15 Minutes Past Sagittarius

What’s in a name? It depends on the context. When a president designates a conflict to be a war, it matters whether he’s speaking legally or attempting to rally people to his point of view.  The difference is in the actions that are permissible both legally and morally.

War is barbaric. Yet there have always been individuals, tribes, and countries who will kill other men, enslave women and children, and take property without compunction, purely to glut their own appetites. Even a man so saintly as to refuse to defend his own life will be conflicted when his nation, his community, or his family is threatened by savages. There is a time for peace and a time for war, and distinct moralities for each. These moralities are based on the two philosophical views of idealism and materialism.

Idealism  develops from the Platonic concept of Beauty – that all things resolve to a unity of one, which is essentially spiritual in nature. Materialism concerns itself with that which we can detect with our physical senses and instruments, and thus recognizes individual objects co-existing in degrees of relationship which may be harmonious, conflicting, or both. As idealism is concerned with the eternal and necessary, so materialism examines the immediate and accidental. Materialism’s moniker is Power, which is simply the capacity to effect movement and change. Change does not exist in the ideal.

The poetic language of Beauty and Power is meant to convey qualities which aren’t so evident in the academic terms. The experience of Beauty can include a palpable sense of the presence of an artist expressing some meaning or purpose through his creation, via its order and unity. Plato is perhaps the West’s first monotheist, though he kept his philosophy remarkably free of dogma. Power is used in a non-prejudicial way to include the attribute that the material is unconscious as its objects decay and re-formulate themselves, blind as a rogue nation toying with weapons that could destroy all civilization, including its own people. When Power develops a religion, its gods are multiple, compete with each other, and can be arbitrary in interacting with us.

Neither materialism nor idealism can be held in a pure form – these are two sides of the same coin, in the same way that astrophysics and quantum mechanics describe the same world even though they have irreconcilable attributes. An idealist, for example, who claims that the right to life is absolute must qualify whether that right applies simply to members of his own species, perhaps to all mammals or all animals, or extends even to plant and microbial life. This might favor materialism, but materialism is implicitly compromised by its nature of change – if it were pure then the basis of morality could at best be self-interest, but even that encounters complications when considering relationships one has with others and with one’s world. Materialist morality resolves to some form of utilitarianism – whether one’s values are mutually consistent, whether one’s behavior is consistent with realizing them, and with thought given to any obligation to others and to the common good.

A modern, civilized culture tends toward the morality of Beauty when at peace. This is implicit respect for the worth of each person and support for his rights, in confidence that the ultimate outcome of self-determination by each of us tends ultimately to the good. But when confronted by those within whom the divine spark is so muddied that their actions and intent  are evil, the same culture – the same people – turn to the morality of Power, and ready themselves for war. Both are modes by which one interacts with the world, and both exist at least latently in everyone. This duality is evidenced in the Koran, which favors peace but also teaches an obligation to war in some circumstances (which are or can be made ambiguous.)

A country considers war justified when its own interests are at stake, meaning (under a representative government) the interests of its populace. It’s extremely difficult for a nation to enter war for the sake of another people, and not simply on practical grounds – a mark of legitimacy in a government is that it extends the right to self-determination to all nations as well as to its own citizens. Our country was able to gather an international coalition to supplant the Taliban government of Afghanistan primarily on the basis that it’s in the national interest of all countries to protect their people from terrorist murder, and only secondarily that the Taliban imposed its own determination of how people must live on an unwilling populace by force and was acting to extend that influence.

Clearly rights to life and property are compromised in war. But civilized cultures no longer abandon principles entirely when at war – otherwise we could hold no concept of war crimes. We are developing international codes as to which are legitimate and which illegal weapons, at what targets these may be deployed, and who bears the responsibility for violations (individual soldiers, those who give the orders, and/or whether the offending nation and its populace are culpable.) Nonetheless, in war morality includes expediency – ‘collateral damage’ is a sanitized term meaning that unintentional or unavoidable harm to otherwise protected people and property, though regrettable, can be morally and legally accepted.

