Ayman Who? Take Two

Is the current 'Lebanon crisis' part of the war on terror? President Bush seems to think so, or at least, would like it to be. That's why he has essentially given Israel a green light to rampage in southern Lebanon. So too, it would appear, does Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has been desperately trying to sustain Al-Qaeda's relevance against the greater interest being paid to insurgents in Iraq, and Hamas and Hezbollah. In his recent entreaty to Muslims around the world, Zawahiri, like Bush, attempted to cast the regional conflict as a global war. He said Al-Qaeda views "all the world as a battlefield open in front of us." Bush and Zawahiri's fantasy is, to a degree, mutual. Both would like to instrumentalize a regional conflict for their own gain. Bush's scandal-ridden war on terror, and now widely unpopular Iraq adventure, has been in need of some new sources of righteous indignation, which Bush seems to be seeking in the reflected glory of Israel's attack. The actual existence and staying power of Hezbollah appears to give more substance to Bush's war on terror than the practically non-existent face off with Al-Qaeda.

Zawahiri's gambit, however, is even more desperate. In little over a month, Hezbollah and to a lesser degree Hamas, have been able to garner far more popular support amongst Arabs and Muslims than Al-Qaeda ever has. As this editorial in the Mercury News notes, over the past days:

"Al-Qaida feels upstaged...At large demonstrations in the Arab world, many people were carrying pictures of Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah, celebrating him as a hero in ways that Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden never has been."

Indeed, Al-Qaeda's increasing irrelevance is reflected in Zawahiri's attempt to make his organization seem more inclusive: "religious puritanism and sectarianism were no longer topics; instead he called on ``all the weak'' to unite against ``injustice.'' Zawahiri was even forced to (rhetorically) abandon the narrow Wahhabi basis of Al-Qaeda, and to call for Sunni and Shia to join together in a holy war against the United States. These lame attempts at hoisting Al-Qaeda's wagon to the engines of more popular movements elsewhere are doomed to fail. Where Hezbollah and Hamas have made an effort to represent actual constituencies in an existing conflict, Al-Qaeda has done the opposite. And its political philosophy, such as it is, is oriented more towards spectacular media events and apocalyptic global visions, than political results and popular mobilization. Behind Al-Qaeda's once exaggerated sense of its own importance, is an awareness that the war on terror has moved on. Indeed, one interesting aspect of the war on terror itself is that today Al-Qaeda plays such an insignificant role.

AWOT Essay: The Impeachment Question Revisited

Last week one of our editors, Alex Gourevitch, debated Barbara Olshansky, Deputy Director for Litigation and Movement Support at the Center for Constitutional Rights, on the merits and demerits of impeachment. What follows are our conclusions about the problems with impeachment. This discussion is especially vital in the context of the pending mid-term elections, in which many liberals feel a positive rallying cry should be ‘impeach Bush’ (see Congressman Paul Koretz's news release and the political action committee created to impeach Bush).

The question that dominates the current impeachment debate is whether Bush’s actions amount to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ – the standard for impeachment. This is unfortunate because it is the least interesting and least important part of the debate. As Olshansky demonstrates in a book she co-wrote with David Lindorff, called The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office, ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ is a special, poorly defined category because it is not a purely legal concept. It is meant to refer to ‘political’ crimes in the sense that not all violations of the law are necessarily high crimes and misdemeanors, but some abuses of official power that may be technically legal are still so egregious that they amount to impeachable offenses. What this means is that impeachment is a specific tool of political accountability that requires using political judgment. Unfortunately, Olshansky and many other proponents of impeaching Bush and his cronies simply take this to mean that extremely unwise or incompetent decisions, like how Bush handled Katrina or how he approaches global warming, are equally fair game as grounds for impeachment. But political judgment is even more necessary not just in determining whether an act amounts to a crime, but to the prior question of whether impeachment is an appropriate tool for holding the administration to account. It is here that we think impeachment is seriously misguided, potentially undemocratic, and most likely to work against the very goals and ideals that impeachment’s proponents wish to uphold.

Impeachment might look like a good idea if we focus only on what Bush has done. He has been incompetent, mendacious and repeatedly violated the Constitution. The abuse and distortion of the powers of the Presidency is one of those high misdemeanors the Framers of the Constitution must have had in mind when they made impeachment as a checking tool. And since impeachment is a power of the most popular branch of government to hold the other two branches to account, it also appears as a very democratic method of dealing with the abuse of powers.

