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10/09/2003: "My War on “War”"

As much as I am a fan of the First Amendment, I’m proposing a Constitutional amendment to limit it. No, it’s not the perennial Big-C Conservative ban on flag burning, although I do believe my proposal will help bolster real patriotism. Here it is: “Congress shall make no law using the term “war” to describe a government response to criminal acts by restive groups pursuing a social agenda.” The major benefit of this new amendment would be reserve the term “war,” a term actually used in the Constitution, for what it really is: military action to defeat armed aggression by foreign powers. It’s important because it prevents abuse of the Constitutional provisions related to making war, preserving it as a truly exceptional event. Otherwise, war can be used as a justification for a broad range of inappropriate action. The prevailing view seems to be that 9/11 is equivalent to, say, Pearl Harbor. Certainly the death toll was horrendous in both cases, but these events were otherwise enormously different. Pearl Harbor was an attack by conventional military forces that represented the first of thousands of large-scale military battles. The epic scale multi-year effort to defeat an enormously powerful coalition of several of the most powerful nations on earth made it a very special event in American history. Comparisons to this event should not be made lightly, lest we demean its significance. Even while 9/11 was a heinous crime, calling it the initial battle in a “war” is a stretch. Dissident fringe social elements have existed throughout American history. Unable to achieve their aims by convincing voters, they have often resorted to terror as a futile and misguided shortcut. In the broader scheme of things, 9/11 is merely a particularly noteworthy example of the otherwise permanent background noise of social dissonance. While the event was exceptional in the scope of the damage inflicted, a scope typically achievable only with military attack, it otherwise has few similarities to a military action. A better characterization of 9/11 is that it was particularly effective only due to the one-time juxtaposition of many factors. The main factor was the inherent assumption underlying virtually all US civil security procedures that a perpetrator would not sacrifice his life. This assumption enabled the enormous destructive potential of fully-fueled airliners to be realized on a one-time basis. The “success” of 9/11 has been the biggest factor in reducing the chances that an event of similar scale will ever happen again, by ensuring a very thorough job in purging the “no suicide” assumption from security procedures. The bottom line is that it is dangerous for democracy to let government officials connect the eternal background noise of murderous fringe elements to the exceptional situation that war represents to a democracy.