Awkward Questions 3: Was Biden Almost Right?
Lest you think we were concerned only with Senatorial grand-standing and broad historical forces (see Awkward Questions 1 and 2), the last Awkward Question raised during Gonzalez's testimony yesterday falls squarely on the President and his shill's shoulders. In a sudden fit of logic, Senator Joseph Biden asked Gonzalez 'How will we know when this war is actually over?' The Attorney General responded: 'When Al Qaeda is destroyed', and then admitted this outcome would be nearly impossible to determine, because Al Qaeda is barely an organization in the first place, and, though he didn't say this, because terrorism isn't exactly a movement to begin with. Which is why the AG settled on a dodge: 'whenever that may be, we know it's not today'.
Biden, aspiring Presidential nominee that he is, unsurprisingly refused to take his question to its logical conclusion. He preferred instead to focus on what he sees as a proliferation of terrorist groups, rather than on the irrationality of calling all of this a war. But he put his finger on something long enough to smoke the administration out. This is not a war not only because there is no state, nor even an easily identified organization against which to fight, and not only because the threat is vastly overblown by Bush and company. It is also not a war because, as the AG put it, it has no future, only a present. There is no clear strategy, no identifiable end, no enemy to vanquish, only a climate of permanent crisis to maintain. For all of its desire to turn 9/11 into a defining, historical moment, this administration has utterly failed to make history. Instead, it lurches from crisis to crisis, struggling to maintain its power on the basis of permanent emergency rather than proper legitimacy. It substitutes fear for consent. That the Bush administration has no answer to the question, 'when will the war on terror be over,' and prefers war to peace, is in this sense not a sign of strength but of weakness. A return to normality would expose a disoriented and fumbling president, with no clear sense of purpose and few political allies.
Biden, aspiring Presidential nominee that he is, unsurprisingly refused to take his question to its logical conclusion. He preferred instead to focus on what he sees as a proliferation of terrorist groups, rather than on the irrationality of calling all of this a war. But he put his finger on something long enough to smoke the administration out. This is not a war not only because there is no state, nor even an easily identified organization against which to fight, and not only because the threat is vastly overblown by Bush and company. It is also not a war because, as the AG put it, it has no future, only a present. There is no clear strategy, no identifiable end, no enemy to vanquish, only a climate of permanent crisis to maintain. For all of its desire to turn 9/11 into a defining, historical moment, this administration has utterly failed to make history. Instead, it lurches from crisis to crisis, struggling to maintain its power on the basis of permanent emergency rather than proper legitimacy. It substitutes fear for consent. That the Bush administration has no answer to the question, 'when will the war on terror be over,' and prefers war to peace, is in this sense not a sign of strength but of weakness. A return to normality would expose a disoriented and fumbling president, with no clear sense of purpose and few political allies.
1 Comments:
This is not a war not only because there is no state, nor even an easily identified organization against which to fight, and not only because the threat is vastly overblown by Bush and company. It is also not a war because, as the AG put it, it has no future, only a present. There is no clear strategy, no identifiable end, no enemy to vanquish, only a climate of permanent crisis to maintain.
It seems to me that the reason terrorism is so widely accepted as war is because it seems to fit von Clausewitz's famous characterization of war as "politics by other means". That is, since al Qaeda is using terrorism to advance the cause of Islam in a geopolitical sense, just as empires throughout history have used traditional warfare to strengthen their own geopolitical standings, al Qaeda's terrorism amounts to warfare.
Now, terrorism can surely be employed for purely criminal purposes as opposed to ideological ones (e.g. the "narco-terrorism" of Latin America, intended mainly to shield drug lords and their operations). But the overwhelming majority of terrorism that the U.S. has encountered has been of the ideological/geopolitical variety, so it isn't much wonder that the Bush administration, Sen. Biden or any other politicians - or for that matter the voters who put them into office - would view terrorism through the Clausewitzian prism and craft their anti-terrorism rhetoric accordingly. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc. (Of course, it doesn't help matters any that Iran, an actual belligerent nation-state with geopolitical ambitions similar to al Qaeda's, has emerged as a major element in this conflict.)
Once both a nation's political class and its general public are convinced that they are in a war, any attempt to rethink this stance is likely if not certain to be roundly rejected as veiled defeatism if not outright treason. [Consider the so-called "war on drugs," which shows no sign of being called off despite turning out no better than alcohol Prohibition, simply because no mainstream politician who values his career wants to touch anything that smacks of surrender in such a (putatively) moral crusade. It seems to me that the same dynamic is taking hold vis-a-vis terrorism, where the stakes are at least as high and the disincentive to dissent at least as great.]
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