War Without End

Dear Mr. President,
Congress may as well go ahead and approve the Pentagon’s request for $200 million to upgrade Guantanamo. Looks like we’ll need it for a long time to come, maybe even till Kingdom Come, as my mother used to say. In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday, assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Michael Sheehan, said that the War on Terror was likely to continue at least 10 to 20 years (today’s NYT, p. A6). Al Qaeda, it turns out, hasn’t really been snuffed out, our $100+ billion a year intelligence bureaucracy is finding new Al Qaedas popping up everywhere. Nobody on the committee had a problem with that or with Sheehan’s estimate of 10 to 20 more years of war; they were only there to determine if the old 2001 “authorization to use military force” needed to be updated since none of these new Al Qaedas are actually connected to the 9/11 attacks. The Pentagon wants no changes to the statute—“it suits us very well,” Mr. Sheehan said. Islamist militants like the Nusra Front in Syria, one group of Syrian rebel fighters, for example, is a “Qaeda affiliate.” “So we can expect drone strikes into Syria if we find Al Qaeda there?” McCain asked Robert Taylor, the Pentagon’s general counsel, also at the hearing. Mr. Taylor declined to speculate. McCain came close to stripping the mask off the War on Terror, calling it “a war on Muslim extremists and Al Qaeda and others.” It turns out there doesn’t need to be a real connection to the old Al Qaeda, just an ideological one (and the ideology seems to be Islam itself). There was no discussion about why we’re doing this or the morality of it; the only objection came from Sen. Angus King (I-ME) who pointed out that the original 2001 statute said nothing about “associated forces” of Al Qaeda. The administration’s theory, he said, had “essentially rewritten the Constitution… because it was up to the Congress to declare war.” All I got to say is, that’s not the only thing in the Constitution your administration has rewritten, Mr. President. How about indefinite detention? The right of habeas corpus? The 1^st and 4^th amendments? What about the Geneva Conventions and all the international laws and treaties we’ve broken under your regime? Just because you call yourself a Democrat doesn’t mean you’re one. And just because you’re a Nobel Peace Prize winner doesn’t mean you’re a man of peace, either. Power corrupts and your corruption is shown in many ways but especially in the ways of war.