perfidy

I don't frequently post about politics, much to your collective relief. I don't usually have much to add to the bloviations and insights that whiz around the internet, and when I do I just can't really be bothered. I pay attention to politics, sure, but I don't have a deep grok of policy the way I do, say, the behavior of bread dough. And even if 99.99% of the people that happen past this website don't give a flying crap about how a certain recipe for bread behaves when refrigerated overnight prior to baking, I still feel that my sharing that information is more of a net good to the world than chiming in with a "me too!" when somebody posts a particularly insighftul nugget about energy policy.

But not today. I have been watching the flapdoodle over the NSA spying thingy with mounting alarm. It quickly became clear to me that Bush's people were doing their best to deflect attention from the full implications of their theories of law, and that investigators were becoming too wrapped up in the niceties of FISA law. When the Vice President can pull a jiu jitsu move on his questioners by merely stating, "we have an interest in knowing why an American citizen is talking to terrorists, said questioners have clearly not thought deeply enough about what they are doing. The salient questions are not really about FISA warrants, but about whether domestic spying, supra FISA, is happening, and under what legal authority.

Going all the way back to the detention of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, by a military tribunal without trial, charge, or habeas corpus, I have worried about the fragility of our way of life. This is especially so when defenses of the Padilla dentention, or Hamdi, or Abu Ghraib, etc., amount to "don't you know there's a war on??"

I am currently reading an absolutely fascinating book by Tom Reiss called The Orientalist. Ostensibly about a writer named Lev Nussimbaum who published bestsellers set in Persia in the middle part of the last century under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, the book is much more. Nussimbaum was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, the son of a Jewish oil magnate. He spent his teenaged years fleeing war and rebellion as World War I, the Russian Revolution, the flight of the White Russians, the counterflights of Azeris, Armenians, Gypsies, Turks, and Jews, pogroms, the collapse of Germany's "democracy," the descent of Berlin into chaos under the rule of the Freikorps, buffeted him and his family across Europe.

Along the way Reiss gives us a staggering array of capsule histories: of the last days of the Ottoman Empire; the rise of Baku as the first big oil boomtown in the world - there was (is?) so much petroleum there that the ground sometimes burst into flame spontaneously, not surprisingly making the city a major stronghold of Zoroastrianism (not to mention Islam and Judiasm); the assassinations that brought down the Czars; the spread of Bolshevism; vignettes about strange peoples like the warrior mountain Jews of Azerbaijan and an enclave of German speakers in the middle of southern Georgia; the fall of the Habsburgs; the rich multiculturalism of pre-20th century Persia, and more.

One recurring theme is that of fragility. The great empires of the 19th century fell quickly; once permanent, immutable and terrible, they turned practically overnight into scared collections of aristocrats stuffing priceless antiques into carpet bags as they fled revolution. The scrim between placid civilization and barbarism is tissue thin, it seems.

Which is why I worry that, in their zeal to prosecute the War on Terror, Bush & co. are doing something very harmful to the Republic we cherish. By now we've all been reminded that past Presidents suspended civil liberties for this reason or that. The difference is, those wars ended. This war, if it is a "war" in any recognizable sense, doesn't have an end-point. What... the last terrorist on earth waves the white flag and we're done? That is what makes any invocation by the President of "wartime necessity" as a defense for his actions very perilous. There will always be terrorism, and there will always be threats. So wartime necessity becomes mere "necessity."

All of this is to say: I have become increasingly convinced that the sum total of all the small gestures the Bush administration makes that signal a disregard for established procedure or finding wiggle room in Constitutional clauses come distressingly close to creeping authoritarianism. I am well aware that the notion that Congress runs the nation died the day John Adams signed the Sedition Act, but do we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater?

And now for the obligatory concilation. I am well aware we are at war, and even if I don't agree with Roger Scruton, Roger Kimball and Mark Steyn's alarmist and alarming essays in last month's New Criterion (short version: Islam terror fall of Rome; Bread and circus, decadent soft complacent. Liberals concilation, immigrants angry hatred xenophobia, Islam Islam Islam, demographic time bomb, our children will wear the chador, gays and Hollywood lead the way.), I acknowledge and agree that we have to be serious about confronting threats to our way of life.

But again, do we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater?

Much of what I hear from ardent hawks reeks to me of desparation, the cries of people who have looked to long into the abyss and gone mad. Sites like Little Green Footballs (no link from me) have as their stock in trade a shreiking denunciation of people who won't accept that sometimes hard times call for stern measures or whatever. Torture, spy, bomb, and nuke, if we must, and if you disagree you clearly hate our freedom.

But that's all crap. When the talk turns from "shall we, as a society, condone the waterboarding of prisoners as a policy" to "when is it appropriate to waterboard prisoners," from "shall we condone the dentention of American citizens without warrant" to "when is it appropriate to detain..., " from "should the government read our mail," to "when should the government be allowed to read our mail," we edge closer and closer to abandoning for expediency's sake the very principles we hope to export to countries we libervade. Any one of these sets off my alarm bells, but as long as any one of these occurs alone, I'm not going to man the barricades. But a whole bunch of similar stories all unfolding at once isn't a curiosity, it's a trend.

Hate our freedom? I love it! And unlike the torture-hawks, I'm not so afraid of a few splodeydopes that I think we need to abandon ship in orde to save it. I'm all for winning the War on Terrorism, whatever that means. But I'm dead against winning at all costs.

What brought all this on? Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has a long and rich discussion about what we don't know regarding what the President has done with the powers he says he now has, with long excerpts from the Gonzales hearing earlier this week, and it depressed me.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging on robots, food, beer, music, and fart jokes.