The problem with this argument is not that it is wrong but that it is only a narrow truth. It seizes on one aspect of a problem – President Bush’s actions – and substitutes it for an analysis of the broader reality. What are these broader facts? First, we are dealing not with a runaway President, but a runaway Presidency. We have discussed the ‘imperial presidency’ thesis before, but the point here isn’t that the American presidency as an institution was chugging along just fine, within proper boundaries, until Bush appeared and turned it into a tyranny. In fact, as numerous historians and political scientists (like Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Lowi respectively) have observed, the 20th century has been the century of the American presidency. The office has been aggrandized, accreted expansive powers during both peacetime and war, and enlarged its scope well beyond anything consistent with the original idea of ‘separation of powers’. As Jules Lobel noted in 1989, the scope of legal emergency powers alone extends to more than 470 remarkably broad privileges.

Second, the involution of the separation of powers is not something that happened by presidential usurpation alone. In fact, Congress has repeatedly legislated away numerous powers to the Presidency, including passing laws that explicitly erode civil rights, and Congress has abjectly failed to exercise its ‘checking and balancing’ function in crucial moments. While we have discussed some of this before, consider a few examples. First, this Congress alone has passed: the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the PATRIOT Act, PATRIOT II, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq, the Detainee Treatment Act, each of which delegated powers to the President or gave him close to carte blanche to use the American military as he saw fit. Nor has it been just this Congress. Much of the PATRIOT Act built on precedents established by the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. And it was the Democrats, controlling both the legislature and executive in 1978, who passed the horrible Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created the courts that have essentially rubber-stamped every executive request for surveillance privileges. This is but a brief list of a long-standing historical abdication of power and responsibility by Congress.

The Supreme Court has likewise been complicit in this trend. While a few cases in which the Court checks the President, like Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer, are perhaps better known, the real trend has been for the Court to discover many ‘implied powers’ in the Constitution that grant the President power to suspend certain rights during ‘national emergencies’. In other words, both the judicial and legislative branches have participated in the aggrandizement and broadening of the executive branch.

Third, and very briefly, there is the strange malaise of the two party system, in which neither party is able consistently to capture a secure popular mandate, nor develop an inspiring political project. This has weakened the Democrats’ ability to serve as a meaningful opposition, and leads both parties to substitute the politics of personalities for ideas.

These three trends – executive expansion, congressional delegation/judicial accommodation and two-party stagnation – well predate Bush, and they will persist after him. They also provide us with a way of understanding the political environment within which we must judge the call for impeachment, and point to a number of problems with it as a political instrument.

The most straightforward problem with impeachment is that it is a political process that takes a legal form. This means it deals entirely with the choices, actions and motivations of specific individuals, and works according to a standard of individual responsibility. This makes it very ill-suited to dealing with structural problems. By its very nature, impeachment is not a medium through which The People can exercise their power over structural problems or reflect upon the institutional arrangements. They can only hold specific individuals to account.

Proponents of impeachment counter that the People are still acting through their representatives in Congress. This is what is supposed to make impeachment a democratic tool, unlike judicial review by the Supreme Court. At present, however, it is difficult to say that representatives are truly representative. There is a great deal of disenchantment with the two-party system, and, as noted, neither party succeeds in laying claim to a popular mandate. A great number of Americans do not see their representatives as extensions of their own will. It is therefore much more likely that an impeachment proceeding, rather than being a democratic activity, will be something more like a political drama that unfolds before a relatively passive citizenry. One can even imagine that impeachment would only further alienate the People from their representatives, because it rehabilitates the politics of Anybody But Bush. This failed electoral strategy of the 2004 election attempted to substitute collective antipathy towards Bush for the development of a set of compelling, shared ideas. It failed to inspire, and substituted a logic of short-term political gain for long-term political thinking.

