In the final Washington Times excerpt from Tony Blankley’s forthcoming The West’s Last Chance, Tony Blankley says that President Bush hasn’t gotten far enough.
When President Bush declared war on terrorism, he did not, legally, put the country on a war footing.
Up until now, we have never accurately named the enemy or the danger. If the government can’t speak the real name and nature of the enemy, it becomes impossible to explain, or even design, a policy for victory.
This is why Mr. Bush — who has tried to talk around the problem of radical Islam — has seemed (to his critics) foolish or deceitful, neither of which he is.
What we need is a clear congressional declaration of war, as prescribed by the Constitution. Congress should declare war on the Islamist jihadists.
I remember this being suggested after 9/11 and it never made sense to me. How do you declare war, in the sense that the Constitution speaks of declaring war, against an idea. There is no nation of “Radical Islam” — although there are admittedly nations that espouse and export Radical Islam. Radical Islam has no borders. Its armies are, or at least appear to be, normal civilians. Given this, it seems that the only advantage that declaring war on a non-nation would confer would be entirely political.
More importantly, what does it mean to say that we are declaring war on “Radical Islam” ? Does this mean the wahabbists in Saudi Arabia are now our enemy ? What about the religious schools in Pakistan that teach jihad ? The danger in declaring war on an idea or philosophy is that it makes it easy to say that anyone, anywhere, is the enemy.
One of the reasons Blankley believes that a declaration of war is necessary is that it would give the state additional power.
It is also important to declare war on the Islamist jihadists because we are a nation of laws.
When Congress declares war and passes enabling legislation, the president can accept the full authority delegated to him under the Constitution and by Supreme Court precedents that establish presidential powers in wartime.
Some such powers that barely were used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, such as the sedition laws, are necessary to fight our war against Islamist terrorism.
Sedition laws are among the most controversial in American history. The first such laws, the Alien and Sedition Acts, were passed during the Presidency of John Adams in response to Federalist distaste for the French Revolution. The public reaction against these laws also led, in no small way, to the election of Thomas Jefferson as President in 1800 — an event which changed the Republic forever.
Suggesting that sedition should be actively pursued today is something that should make any advocate of liberty concerned, to say the very least. To his credit, Blankley, does recognize this:
The likely prolonged nature of this war should be a concern to everyone who values civil liberties. As long as we are inventing a new form of war declaration, put a sunset provision on it. Every two years, all exclusively wartime powers would be extinguished and need to be renewed by the next Congress.
A sound idea, though I doubt it would ever actually be implemented. In reality, what happens is that the power of the state expands, and individual liberty shrinks, during war time, and the equilibrium is never re-established when the war ends. This was true of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. There is no reason to believe that it will not also be true of the War on Terror.
Blankley does make one point with which I agree 100%:
Ethnic and religious profiling is a specific war power that must be available to our government.
With this I must, in some respects at least, agree. Let’s face facts, terrorism is most likely to be committed by Muslim men mostly between the ages of 18 and 35. It wasn’t the Mormon Tabernacle Choir that attacked the World Trade Center. And the Boy Scouts kill hundreds of people in Madrid. Given this, it is absurd for TSA screeners to be treating 85 year old grandmothers the same way they would treat a 25 year old Arab male travelling on a one-way ticket.
Then, once again, Blankley goes off the deep end:
Here is one hard truth: We no longer can afford the luxury of not requiring national identification cards. Without biometric cards for every person living or traveling in the country, even secured borders will be insufficient.
No. No. A thousand times NO. National identification cards are the first step on the road to serfdom.
Despite all of this, though, Blankley ends with an argument that I cannot disagree with:
The best strategy to fend off and reverse the Islamist threat is to strengthen the alliance between the United States and Europe.
Of course, Christian Southern Africa (390 million of Africa’s approximately 850 million people), Hindu India, non-Muslim Southeast Asia, Christian Latin America and Russia all have important roles to play in defeating the Islamist jihadists.
But a defense of the West without the birthplace of the West — Europe — is almost unthinkable. If Europe becomes Eurabia, it would mean the loss of our cultural and historic first cousins, our closest economic and military allies, and the source of our own civilization. This is a condition Americans should dread and should move mountains to avoid.
It bears repeating: An Islamified Europe would be as great a threat to the United States today as a Nazified Europe would have been in the 1940s.
Even before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt understood that Nazi-dominated Europe would be more than a fearsome military and industrial threat. It would be a civilizational threat.
Now we face another such threat in insurgent Islam.
Except for the fact that “civilizational” is not a word, Blankley is at least half right. America cannot win this war alone. I don’t have alot of confidence in certain segments of Europe —- particularly France and Germany — but I have a feeling that, along with the United States, the British and their former colonies (specifically Canada, India, and Australia) will be up to the fight.
Bring it on.
Previous Posts:
Another Good War
An Islamist Threat To Europe ?
