9/11 Tradeoffs Posted by Ari Melber

As we turn from Iraq to 9/11, I've been thinking about how America's post-9/11 discourse has not changed much in six years.  Politicians and journalists still present most homeland security debates as tradeoffs between security and liberty. But the Bush Administration's most severe security measures since 9/11 are actually premised on radically different tradeoff: pursuing security by sacrificing the rule of law itself.

The administration's attempts to undermine American rule of law -- from torture to spying to detaining citizens without trial -- is both morally wrong and harmful to our national security.  But what if the David Addingtons of the world were right?  What if destroying American rule of law did advance our security?  I explore that question in an editorial for The Nation today, and busy Democracy Arsenal readers can skip right to the conclusion:

In an asymmetric battle with terrorists, our enemies are not seeking a traditional military victory, like occupying American cities. Instead, they aim to erode our power abroad, terrorize our society at home, advance Islamism and destroy the American way of life. No US government would ever accede to those objectives. But suppose, as a thought experiment, that Americans could prevent all terrorist attacks by converting to Islam, as Osama bin Laden urges in his new video. Would we willingly trade our faith and freedom for security? Of course not.

Now suppose that Bush's extremist advisers are right, and we could actually end terrorism by aborting the rule of law. Would we trade our laws and freedom for security? After touting Muslim conversion in his new video, Bin Laden's other stated goal was to "do away with the American democratic system of government," as ABC News' Jonathan Karl reported. If we let our leaders pursue security by destroying the democratic rule of law in this country, then yes, the terrorists will already have won.

Do you agree?

The entire editorial is here.

Updated Comment Response:

Dan Kervick raises an important concern about falling into the trap of merely falling into the "If we do X, the terrorists win" argument. He writes:

The message is that the main reason not to trade our laws and freedom for security is that that's what the terrorists want us to do... I prefer a message that demands a bit more courage and fidelity from the American people, and doesn't draw so much on oppositional and heteronymous "war on terror" paranoia. The kind of society that we decide to have should have nothing at all to do with the way a few jihadi gang-bangers do or do not want us to live. If it should turn out that Bin Laden wants me to stop global warming, for example, I should not then decide not to stop global warming just to spite Bin Laden.

I definitely agree. This is even more important for foreign policy debates than domestic concerns (such as the rule of law principles in my piece), because President Bush has often defined our strategic goals in the Middle East reactively, in the shadow of opposing "what the terrorists want."  (For more on that, check out this op-ed I wrote last year, titled simply, "Who Cares What The Terrorists Want?")

Comments

[Wordsmith]

We need to get rid of that word - homeland. It's too damned fascist-sounding, let alone Orwellian.

[Don Bacon]

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld said:

"People think of terrorism as the purpose of terrorism to kill people. It often has that effect. But the purpose of terrorism is not to kill people, it's to terrorize people, it's to alter their behavior, it's to cause them to do something fundamentally different than they otherwise would be doing; that is to say to do exactly what the terrorists want them to do and to live a life and to behave in a manner consistent with what the terrorists want".--Air Force War College, October 18, 2006

[Don Bacon]

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld said:

"People think of terrorism as the purpose of terrorism to kill people. It often has that effect. But the purpose of terrorism is not to kill people, it's to terrorize people, it's to alter their behavior, it's to cause them to do something fundamentally different than they otherwise would be doing; that is to say to do exactly what the terrorists want them to do and to live a life and to behave in a manner consistent with what the terrorists want".--Air Force War College, October 18, 2006

[Dan Kervick]

In an asymmetric battle with terrorists, our enemies are not seeking a traditional military victory, like occupying American cities. Instead, they aim to erode our power abroad, terrorize our society at home, advance Islamism and destroy the American way of life.

I'm not thrilled about yet another version of the "If we do X, the terrorists win" argument. The message is that the main reason not to trade our laws and freedom for security is that that's what the terrorists want us to do. To my mind, that's as perverse as saying that the main reason not to sell my children into slavery is that that's what the slave traders want me to do, and I don't want to let the slave traders win.

I prefer a message that demands a bit more courage and fidelity from the American people, and doesn't draw so much on oppositional and heteronymous "war on terror" paranoia. The kind of society that we decide to have should have nothing at all to do with the way a few jihadi gang-bangers do or do not want us to live. If it should turn out that Bin Laden wants me to stop global warming, for example, I should not then decide not to stop global warming just to spite Bin Laden. Similarly, If Bin Laden wants me to throw away a priceless treasure, it seems bit perverse to say that I shouldn't throw the treasure away just "so the terrorists don't win". I shouldn't throw it away because it is a priceless treasure.