It is of course possible that impeachment could indirectly expand public debate and lead to more reflective thinking about our political institutions. After all, an impeachment question always forces us to think anew about what the Constitution means, and we would be asked to consider what the Constitution prescribes in relation to Bush’s actions. However, the far more likely effect would be to narrow public debate. Given the individualized nature of the central question – Did Bush Commit High Crimes and Misdemeanors – the public debate would likely be dominated by a circumscribed set of questions such as: ‘Did Bush lie?’ ‘Did he know he lied?’ ‘How bad was the lie?’ ‘Did he violate the constitution?’ ‘Did he know he was violating the constitution?’. Worse yet, impeachment could very easily give the public the wrong impression about the source of our political problems. The premise of an impeachment proceeding is that the system works fine but the individual has skewed it – impeachment is the means by which we prove that the system works well. There is something disingenuous and self-serving about a Congress that chooses to impeach and give the impression that it is performing its checking function, when for the most part it fails to do so. Such a maneuver would, of course, be consistent with the overall pattern of a Congress that seeks to displace responsibility.

At best, impeachment would be a very limited ‘second best’ to thought and action aimed at our basic principles and institutions. This may very well be why it attracts many followers. Underlying the call for impeachment is actually a great deal of pessimism and cynicism about political change. During the debate last week, Olshansky said that she was well aware of the broader problems but was cynical about any possibility of changing them. No doubt the political will for more dramatic social change is weak at present, but what is pernicious about this dimension of the argument for impeachment is that it is tacit and presents itself as ‘realistic’. Impeachment can only reinforce the mood of political pessimism, rather than assist in overcoming it.

There is another reason why impeachment is likely only to retrench cynicism. Not only will the public debate about Bush (and any others who might be impeached) be intense and bitter, but it will absorb political energy for an extended period of time. At the end of this protracted process, at most a few individuals will be gone from power, but the familiar problems will remain. Given all of the emotion and commitment invested in this process, it can only be disenchanting for the public to come out the other end to discover how little of substance really changed. The analogy with Nixon is apt. It was after Nixon resigned that public cynicism really consolidated. While some of that was not doubt due to Dirty Dick’s dirty tricks, it was also part of the public realization that the problem was larger than Nixon and a feeling that so much effort had been expended to relatively minimal result. There is little reason to repeat that affair.

American politics is shot through with the sense that things must change, and yet little sense of how they can. Impeachment presents itself as something immediate and practical. Yet in reality, it will be a protracted piece of political theater considerably removed from any real democratic process. It would be a shame to invest what little democratic possibility exists at the moment in an activity with such a short time-horizon and narrow political perspective.

Impeachment debate!

This Thursday AWOT editor Alex Gourevitch will be debating Barbara Olshansky, Deputy Director for Litigation and Movement Support at the Center for Constitutional Rights, on the topic of impeachment – both whether it is a good tool of democracy in general, and whether it is a useful way of opposing the current administration.

The Great Debate:
Impeachment: Safety-Valve of Democracy?
7:00 pm, Thursday, July 20, Columbia University Bookstore

Impeachment was once seen as a procedure of last resort, effective only as a result of 'high crimes and misdemeanors'. Yet recently, calls for impeachment have become increasingly common, and it has become a rallying point for opposition to George Bush, just as it was to Bill Clinton.

Is this a sign of a healthy democracy; that we are forcing our politicians to be more accountable than ever before? After all, there is reasonable evidence that both Presidents deliberately attempted to mislead the electorate. Is this just another indication that politicians are becoming increasingly dishonest?

Or should we view this new development more critically? Why has impeachment started to take the place of more conventional democratic forms of opposition? Might impeachment be undermining the role of the electorate as ultimate arbiters on their rulers?

Come and debate these critical questions with two informed and challenging speakers.

Speakers:

Barbara Olshansky is Deputy Director for Litigation and Movement Support at the Center for Constitutional Rights. She has authored books on secret detention, military tribunals and, most recently, "The Case For Impeachment" (with Dave Lindorff).

Alex Gourevitch is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Columbia University and an editor of www.againstwot.com. He previously worked as a political journalist in Washington D.C, writing for The American Prospect, Washington Monthly, and other publications.

