kill you. Not even the ACLU is against that.

That's not what the government is doing. It is reserving to itself the right to kill an American citizen who -- for all we know -- might be sitting peacefully in a kitchen somewhere in Yemen, presumably able to be captured if he's spotted. And that's where, at the very least, the government wanders into gray area. The ACLU, noting that the "right to life" is fundamental for U.S. citizens under the Constitution, wants that area to be a little less gray.

The government’s refusal to disclose the standard by which it determines
to target U.S. citizens for death independently violates the Constitution: U.S. citizens
have a right to know what conduct may subject them to execution at the hands of their
own government. Due process requires, at a minimum, that citizens be put on notice of
what may cause them to be put to death by the state.

The weird thing is, that's not so different from Goldberg's own conclusion. "So, let's have Congress and the president come up with some clear, public rules," he writes. "Better to start the debate over an easy case than a hard one." Sure. So why knock people who share your position? Can there never be a cease-fire in the war against liberals?

I didn't draw Mohammed today

I've got nothing against blasphemy -- in fact, I kind of love it.

I love "South Park," enjoyed "The Last Temptation of Christ" more as a novel than as a movie, think "Dogma" is overrated but enjoyable and, generally, like to see sacred cows nudged a little bit. I think it's wonderful, essential and necessary that we can do such poking in America -- and it pisses me off, frankly, when the "South Park" guys come under threat for depicting Mohammed. Or, looking abroad, when European cartoonists face violence, threats and censorship for doing the same.

Still, I didn't draw Mohammed today. And I won't be publishing any of the cartoons. At least, not for now.

Why? Simple. I have Muslim friends and acquaintances -- at least one of whom, I know, is very offended when Mohammed is drawn or otherwise depicted. Not to the point of threatening or undertaking violence, thank goodness, but still: It's an act that wounds her.

And that, I think, beyond strength in the face of censorship and threats, is part of "Draw Mohammed Day" is supposed to be about: Offense.

Some more hawkish and conservative types have pointed out -- rightly -- that Comedy Central, "South Park" and other American institutions have skewered Christianity for years without facing death threats. But I can't help but notice that many of the people who make that observation have also gotten the vapors -- or are closely allied with those who get the vapors -- about having their religious sensibilities trampled upon. And that many of those people are very, very gleeful about the chance to offend Muslims en masse today.

So yeah, there's a double standard. But I suspect the double standard goes both ways.

Me? I admittedly feel more comfortable blaspheming Christianity because, well, Christianity is mine to blaspheme: I grew up in it, was immersed in it and (yes) fell away from it. Even at a distance of nearly a decade, its rhythms and habits are still etched in my bones. And my own adventures in blasphemy were part of rebelling against a culture that had dominated my outlook and behavior.

But Mohammed was never my prophet. Between that and the fact of my friends' sensibilities, a day devoted to angering his followers seems ... rude. It seems too easy to me, even a little bullying, to blaspheme against somebody else's god.

And I'm weird: I've always felt my principles must be balanced and shaped by the impact that they have on real people. Right now, I don't think I have enough cause to hurt my friends.

Make no mistake: I still find the threats and censorship despicable. There may come a time when I feel that committing a little blasphemy against Islam's sacred cows is necessary. That day isn't today. I won't draw Mohammed.