The Greatest War of All Time

Digby has an excellent post today on a topic I've been meaning to touch upon but have felt too overwhelmed by the shear magnitude of what needs to be said. Well, Digby's gone a long way toward doing it for me. The topic? The so called "War on Terror".

I know it's not patrioticly correct to say, but damn if a lot of people haven't overreacted and/or used the events of 9/11 to grab power and further an agenda. The idea seems to be that terrorism is such a threat that the norms of civilized society (no torture, civil liberties, the right to dissent) need to be tossed out in self defense. Bull. Digby takes it from here:

The idea that al Qaeda is some unique form of evil that requires we cast out all
norms of civilization is simply mind boggling (Indeed, I get the feeling that it
illustrates nothing more than ego run amuck --- some kind of competitiveness
with the Greatest Generation.)

The biggest threat we face is from nuclear weapons in the wrong hands. But we need to remember that this is not a new problem. Nuclear weapons have been in the hands of America's mortal enemies for more than 50 years and while they may not have been as nihilistic as these terrorists, they were certainly as prone to accident and misjudgment as any group of humans. The stakes were unimaginable. These were not "suitcase bombs" or "dirty bombs", as awful as those may be, they were ICBM's aimed at every American city and if they were launched, the result was likely to be annihilation of the planet. That's the threat we lived with for almost 50 years. We can handle this terrorist threat without completely losing our values, our
wits or our moral authority.

[snip]

There is another name that fits these terrorists... They're called "criminals."
These international criminals do not represent a "nation" but what might be called a
gang or a syndicate or a "family." They can be brought to heel the same way
criminal gangs can always be brought to heel. One of the ways that you do it is
by enlisting the help of other nations in the manhunts with cooperative police
and international quasi military investigations.

The fact is that this isn't a "war" by any reasonable definition. However, the powers that be have deemed it so, in which case they should not be able to change the rules of warfare to accommodate what isn't a war in the first place. If it's a war, then
it's a war, which means that quaint little treaties like the GC cannot just be
tossed at will. If it isn't a war then we should follow the criminal model and
use the laws and rules that have been established to deal with this.

[snip]

The Bataan death march, the holocaust, the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh memories when the Geneva Conventions were signed. The people who conceived them had intimate and personal knowledge of the kind of inhumane actions against millions of prisoners, civilians and soldiers the horrors of war can bring. Please don't say that attacking civilians is unprecedented. It's just ridiculous....Inhumanity wasn't invented on
9/11.

[snip]

The idea that 9/11 is something so unique and the hatred of our enemies so threatening that we must discard all the rules that we created in the wake of the most horrifying conflagration in human history is intellectual bankruptcy of the highest order.

[snip]

Al Qaeda is a serious threat. But it is not so serious that WWI and WWII pale in comparison or that we face an unprecedented existential threat. It's absurd to put it in those terms and it's a misunderstanding of the problem on such a vast scale that we are actively making the threat worse instead of better.

I have severely edited Digby's post so check it out in its entirety. I have more to say on the topic but it will have to wait for another day.