Columbia University Bookstore
Ground Level of Lerner Hall
2922 Broadway & 115th Street New York, NY
(212) 854-4131 www.columbiabookstore.com

Book Review: Peter Beinart's 'The Good Fight'

In 1948 Richard Hofstadter took the long-view of the American Political Tradition and deplored the “rudderless, and demoralized state of American liberalism.” He could have been speaking about today. Liberals are in a tizzy about their inability to develop a compelling vision that seizes hold of the popular imagination. Their failure to seize upon Bush’s political weakness has emphatically demonstrated their political confusion, and as a consequence, a number of commentators have begun offering up new ‘big ideas’ for liberalism to embrace. Of the various offerings, Peter Beinart’s recent effort, The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, is easily the most interesting – and the most chilling. Read on...

Exercising Restraint

Although the United States has not in any way altered or modified its stance of complete public support for Israel's incursions into the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, there are clear, if subtle, signs that Washington and Tel Aviv are, in fact, not entirely on the same page in the current crisis.

Consider this comment by Prime Minister Olmert following the attack from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon on Wednesday night and Thursday morning: “I want to make clear that the event this morning is not a terror act, but an act of a sovereign state that attacked Israel without reason. The government of Lebanon, of which Hezbollah is a part, it trying to shake the stability of the region.” In essence, this is the justification for Israel’s reach to Beirut.

Compare that with President Bush’s remarks yesterday during a press conference in Germany with Angela Merkel. “My attitude is this: There are a group of terrorists who want to stop the advance of peace. And those of – who are peace-loving must work together to help the agents of peace – Israel, President Abbas, and others – to achieve their objective.” Such talk is standard for Bush. But who, exactly, are the “terrorists”? Later on in the conference, Bush shed some light: “[W]e – whatever Israel does, though, should not weaken the Siniora government in Lebanon. We’re concerned about the fragile democracy in Lebanon. We’ve been working very hard through the United Nations and with partners to strengthen the democracy in Lebanon. The Lebanese people have democratic aspirations, which is being undermined by the actions and activities of Hezbollah.”

This is quite different from Olmert’s position. And, proving that it wasn’t a case of Bush mixing his words up, Secretary of State Rice said, in regard to Lebanon: “It is extremely important that Israel exercise restraint in its acts of self-defense.” It is true that the United States routinely offers such advise whenever Israel begins to do whatever it wants, but this time the caution was directly related to the incursion into Lebanon. So, what is going on?

Both the United States and Israel are united in placing the ultimate blame for the current crisis in Damascus and Tehran. More precisely, because of Iran’s nuclear ambitions (which Israel fears much more than Katyusha rockets), Tehran is the central hub of the enemy, while Damascus is but a way-point to Lebanon and the Occupied Territories. Validating this view in the public consciousness, President Ahmadinejad told President Assad during a telephone conversation: “If the Zionist regime commits another stupid move and attacks Syria, this will be considered like attacking the whole Islamic world and this regime will receive a very fierce response.”

Despite the agreement on this matter, it appears that Washington’s policy of strengthening the anti-Syrian coalition within the Lebanese government is being undermined by Israel’s incursion. According to Joshua Landis at Syria Comment, Israel’s policy of using punitive measures across Lebanon to drive a wedge between Hezbollah and the Lebanese people will backfire. Threats to re-occupy southern Lebanon, “will only re-legitimate Hezbollah, which claims it is a legitimate Lebanese resistance movement fighting occupation. The bombing of the Beirut Airport will also serve to undermining (sic) the Lebanese government, not isolate Hezbollah. By attacking the central government, Israel will push ordinary Lebanese onto Hezbollah’s side, not deepen the divide between the two.”

Explaining why the US is not taking a more forceful role in attempting to halt the spiraling violence in the region, Landis quotes Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group (from a Washington Post article): “By cutting off its relations with states such as Syria and Iran, [the US] has very little ability to convince them to do favor for Washington… They have cornered themselves out of leverage on Iran. They have cornered themselves out of a lack influence on any of the parties that are driving this – Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran. Counseling restraint or condemning actions is pretty meager when you think of the influence the United States should be wielding.”

And unless one has swallowed hook, line and sinker the notion that the current conflict is a fight against terrorism (which would authorize whatever degree of conflict Israel chooses), then it becomes obvious that a regional war involving Syria and/or Iran is beyond Washington’s ability to handle at the moment. In a very real sense, Israel’s incursion into Lebanon brushes dangerously close to the edge of what the United States is capable of controlling in the region. Thus do we witness the rare spectacle of the United States actually meaning what it says when it tells Israel: exercise restraint.

