“Purposefully and Materially” Undermining Democracy & the War on Terror
Recent efforts by Congress to develop a mechanism by which to try unlawful enemy combatants empowers the executive branch to indefinitely detain suspects who have “…purposefully and materially” supported hostilities against the United States. The efforts still fall short of restoring the United States’ credibility as a Just democracy and the bastion of hope to the oppressed people of the world.
The problem is that these very same oppressed people, often misinformed and manipulated by their own governments and powerful organizations like Al-Qaeda, make up the bulk of the support networks for insurgent and terrorist groups. As long as their own governments oppress them, our enemies can manipulate them for support. The last thing the US should do is give these people, who have no historic experience or inherent faith in a representative form of government, a legitimate reason to fear us too.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the consequence of most of the actions taken by the Bush Administration since launching the war on terror. Our government now advocates torturing enemies, exempting certain persons from habeas corpus protections, and submitting them to hidden commissions for judgment and the possibility of the death penalty. It advocates warrantless surveillance of US citizens, and sees military violence as the first resort for dealing with the primarily socio-political challenge of terrorism and insurgency—a situation especially complicated by significant religious and ethnic disputes and historic geopolitical interactions.
The President and his supporters advocate that these abuses of human dignity and rights are an appropriate response to the extraordinary threat that we face from modern terrorism. Even though the extent of the destruction and death possible today is terrifying, does that warrant undermining the very principles of the US constitution, conventions on Human Rights, and basic democratic values? After all, do the Geneva Conventions authorize torture and inhumane treatment for citizens and combatants of warring “recognized” states that might resort to an attack using nuclear weapons?
These flawed policies are not going to affect the active insurgents very much because the extremists only make up a relatively small portion of the population, and a protective layer of direct supporters surrounds them. The largest populations—numbering in the millions throughout the Middle East—who are only loosely affiliated with the extremists consist of sympathizers and relatively neutral people just trying to go on with their lives. We stand to gain much more intelligence and support from this group by ensuring human rights and justice, than from the handful of hard corps terrorists or their direct supporters we may actually catch. Conversely, every time we maltreat a suspect who is not a terrorist we undermine our position and propel more support directly to the enemy.
Some very bad people out there should be captured or killed as quickly as possible, but not at the expense of our civil liberties and constitutional rights. In a terrorist insurgency, the strategy is more like policing than war. Security and justice are paramount. If the Geneva Conventions do not clearly articulate protections for “unlawful enemy combatants”, it is because the people who drafted them did not anticipate the extent to which this group would play in future wars. Perhaps it is time to amend the conventions and provide that protection. For now, in the absence of those amendments, the US should retake the moral high ground by establishing the broadest protections possible and demonstrate to the world that we can back our lofty rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and justice with tangible action.
In the end, you can sometimes fight fire with fire, but you can never fight terrorism and insurgency with more terror. If you want to take away the support of an oppressed people from the terrorists and insurgents, you have to offer them something better than oppression and fear.
They already have that.
The problem is that these very same oppressed people, often misinformed and manipulated by their own governments and powerful organizations like Al-Qaeda, make up the bulk of the support networks for insurgent and terrorist groups. As long as their own governments oppress them, our enemies can manipulate them for support. The last thing the US should do is give these people, who have no historic experience or inherent faith in a representative form of government, a legitimate reason to fear us too.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the consequence of most of the actions taken by the Bush Administration since launching the war on terror. Our government now advocates torturing enemies, exempting certain persons from habeas corpus protections, and submitting them to hidden commissions for judgment and the possibility of the death penalty. It advocates warrantless surveillance of US citizens, and sees military violence as the first resort for dealing with the primarily socio-political challenge of terrorism and insurgency—a situation especially complicated by significant religious and ethnic disputes and historic geopolitical interactions.
The President and his supporters advocate that these abuses of human dignity and rights are an appropriate response to the extraordinary threat that we face from modern terrorism. Even though the extent of the destruction and death possible today is terrifying, does that warrant undermining the very principles of the US constitution, conventions on Human Rights, and basic democratic values? After all, do the Geneva Conventions authorize torture and inhumane treatment for citizens and combatants of warring “recognized” states that might resort to an attack using nuclear weapons?
These flawed policies are not going to affect the active insurgents very much because the extremists only make up a relatively small portion of the population, and a protective layer of direct supporters surrounds them. The largest populations—numbering in the millions throughout the Middle East—who are only loosely affiliated with the extremists consist of sympathizers and relatively neutral people just trying to go on with their lives. We stand to gain much more intelligence and support from this group by ensuring human rights and justice, than from the handful of hard corps terrorists or their direct supporters we may actually catch. Conversely, every time we maltreat a suspect who is not a terrorist we undermine our position and propel more support directly to the enemy.
Some very bad people out there should be captured or killed as quickly as possible, but not at the expense of our civil liberties and constitutional rights. In a terrorist insurgency, the strategy is more like policing than war. Security and justice are paramount. If the Geneva Conventions do not clearly articulate protections for “unlawful enemy combatants”, it is because the people who drafted them did not anticipate the extent to which this group would play in future wars. Perhaps it is time to amend the conventions and provide that protection. For now, in the absence of those amendments, the US should retake the moral high ground by establishing the broadest protections possible and demonstrate to the world that we can back our lofty rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and justice with tangible action.
In the end, you can sometimes fight fire with fire, but you can never fight terrorism and insurgency with more terror. If you want to take away the support of an oppressed people from the terrorists and insurgents, you have to offer them something better than oppression and fear.
They already have that.
1 Comments:
The last thing the US should do is give these people, who have no historic experience or inherent faith in a representative form of government, a legitimate reason to fear us too.
Well put and an excellent observation.
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