David Warren, as dead-on as usual:
The whole point of the Geneva Conventions is to encourage legitimate soldiering, even under the pressures of war. It was written intentionally to exclude terrorists and other “informal” fighters, who do not wear uniforms or other clear markings, who arm themselves in exceptionally vicious ways, who target non-combatants as a matter of course, and whose behaviour is in every other way unanswerable to civilized norms.
The U.S. capitulation confers legitimacy upon people like the perpetrators of yesterday’s blasts in Mumbai. It gives them encouragement, together with the reasonable assurance that nothing bad will happen to them if they are captured. It announces to all the enemies of the West — internal and external — that not even the Bush administration has the guts to be ruthless with its mortal enemies.
In the larger view, no civilization can survive treating violent savages as if they were conventional soldiers. For that is to declare that the destruction of our civilization is a legitimate end.
A point which seems lost on our judiciary.
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In the larger view, no civilization can survive treating violent savages as if they were conventional soldiers. For that is to declare that the destruction of our civilization is a legitimate end.
One of our big strengths is adaptability - not as a people so much as a culture. I have every confidance that in short order we’ll adapt our ways and means to doing what needs to be done. This may take the form of appropriate action by the government or it may simply be people doing what needs to be done and coming up with justification after.
This has happened before, in the West. The Plains inidians fought for 80 some years against Anglos invading their turf. For most of that time the Americans could have applied overwhelming force and pushed them onto the Reservations. It only took majority of a decade in the 1870s to do that. Most of the time policy, set by people removed from the frontier, prevented all but limited and local holding action.
People adapated. Eventually policy changed and the Plains were opened up. Maybe in hindsight a short sharp campaign would have dodged decades of brutality and bloodshed - and killed fewer peopele and caused less misery on both sides.
Well, Warren probably considers civilization to have begun collapsing with the death of Queen Victoria, and the whole enterprise 90% down the tubes now. ;-)
I take your point, but I’ll note that plains indians weren’t capable of inflicting a whole lot of harm (as far as I know, but I admit to a lack of expertise in this area) - they were no longer allied with rival nation-states, weren’t trying to acquire nuclear weapons, etc. If they had been raiding in NYC or DC, instead of the frontier, what would the effects on policy have been? Our current adversaries have proved they can conduct operations in the core - policymakers are all sitting on potential ground zeros, and half of them still think a botox-filled idiot with a magic hat could appease their way out of trouble.
Random note: in the stack of books I’m working my way through: Bill Yenne’s Indian Wars - The Campaign for the American West.
This magic hat you speak of. Where can I obtain one? Oh wait that was a metaphor. Silly literal minded me …
Oh, sorry, I meant to say “lucky hat”, the thing Kerry said was given to him by a gun-running CIA guy in Cambodia on Xmas…
No you pronounced ‘lucky hat’ correctly when you said m-a-g-i-c hat.
I hold dim opinions about the character of people who make stuff up and then, in the face of such awkward things as ‘the truth’, continue to weave more elaborate lies and tomfoolery.
I won’t put up with that from my kids. I shouldn’t have to put up with that from a grown man and presidential candidate.
Yo - Democrats; can you please, pretty please, run a viable candidate in ‘08? Thank you.