None of this is to say that Israel will inevitably go over the edge, or that Israel and the United States are not ultimately uncritical allies with one and other, and will not work together to find a mutually acceptable way to assert their interests. But their opponents have shown surprising strength. As with unilateral withdrawal (from the Gaza Strip and Southern Lebanon), refusal to engage with the Hamas government, the government of Syria or Hezbollah in Lebanon has not isolated or weakened them. Rather, it has consolidated all power and legitimacy on the very fringes of militant resistance. At the moment, the role of the United States is to remind Israel (whose civilian leadership is spectacularly testy at the moment) just how powerful those opponents, in fact, are.

Israel's War on Terror

Israel has commonly argued that the Palestinians are terrorists because they do not recognize the distinction between military and civilian targets, and often lack a sense of proportionality in their actions. The occasional suicide bombing has tended to bolster the Israeli's case that they are fighting terrorists who lack any basic moral understanding. Yet recent events have exposed the ideological character of Israel's war on terror. On June 25, Palestinians captured Corporal Gilad Shalit (see our post Shalit Supremacy), and then, yesterday, Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a similar kidnapping raid. These acts are significant because they seem to suggest a change in tactics that recognizes an ethical distinction between targeting soldiers v. civilians, and that even seems to seek to avoid unnecessary killing in a political conflict.

It is striking, then, how phenomenally disproportionate Israel's reaction to the kidnapping of three of its soldiers has been. In response to the first kidnapping, Isreal, among other things, violated Syrian sovereignty, buzzed the President's summer home, sent thousands of soldiers into Gaza, bombed a power plant cutting off electricity to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, shutting down water wells and killing electricity to various hospitals. Since then, in its ostensible effort to free Shalit, Israel has "dropped a quarter-ton bomb on a home in Gaza City, killing a couple and seven of their children, ages 4-18." In response to the second kidnapping, Israel has, so far, sent soldiers into southern Lebanon, used warships to block Lebanese ports, conducted a series of air raids that, among other things, hit Lebanon's only international airport in Beirut, forcing its closure, and that killed 35 Lebanese civilians. Israel has also upped its raids in Gaza, killing at least 23 Palestinians. The point is not mere hypocrisy on the part of the Israelis, nor that they are more 'terroristic' because they kill more civilians and hit more civilian targets. Rather, it is that, as the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah become more tactical and 'proportionate', the Israeli response has become more disproportionate and violent. The hysterical character of the response derives from the fact that Israel's war on terror has more to do with policing the Palestinians and, somewhat graspingly, with finding some basis to establish domestic stability and coherence, than it does with defending its society from what it calls terrorists. For political reasons having little to do with suicide bombing, it is the Israelis who are more dependent upon the senseless logic of retaliation than the Palestinians.

The Madman Theory

The immediate response to the North Korean missile tests on July 4th was a round of international condemnations followed by John Bolton putting on his most gamesman-like face for urgent consultation with the United Nations Security Council. Britain and the United States both supported a Japanese resolution to impose tough sanctions on North Korea (to be voted on later this week). But in less than a day, it became clear that China, Russia and South Korea had veered from the script by opposing any sanctions. Now, even the United States is calling for a return to the six-party talks, on hold since November 2005. The Japanese resolution will surely fail. So, what remains?

Right after the tests, there was a lot speculation as to their timing. They not only coincided with the United States’ Independence Day, but also came shortly after a massive series of war games conducted by the US in the Pacific Ocean (the largest since the Vietnam War) as well as the recent freezing of North Korean bank accounts in the Chinese island of Macau. While these events may have a lot to do with the timing of the tests, they are ancillary to the tests themselves.

The real reason North Korea launched its missiles was that it desires a return to negotiations over its nuclear program. Specifically, it wants bilateral talks with the United States. As Bruce Cummings points out, the test was not in any way intended to be a surprise. It was a carefully stage-managed event designed to garner maximum attention. In that, it succeeded despite the failure of the Taepodong-2 test.

Cummings notes that what likely led to the North Korean test “was President Bush's announcement in May that the administration would negotiate directly with Iran over its nuclear program — a move that led the North Koreans to call for talks of their own with the United States. In this light, North Korea's missile brinkmanship is not intended to scare us. Rather, in the ham-handed way that is Pyongyang's specialty, it is meant to invite Washington to make a deal.”

