Yesterday’s installment in the Washington Times’ serialization of Tony Blankley’s new book The West’s Last Chance starts out on a good enough point:
American writer and social historian Studs Terkel memorably called World War II “the good war.”
Terkel interviewed hundreds of GIs and their families many years after the war. They recalled that the struggle lifted them above their personal lives to fight on behalf of something they believed was greater than themselves.
World War II was good, despite the millions of deaths, the limitations on daily lives, the encroachment on peacetime liberties and the arduousness of wartime life. The war was good because the sacrifice was for a noble cause, for the perpetuation of America and the American way of life.
The struggle against Islamist terrorism is an equally good war — and for the same reasons. We have just as great a responsibility to win our struggle against insurgent Islamist aggression as our parents and grandparents had to win World War II.
Excellent point. The danger America faces from Islamic fascism is the same that we faced from German fascism and Japanese militarism. In both cases, we are dealing with enemies with a singular will and a vision of a world order that is incompatible with the existence of American freedom, or freedom in general.
On some levels, though, the War on Terror is more analogous to the Cold War. The most important battles are being fought in the shadows, by warriors we may never know.
After this excellent point, however, Blankley goes off the deep end as he examines several of the violations of civil liberties that occurred between 1941 and 1945.
Today, we are under attack not by a nation, but by groups of militant individuals who claim Islam as their faith. Yet for the first time in human history, the destructive power of terrorists can be as great as that of a traditional nation-state that has declared war. We need a mechanism to deal with this change.
During World War II, the country was faced with the prospect of large numbers of people — again identifiable by ethnicity, not conduct — who were real or potential enemies.
The logic of the Supreme Court’s opinion is applicable to the situation we face today. The court held that people ethnically connected to the war-makers are more likely to support them than are others — and our country at war has a right to protect itself from this presumed higher risk of danger.
The Supreme Court opinion that Blankley refers to was Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950) where the Court held that executive power over enemy aliens, undelayed and unhampered by litigation, has been deemed, throughout our history, essential to wartime security.”The Court also said that “The resident enemy alien is constitutionally subject to summary arrest, internment and deportation whenever a ‘declared war’ exists.” So the power to intern or deport comes into effect only when war has been declared.
There is a difference, though, between taking steps to control the actions of enemy aliens, and taking actions against American citizens just because they happen to be part of the same ethnic group as an enemy, and this is what Blankley is quite plainly advocating.
Fighting a war to preserve freedom while simultaneously taking away that freedom accomplishes nothing.
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