microwaviblerabbit said:
I agree that people need unalienable rights. I oppose the view that these rights should be removed during warfare, because without public skepticism, I feel the path becomes one to less and less of a democracy. You mentioned their use during the Second World War to round up Nazi sympathizers, they were also used to round up anyone of Japanese descent, remove all of their property and sell it off, and then place them in prison camps for the rest of the war. We are talking third or fourth generation as well, people rounded up basically on racist lines. For a war fought against this, its rather ironic. Note that being of German decent was not a threat, even if you had arrived in the last few years.
The Patriot Act is more than War Powers because it circumvents the necessary obstacles put in place by the founding fathers. The President has no power to declare war - that is up to Congress. As are the war powers, martial law, allocation of resources, etc. It transfers the power to a small group of mainly non-elected people. Kinda opposite to a democracy.
Yes the culture doesn't have an active military, because everyone is the military in waiting. If Alexander the Great, the British Empire, and the Armies of the USSR could not win in Afghanistan, why would the Americans do any better? Especially after training, funding and arming the Taliban for years to fight against forces remarkably similar to their own? The war was conducted poorly from day one. The borders are open, the supporters of the regime are still able to funnel funds, arms, and soldiers in, and the civilian casualties keep on rising. In a culture where blood feuds exist, and tribal laws that are steeped in centuries of tradition are adhered to - going in without teaching anyone these seems insane.
I agree the war would have been over quicker if the the government had declared martial law, though probably because they would have to pull troops to restore order to the country - I doubt many people would agree with martial law, especially with the freedom to bear arms being forcefully removed.
The founding fathers said that a standing army was a threat to democratic process. They fought against the largest standing army in the world at that point, backed by military belief and a hierarchy of power so they had a point. To remove the rights of citizens during a war is to make a change that is a struggle to reverse. Remember - income tax was only going to a short term measure until we won the Great War. Ninety-two years after the surrender of the Kaiser and its still going strong.
We'll have to agree to disagree on most of this since it will be going way off topic.
I will say that I do not consider things like what happened with the Japanese during World War II to be a bad thing in paticular. Yes it WAS racist, but then again the war itself was racist with Japan largely being motivated by their own feelings of superiority. We were dealing with a group of fanatics that spawned things like the Kamikaze.
Generally speaking people can look back and say "OMG that was wrong, those poor innocent Japanese people didn't do anything", well of course they didn't, they were all locked up, and when we let them go we pretty much demoralized their entire culture and changed them irrevocably. Anyone who had plans to do anything had no reason to fight anymore, and no
cause to sacrifice themselves for.
Post World War II a lot of morality came into being, a lot of which seemed to be based on the perception that it was a "good" war, and that we were totally moral in the way we fought (which we were not, we were the bigger bastards which is why we won). People came to believe that we could have won without doing things like that, and I don't think they are correct.
You'll notice that since World War II while our military has never actually been defeated, we also have not won any wars, and have generally been forced to retreat due to the inabillity to meet our goals with the morality we place on ourselves.
I think it was Heinlan who also pointed out that regulating warfare is one of the dumbest things that humans try and do, and we do not learn from the mistake. War is ugly, nasty, and all about "us against them". Absolute good and evil exist after the fact when the winners write about how great they were in the history books. Some good examples of earlier attempts to regulate warfare were Chivalry... which ended when instead of deciding to lose gracefully the English decided to pretty much end the hundred years war by slaughtering the flower of French knighthood with longbows... and Bushido which lead to the Samurai aristocricy being slaughtered at the hands of Peasants who decided not to engage under the same rules, indeed a lot of early Japanese martial arts were basically systems of "how to fight dirty against some dude with a sword". The knights and samurai are both lost to the mists of history. The same is going to happen to those of us who engage under modern systems of morality such as the "Geneva Convention" as we're seeing in battles where again and again insurgents defeat far superior military forces who refuse to fight to their full potential.
At any rate, this is getting far afield, we're going to have to agree to disagree.
Oh one last thing:
When it comes to the Russians in Afghanistan though, understand that the only reason they lost was because of "The Cold War". Morality wasn't so much a factor so much as politics and the overall strategy of the meta-engagement. The US was backing and training the guys the USSR was fighting against (The Taliban), while the USSR was forced to hold back becaue to go all out on Afghanistan would have caused the entire war to go hot, as their usage of that kind of force would have caused the US to do the same.
When it comes to us in Afghanistan, we really don't have a similar situation holding us back. Our entire problem is that our morals prevent us from engaging a culture like we did to defeat the Nazis (don't kid yourself, we wiped out tons of civilians and children, and then spend decades hunting down the remnants, Isreal was especially enthusiastic about the latter part... they had tons of Nazi hunters).
To put things into perspective the US military is powerful because of technology, we have weapons that can wipe out entire villages, towns, and cities easily. We have missles designed to collapse caves, tunnels, sewers, and similar things both to destroy structures on top of them and to collapse them on people hiding inside. We have things like neutron bombs that can wipe out everyone in a city while leaving the buildings and infrastructure intact.
We won't use these things, or engage on that level. Our current morality prevents us from doing what we did to wreck the Nazis (where we dropped more bombs on them than they did during the Blitz). We won't target factories, hospitals, farms and other structures to weaken the whole. We won't engage civilians to destroy a civilization. We have moral comunctions about engaging and disposing of forces akin to "the Volkssturm" or "Hitler Youth" both of which were dealt with during World War II.
When we go in with infantry with rifles, and fight insurgents with rifles for the most part we're operating on their level. When we fight like this our greater technology is of minimal benefit, and any edge we have from gizmos and training is equalled by the other guys being in their back yard. We are very much engaging like the Russians did, but because of limits we impose on ourselves more than anything.
The point here is that if the US just basically decided to win the war at any cost, and toss the entire morality system out the window, I'd imagine we could probably be done with Afghanistan inside of two months. On sure it would be reprehensible by the standards of modern morality and the death toll would be ridiculously high, with most of it being a slaughter since they really have no way to defend themselves against our best weapons (which is pretyt much why we developed them to begin with...).
Incidently had we invoked War Powers and the like, engaging on that level would be a lot easier. Part of the point of information control like we're discussing is to demonize the enemy and prepare the people to accept this kind of thing. That's where things like the human flesh lampshades came from... the idea is that in a real war you don't want your people to see the enemy as just another group of guys who might have gotten a bad rap, or enemy soldiers as desperate guys with families. When you allow the enemy to be humanized it makes them much more difficult to deal with.
I think one of our problems is that to the guys we're fighting we're a faceless evil threat, where we see them in very human terms. That kind of differance in viewpoint is part of what puts us at a disadvantage.
Ahh well, as I said, we're not going to agree, and this is getting way off subject.
... but as I said originally (or so I thought) I do agree with you about the patriot act. I believe in the nessecity of war powers, and will defend the need for them virtually to the ends of the earth. I do not however believe that they should be easy to get (even some of them) as the Patriot Act allows. I don't object to most of what "the Patriot Act" actually does, but I disagree with the nature of the act itself. I feel the goverment should either decide a crisis is worthy of invoking war powers or not... half measures defeat the purpose of all the safeguards in plaace.
