by Smitty
Via Zero Hedge we have yet another fine example of a useless Progressive, if you’ll pardon my pleonasm, here in Global Research by Paul Craig Roberts. The context is the purported threat by the Obama Administration to veto the Defense Authorization Bill, emphasis mine:
However, on further reflection I conclude that the Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it: Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”
Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”
The Laws of War are to countries what the rules of boxing are to fisticuffs. The Laws of War attempt to bound the behavior, so that the fight can occur while minimizing collateral damage. Countries that adhere to the Geneva Conventions grasp that the behaviors outlawed by the convention, e.g. blowing up hospitals, have no military value and will only prolong conflict.
Boxing presumes adherence to rules, as well. Boxers don’t put each other in chokeholds. As a thought experiment, say Paul Craig Roberts approached Mike Tyson in a bar, and put a chokehold on Tyson. What is the likelihood that Tyson is going to brush Roberts off and say “Come, my good man: let us engage in a civilized bout.”? The phrase “Roberts looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone” comes to mind, to paraphrase Croce. Do you fine Tyson according to the rules of boxing for scattering a few pieces of Roberts about? Why, no: it wasn’t a boxing match.
Why under the sun do these idiots keep attempting these misapplications of the rules? Two closely related sources are:
- the Postmodern attack on Western Civilization, and
- the Alinskyite urge to make the other guy live by his rules (Rule #4).
And it’s high time we call out these idiots like Roberts. They are either useful idiots waging a soft campaign in service of the foe, or diabolical enemies badly in need of a ‘Mike Tyson’ moment of their own.
The radical Islamic terrorists who beset Western Civilization are barroom brawling creeps. We still, by the way, treat them very, very well when they are captured, if the weight gains at various places of detention mean anything. But these terrorists have do not and will not conform to the rules of boxing. Why should they, when the likes of Roberts and his ilk support their cause? Easier to destroy boxing slowly than give up being a brawler.
The best argument of the Roberts crowd seems to be that if boxers treat brawlers like brawlers too much, the boxers will become brawlers. Some slippery slope exists, they imply. This does not make perfect sense, but it veers closely enough toward reality that it may confuse those not choosing to think. For all the hubbub about waterboarding, labeled ‘torture’ on Wikipedia, note that even Wikipedia allows that the actual number of usages can be counted on one hand with leftover fingers. Rumsfeld allowed the same amount in his book. Now, you can contend that Rumsfeld is engaged in a Holder-esque game of lying early, lying often, and lying big, but then you are admitting that we have a far greater problem in that our federal government has gone completely off the rails.
None of this argument is to be taken as support for the Obama Administration. The whole Afghanistan argument was a cheesy way to make a foreign policy statement that sounded vaguely credible during the 2008 campaign, but which became an ambiguous muddle at best. While not going the full Ron Paul here, one hopes that the United States takes a serious look at the costs of nation building over the last decade and understands that we should never bother with this sort of noise again.
