CC's War on Logic
Our good friends over at CC, taking their cue from your President, invoke the image of 9-11 (yes, picture and all), then proclaim that "we are in fact at war."
Not, apparently, a war like this:
war (n.)
A concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious: the war against acid rain. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000
But, in fact, a war like this:
War\, n. 1. A contest between nations or states, carried on by force, whether for defence, for revenging insults and redressing wrongs, for the extension of commerce, for the acquisition of territory, for obtaining and establishing the superiority and dominion of one over the other, or for any other purpose; armed conflict of sovereign powers; declared and open hostilities.
Note: As war is the contest of nations or states, it always implies that such contest is authorized by the monarch or the sovereign power of the nation. A war begun by attacking another nation, is called an offensive war, and such attack is aggressive. War undertaken to repel invasion, or the attacks of an enemy, is called defensive. Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998
CC further explains that this "War" is solely against "a radical strain of Islamofascism that uses terror as its chief weapon". Then they ask... "Any questions?"
And I've got a few. First, if this is a real live war, which "nation or state" are we at war against? Also, why aren't the enemies we capture prisoners of war? Why is it that in this War we don't care about the Geneva Convention?
Also, if the bombing of an American building by a radical, anti-American, non-governmental group calls for a literal WAR against that group, not action by American and international justice systems, what should we have done about this?
Attack the Michigan Militia with tanks and napalm?
Finally, if this "War" is solely against "a radical strain of Islamofascism that uses terror as its chief weapon". How can the military effort in Iraq be part of the "War on Terror". Wasn't Iraq, like North Korea, just a troublesome country ruled by a psychopath who tortured his own people? (Or maybe Saddam didn't really torture his people... I mean, was it really "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death"?) Was Saddam bent on radical Islamic worldwide domination? Wasn't it Saddam's very opposition to such a worldview that caused Rumsfeld to shake his hand and give him cash in the 80's.
Sorry, CC. Pictures of explosions do not change the fact that, according to your own definition, there has been no true justification for "real live war" on "a radical strain of Islamofascism"(a.k.a. "Terror") since Afghanistan.
1 Comments:
Do you not think the art of war can, on occassion, evolve from the traditional sense of the term? The wars of yore involved maces, lances, the phalanx, redcoats, and man o' wars, and were fought between city-states, fiefs, clans, tribes, militias, nation-states, and finally countries. Haven't things changed? Isn't "the war on terror" just a handy moniker more like war in the traditional sense with traditional enemies rather than a war on an abstraction?
Also, how would you categorize al Qaeda? Is this subgroup akin to a country like Germany, or even unrecognized nations within countries like Tutsis and Hutus in Rawanda? For international law purposes, how would you treat them? As a criminal element?
--Bob Paulson
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