declaring war on al qaeda
Here’s a novel concept:
Bush law chief seeks new Qaeda war declaration
I’m a little dubious about this, though. How do you declare war on a non-state actor? The closest parallel I could think of was the Barbary pirates, so I asked the wikipedia. Turns out that the US didn’t declare war in either conflict, because the pirates beat us to it (although the first declaration of war is a little unorthodox). It seems like a legal state of war did exist. But the parallel doesn’t hold up for long- the Barbary pirates had enough trappings of statehood to make it simple, including more or less clearly defined territory.
So if we declare war (or some functional equivalent thereof) on Al Qaeda, it’s not clear at all what legal bearing it would have. We would still have to attack them on someone else’s sovereign territory, which if we did without permission, would also be an act of war. Pakistan or Yemen or Germany wouldn’t take that very well, although Germany might be able to do more about it than Yemen.
So if it doesn’t improve our ability to fight the war, what does it accomplish?
New legislation should also prohibit courts from ordering a detainee to be released within the United States. It should protect secrets in court hearings, ensure that soldiers are not taken from the battlefield to testify and prevent challenges from delaying detainee trials, he said.
Democrats in control of Congress and civil rights groups reacted coolly, saying Mukasey’s proposals would avert legal oversight and stack the deck in favor of the administration.
So attempting to bring the war onto a constitutional footing is really a way to increase the power of the imperial presidency? Nuh uh. Do not want.
Here’s a better idea: declare the “global war on terror” to be a crock of shit and bring it to an end. We can treat it as a criminal matter, or concoct some new post-modern post-nation-state form of conflict. But no more excuses for generation-long wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iran or wherever else. Well, it may be too late for the first two. Oops. Sorry ’bout that. But it’s not too late for the rest of them yet.
If nothing else, dropping the war paradigm will save us the embarrassment of losing a war to people in caves.
