Bush’s ‘war’ will prove expensive
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Bush’s ‘war’ will prove expensive |
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Posted by Charley Reese on February 09, 19102 at 19:17:52:
Charley Reese: Bush’s ‘war’ will prove expensive
Published Thursday, February 07, 2002 10:17 AM CST
The war against terrorism is going splendidly, President Bush says. In the long
run, that will be proven false. The reason is quite simple: You can’t eliminate
terrorism by eliminating individual terrorists. The death of every terrorist
creates new terrorists. As long as the reasons exist that spawned terrorism in
the first place, new generations will take up the fight.
I hesitate to bring up something that is apparently so inconsequential to most
Americans as the Constitution. It does, however, forbid a president from
unilaterally committing the nation to war. Without a formal declaration of war
by Congress, we are not at war, even if our military forces are engaged in
combat. Therefore, the president’s war is illegitimate.
No one, including me, objects to, or would have any reason to object to,
America’s military forces hunting down and killing the people who played any
part in the attack Sept. 11.
That should properly be called a campaign against terrorism. If your ships are
attacked by pirates, you don’t need Congress’ permission to order the Navy to
sink the pirates.
But the president’s use of the term “war” was deliberate, and under the
pretense we are at war, he is greatly expanding the power of government. The
new laws passed by Congress in the name of fighting terrorism pose a greater
danger to the civil liberties of American citizens than to the operations of
terrorists. Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies,
once created, never die.
The president is also asking for many billions of dollars to bolster our
defense spending and for homeland defense. Does it not occur to anyone else but
me to wonder why, since the federal government has been spending close to $2
trillion a year for some time now, we are so vulnerable? It’s not as if the
Defense Department has to start from scratch to build the forces necessary to
deal with terrorism, nor have we been defenseless at home, as one might imagine
from the current rhetoric.
The answer, of course, is that much of what the government spends is poorly
spent. By that I mean it is spent on stuff that does not accomplish the
mission — or does so at an excessive cost. Americans should highly prize the
few thousand (that might be an overly optimistic estimate) dead members of al-
Qaida, as it cost us $1 billion a month to kill them.
Granted, our politicians (and, indeed, we ourselves) don’t like American
casualties, but if we are going to use expensive carriers and airplanes and
million-dollar-a-pop missiles to take out 60 or 70 bad guys holed up in some
camp, we’d better damned sure have deep pockets.
It is, to be blunt, stupid to talk about homeland defense without tightening
our borders. The immigration laws and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service are a disgrace and have been for years. Yet the president dances around
this question, I suppose, lest he offend his friend, the president of Mexico.
If you can’t keep illegal immigrants out, you can’t keep terrorists out; if you
can’t track people who come in on a visa, you can’t track terrorists who come
in on a visa.
But most importantly, unless you change the policies that create terrorism, you
will never rid yourself of it. It is an insult to our intelligence to say that
people hate us because we are free. They hate us because our policies are all
too often seen as cruel and unjust.
There is logic to terrorism. As long as we suffer no consequences from our
policies that cause pain to others, we are unlikely to change them. The task of
the terrorists is, to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton, to help us “feel their
pain.”