We are called upon by our tradition and historical vocation to preserve our liberal, democratic system of government, and to honor the sacrifices of our ancestors who fought to establish and defend that system of government. To destroy that system for marginal enhancements to our safety is cowardly and dishonorable, and a betrayal of every man or woman who died to defend the Constitution. That system has many obvious and also hidden strengths, and can enhance security in important ways. But it was never designed to be the most safe system of government. It was designed to be the most free system, and living in the open air inevitably exposes one to risks not faced by people who wall themselves up in a fortress.

One of the most trite phrases kicked around since 9/11 is that the Constitution "is not a suicide pact". Well maybe not. But in fact, fidelity to the Constitution does require that one be prepared sometimes to risk death. Accepting that risk is my obligation as an American. We should just embrace that commitment and fact of life, and condemn Bush, Cheney and their cowardly acolytes in right-wingdom, who are evidently not prepared to accept that risk.

In any case, I really don't think that "destroying the American way of life" is nearly such a big deal for Islamists as American war on terror nuts would have it. Most militant Islamists have much more limited regional goals that they seek to advance by reducing the American and Western presence and influence in the Muslim world, and their attacks on Americans and Westerners serves the purely instrumental role of raising the price for our involvement with Muslim societies, so as to get us out. Some Islamists are not starkly opposed in their ideological views to Western culture. Others are more puritanical, and adamantly do not want Western ways, or even unorthodox Muslim ways, for their own societies, but don't bother themselves much with the more grandiose goal of eliminating Western ways of life wherever they exist.

Just one aside: Personally, I do not believe that is Bin Laden on the latest tape. It doesn't even look like him - and I don't just mean the person on the tape looks older. The message on the tape is also bizarrely America-centric. So even if it is Bin Laden, he appears to be a confused and declining figure, wrapped up now in tired internet debates about such staples of Muslim thought as Noam Chomsky and the US tax code.

[Zathras]

I can see why Dan Kervick isn't in politics for a living. To preserve civil liberties in a period of terrorist threat you need to do a little better than tell Americans that they must be prepared to die. That line of argument wouldn't survive the next terrorist attack; even most of the people who would make that argument now would forget within days that they had ever done so.

American democracy is not predicated on the unique virtue of the American people. It is no use expecting Americans to believe that, whatever happens, there are some things we will never do. "Whatever," after all, could mean a lot of pretty bad things; Americans, no more virtuous by nature than any other people, will go pretty far pretty fast to prevent some of those things from happening. What is required is some level of public confidence in government, such that Americans can be reassured that steps taken in the name of fighting terrorism that would abridge civil liberties and undermine the rule of law are not necessary.

Such public confidence in government is easier spoken of than achieved. And it isn't the only thing required. A proper understanding of, and appropriate contempt for, the enemy is also required. Products of backward, inferior Arab and Southwest Asian cultures, devoted to violence, profoundly racist, if anything even more enthusiastic about killing other Muslims than any of the other people on their very long list of enemies, producing and achieving nothing....that is the nature of the people devoted now to terrorism. Modern society is such that people like this can, if they have access to modern weaponry, explosives or (as on 9/11) knowledge of vulnerable points in the transportation system, cause great damage and loss of life. Obviously we cannot permit this.

But we also need to recognize savages for what they are -- a nuisance and occasional menace to us, a much more deadly threat to people and nations closer to them. They have no ideas of any interest to Americans, nor are they representative of the great majority of people who visit or immigrate to this country. Turning ourselves inside out, ignoring standards of conduct and procedure that have served us very well in our relations with the rest of the world, and abandoning the liberties of our own people in response to such a threat would represent overreaction tantamount to panic, and a serious failure of leadership.

A public lacking confidence in its government and in doubt as to the level of threat it faces will be sorely tempted to want greater activity from the government and think more of the threat than it should. To the extent Washington has gone overboard in the measures it has taken in the name of security since 9/11 it has responded to this dynamic, which must be changed if more significant erosion of Americans' civil liberties is to be avoided in the future.

[David Billington]

The trouble is the problem of scale. If terror attacks become larger by orders of magnitude, sentiment in favor of emergency rule in the United States will rise and eventually overwhelm what remains of constitutional government.

The problem is that the only choice seems to be either to hold our form of government hostage to events, by carefully proportioning what we do to what we think is the scale of the threat as measured by its last demonstration, or to lash out in blind ad hoc efforts to prevent a greater catastrophe that is still hypothetical. Both responses are short-term.

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