What the tests are not about is an attempt to threaten the United States with any kind of attack. Both Ashton Carter and William Perry (former Secretary of Defense and Assistant Secretary of Defense, respectively, under President Clinton) implicitly recognize this, first in their Washington Post piece from June 22nd, then in their Time Magazine piece from July 8th. In arguing that the United States ought to have blown the Taepodong-2 missile off its platform in a preventative attack before launch, they reason that the North Korean regime would not, in fact, “lash out” in response. The regime must know, so Carter and Perry argue, that any war on the Korean peninsula would immediately result in its own collapse. “Pyongyang’s leaders are bold, but they are not suicidal.”

This, in a nutshell, is the salient point. If the North Korean regime is not suicidal (as any sort of attack on the United States would surely be), then what, exactly, is the threat? Why waste a US missile in a surgical strike if North Korea is so lame as to not even respond to such an attack? Carter and Perry contradict their own argument in the next paragraph by presenting the well-worn bogey of North Korea providing nuclear material to terrorists. It is not explained how that would be any less suicidal than an overt attack by North Korea itself. As ever in the war on terror, Carter and Perry wax eloquent on the “mounting danger” from North Korea, but do not actually argue the point. The danger is stated, but not explained.

Though Carter and Perry are caught in a prescriptive bubble of their own making, the only way out of the bind is the madman theory of international relations, as recently explained by John Judis in the New Republic. “Diplomacy assumes that national leaders act according to the usual norms of reasoning. They design actions in order to accomplish certain ends, and one of these is the preservation of their nation. But what if a nation's leader is or becomes genuinely mad and attempts to carry out policies that will, he believes, lead to the destruction of his nation and, perhaps, the world? Or what if he is so deranged that he has no conception of means and ends, so that he undertakes policies that will lead to the destruction of the world, but has no awareness that they might? Such a leader would be a "madman." And in that case, the ordinary rules of diplomacy would not hold.”

This kind of reasoning has been on constant display since 9/11 as the United States valiantly defends freedom from all manner of madmen from Iraq to Iran to North Korea. It remains the only viable public explanation for why the United States can play any kind of war game it desires (including the non-game variety) while North Korea cannot conduct missile tests that do not violate any international laws. In the war on terror, your opponents must be not merely dangerous, but deranged. Only in this way will the standard, domineering geopolitical interests be made to look like defensive gestures.

Luckily, Carter and Perry are out of sync with the actual negotiators, all of whom recognize that diplomacy is the only option at the moment. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of the madman in Pyongyang has a logic unto itself and is unlikely to abate anytime soon.

The Shalit Supremacy

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that the Israel would strike down supporters of terrorism, saying that “None of them will be immune”. The Wall Street Journal reads this as a thinly veiled threat against Syria, but there have been more disturbing contours in Israel’s official rhetoric. The BBC reports that Olmert made the following remarks at the border town of Sderot, “This is a long war. It requires lots of patience, sometimes endless restraint. We have to know when to clench our teeth and to deal a decisive blow.” Similar remarks also surfaced from Cabinet minister Roni Bar-On, "It's safe to say…the sky will fall on them if Gilad Shalit is harmed…If he is killed, we will react in ways the Palestinians haven't seen before."

Militarization is a central component of state participation in the War on Terror, but it tends to manifest in very asymmetrical warfare, which obscures the problem with these incredibly violent statements by Israeli officials. The debate centers on Israel’s level of restraint, rather than asking how it is that an allegedly democratic state can distribute such high levels of violence despite any mitigating political process. In the same way that Lyndon Johnson’s America suffered urban warfare in exchange for a declining liberal dream, we have to ask what dreams have been thrown out or replaced to make Israel’s violent logic possible. Such widespread retaliation in the name of one soldier exposes (again) how Israeli politics has worn through its adopted liberal democratic values. Government intervention has shifted away from liberalism’s group-oriented framework to one that has the entire military apparatus publicly claiming its obsession with the fate of an individual Israeli GI.

As we pointed out in a previous post, the reoccupation of Gaza cannot be seen merely as an effort to rescue Corporal Shalit. Rather, with each new military sweep we can detect a broader logic of political militarization. This thinking has been in development for some time, but found its full expression in the War on Terror—and has taken this form as a way of registering its impact in the world against the failures of liberal democratic ideas. New formulae have surfaced to help us understand how individuals relate to one another politically in these conditions. Where the liberal tradition wanted to elevate the individual experience of freedom in terms of choice and cognition, what has taken over in liberalism’s decline is something far more bawdy: a political calculus expressed in units of persons, wherein the first principle is the state’s power to grant sanctity over life, or take away the conditions that make life possible. Political process is then subsumed by the need for a sanctioned political space protected by the state’s benevolent guarantees of life. Political claims and collective interests are shackled to state authority, as if the validity of political ideas were a matter of winning official confirmation of one’s (collectively held) demands. Without that confirmation, no such political safe-zone will be provided and out-of-bounds political demands will appear to directly challenge the state’s monopoly on violence, or its equally sinister monopoly on the provision of life-guarantees. Taken to its next step, this logic turns political contests into body-counts—and instead of mobilizing ideas we see efforts to prove the “worth” of an individual’s life relative to that of a political enemy. The resulting warfare looks like Clausewitz’s “politics by other means”, but is in fact warfare taking the place of politics altogether.

This reduces to a might-makes-right equation, in which the strong take on the trappings of morality because they have a better chance at guaranteeing life, regardless of the devastation to the weaker side. In this way the Palestinian ransom (1 Shalit = 1,000 Palestinians) proves exactly what the ratio says, that the political power of one Israeli soldier weighs as much as a thousand incarcerated Palestinians. The problem is not that Hamas demands too many Palestinian lives in exchange for Shalit, but that for the most part they have conceded to Israel’s political logic: to repay the attacks on Israeli soldiers one-thousand fold on the backs of Palestinians—and this same formula is what their ransom confirms. Sure, 1,000 released prisoners seems high. Israel’s officials have said the number is absurd, but it is they who authored this exchange-relation and they who set the prices in this sick market.

Discipline at Your Door

The Supreme Court recently upheld the side of state power by permitting “no-knock” home incursions by police serving search warrants. The decision in Hudson vs. Michigan rekindles the militarization of the police that began with the formation of SWAT teams in the mid-1960’s. The acronym for “Special Weapons and Tactics”, SWAT was the official response to radical political movements and generalized social unrest in dense urban areas.

No-knock warrants are a special extension of police powers designed to cope with what the state sees as an evolved criminal element. In 1969 SWAT debuted against the Black Panthers, a group known for its armed drills and indifference toward police authority. The concept was simple: the Panthers would resist, they had the weapons to do so, and past experience had shown that normal police forces are no match for an up-armored, upgraded criminal possessing the will to fight. SWAT could now publicly demonstrate its high velocity weapons, body armor and its trademark tactic: the explosive entry to disorient the target through confusion and terror. No-knock incursions reassert the authority of the state by inflicting tremendous chaos at the boundary-line between public life and private domain. The significance of Hudson can be seen at a definite point in space, at the doorway, where the relationship between the individual and the state is internalized in the form of the door itself. The integrity of the doorway is a measure of how society values liberty.

When police have the unrestricted tactical advantage to deploy no-knock force it is hard to see the distinction between military power and rudimentary policing. The consequences of losing a clear distinction between the two are devastating for political agency and symptomatic of a larger process of incremental growth in police powers to survey, apprehend and detain.

It sometimes seems necessary for the state to have these powers, and numerous gun battles have proved the inadequacy of regular police against those better armed and better trained. In the 1997 Bank of America robbery, later dubbed the “North Hollywood Shootout”, police were overpowered, even in the age of SWAT. Eventually the police won out, but it was a battle of attrition so brutal that it seemed to justify not just the spread of SWAT teams, but the wholesale militarization of normal police forces; making high-velocity, high caliber weapons, airpower and tanks available for regular deployment throughout the police system. Combined with Clinton’s hysterical anticrime initiatives, the North Hollywood incident reanimated public support for militarization of the police. In small towns where no SWAT budget existed, local groups raised money for police procurement of M-16s to combat the threat.

But the threat of what, exactly? Earlier this spring Dr. Culosi, an optometrist, was killed by SWAT agents serving a no-knock warrant at his home in Fairfax, Virginia. AWOT contacted the Fairfax Country Police Department, whose representatives say that there is no policy on the use of SWAT-level force, that in fact all such deployments are made at the “discretion of the department” after looking at the type of warrant and the history of the suspect. The FCPD noted that the deciding factor is the “safety of the officer” and that no standards have been set on the use of SWAT because every case has to be taken up individually, “in its totality”.

Culosi was under investigation for 3 months for betting on sports and had no criminal background of any kind. The fact that he was killed makes this case distinctive, but also clouds the issue. The problem is not that SWAT is disproportionate with respect to the suspect’s alleged crimes, but that there is no clear justification for SWAT deployment that can separate it from regular policing. If the only official consideration is the “safety of the officers”, then the threshold has been lowered to the floor and SWAT teams will be able to justify their deployment in very mundane situations. Or, more to point, SWAT style military tactics and weapons will come into normal use by regular police.

This normalization of extraordinary tactics conceals a deeper rot. No-knock warrants preemptively escalate the violence of police searches as if every home were Ruby Ridge or Waco. In this way no-knock tactics erode publicly held ideas about an individual’s capacity for rational engagement with legal regimes. The suspect is imagined to be eminently threatening, irrational and chaotic—rather like a child or the stereotypical terrorist, and the resulting no-knock breach is designed to generate the very crazy, confused situation that justified the preemptive use of force in the first place. So with no-knock we see a loss of etiquette but also a loss of faith in ideas of rationality and human interaction. Most importantly, and most dangerously, these trade-offs are made in a uniquely preemptive manner and justified in the name of security—which in this case is the bodily security of the state-agents serving papers.

When the security of state servants is prioritized in situations that are necessarily risky, (like the search or surprise invasion of someone’s home), there is then a corresponding shift toward authoritarian guarantees: the guarantee of safety, the guarantee of certainty and repetition—these are the promises of a police state. Liberty is always in some sense a function of risk, uncertainty and exploration, even reconnaissance into the unknown. For the state to operate on the premise that its agents must always walk in an aura of protection means that ordinary subjects have lost their freedom, and must instead live in a condition of total transparency—so that the police can traverse the doorway contented by their overriding tactical and technological prowess, thus reducing to near-zero the threat of whatever mysteries lie concealed behind our doors. Police can sleep easy knowing that their overkill entrance can match any unknown—a climate perfect for cultivating expanded executive power against the aspirations of diminished political agents. This is what happens when risk aversion takes the form of an official state policy—a policy that will always informally be one of preemptive violence against its citizens in an effort to reinforce the authority of the state itself, but also in an attempt guarantee a risk free workplace for those who bring the law to your doorstep and infantilize you in the process.

The Re-Invasion of Gaza

There is much to say about what’s happening in Israel right now. Events there are so astonishing that a palpable sense of shock and bewilderment can be detected among the running commentary. Still, certain elements are easy to assess.

Although Corporal Gilad Shalit is indeed being held by a faction within Hamas, and although Israel genuinely would like him to be released unharmed, that is not what the re-invasion of the Gaza Strip is about. The first sign of some larger plan came with the destruction of the only power plant in Gaza. This was an unmistakable attempt at collective punishment for which Israel has become famous. An incursion into Syria and the arrest of the Palestinian government rounded out the true motives of the Gaza operation: nothing less than the complete destruction of the Hamas-led government.

The press, of course, treads delicately as the contours of Israel’s ultimate goal slowly become clear enough to safely state the obvious. Nonetheless, in spite of this timidity, Time Magazine has hit upon the pivotal error that led to the current massing of troops on the Gaza border:

“The kidnap drama has simply highlighted a fundamental flaw in the policy of unilateral withdrawal on which Olmert based his election campaign. Absent any agreement with a Palestinian government that is willing and able to enforce order, militants will continue to attack Israel. The idea that Israel can "disengage" from the Palestinians without their cooperation is wishful thinking.”

While the immediate goal of the Gaza withdrawal might have been to make the permanent occupation of large swathes of the West Bank easier to swallow, it was never a serious or stable long-term solution. In short, the re-occupation (in some form or other) of the Gaza Strip was inevitable. In spite of the touching concern that Israel shows for its Jewish citizens, the kidnapped corporal is a mere detail.