Usama bin Laden is dead. And Anwar al-Awlaki, too, was specifically targeted for assassination. Under the morality of war we can celebrate their deaths. Any disquiet with that joy is the presence of Beauty within our souls. Killing is more troubling when the enemy has a name and a face, in part because someone worth targeting must be extraordinary in some way. But assassination is expedient – take off the head and the serpent will die harmlessly. Neither have we only now adopted this tool – we sent a squadron for Isoroku Yamamoto during World War II. And one of our most popular presidents, John Kennedy, is alleged to have authorized several attempts against Fidel Castro (if true, hopefully on the basis that Castro invited the threatening presence of the former Soviet Union just off our shores during the Cold War.)

That last example brings up the point that war can have an expansive definition. It’s not necessarily an overt conflict between governments – the Cold War was a conflict of the ideologies and distrust of two nations which never took up arms directly against each other, though we sometimes used hapless third countries as proxies (intolerable, if not claiming wartime morality.)

Governments can also claim war against non-political agencies – i.e., the war on drugs. Governor Rick Perry, a candidate for the presidency in the next election, recently said, “It may require our military in Mexico working in concert with them to kill these drug cartels and to keep them off of our border and to destroy their networks.”  This is not unlike our justification for intervention in Afghanistan; primarily, the drug cartels present a clear and immediate threat to our citizens of murder and other crimes, and only secondarily these cartels continue to commit mass murders in Mexico, the government of which is too weak and too corrupt to put an end to it.

The intertwining of idealism and materialism is expressed in the contradictions that Beauty, while worshiping the unity of all, respects the individual, and that Power, while championing the individual, requires him to surrender significant rights to the hierarchy of war. Not just soldiers – we would not tolerate the intrusive searches of private persons and property in airports if we did not agree that terrorists are at war with us.

That weave is expressed in the two fundamental documents of our government, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration presents our most basic ideals, naming as inalienable the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – then states that governments exist in order to secure these rights. The Constitution defines our government’s structure, responsibilities, and powers. The Declaration cites self-evident truths, twice appealing to God – hallmarks of the ideal. That a government must be established to defend these principles is a practical, rather than ideal necessity. The ideal holds primacy, but where we can’t agree on values – domestically or with potential enemies – we must establish utilitarian principles.  Our government is a material overlay on ideal concepts, an imperfect instrument attempting to institute the absolute.

First and foremost, government is charged to respect the divine spark within each of us – that is, it must support self-determination. Each citizen will have his or her unique perspective on the ideal, and in the very act of giving it substance the ideal is no longer pure.  Thus, a government must adopt legal statutes and avoid enforcing subjective principles (those truths revealed beyond articulation within individual souls) as much as possible. The separation can’t be maintained perfectly; an example unrelated to the subject of this article is that whether marriage should be defined as a union between one man and one woman is self-evident to a great many people. Self-evidence is the perspective of idealism – in religious terms it’s called revelation. Yet we require governments to recognize and guarantee specific rights on the basis of marriage contracts – our government is being forced to legislate a decision on whether same-sex couples can claim at least some of those same rights.

In principle certain rights extend to all people, and absolutely. Through the instrument of government, however, they are limited – enforcement means restriction. And distinction is drawn between the citizens whom a government represents and aliens, a consequence both of respecting the right of other peoples to self-determination and of the practical, material bias toward self-interest. Not even the first-named right – life – is held sacred; in order for government to secure our ideals it must be granted the power to make war, be given our permission to kill. Even internally, government assumes the authority to take life in action against criminal activity; the degree to which that is tolerated is morally contentious, and subject to our weaknesses as well as to our ideals.

There is a time for war, an obligation. And war is not so tightly defined; as an enemy’s strategies and methods develop a political character, they begin to defy police control and must be answered with war powers. This applies even to organized crime when its influence crosses borders and affect the liberties of other peoples, when criminals becomes effectively a warlike tribe oppressing its neighbors. Religious fundamentalists are of the same character when their methods include intimidation, brutality, and murder. Moslem extremists can claim that their actions are a response to Western interventions in their lands, but the Taliban has demonstrated that this is sometimes a ruse for an Islamic Crusade – the imposition of a religious way of life by force. This is Power masquerading as Beauty, betrayed by its contempt for the sanctity of other people’s lives.

Defense against terrorism must be explicitly defined as war by Congress because actions which are both legal and moral are far more extreme in war than in police action, meaning that they depart much further from our ideals. The rights which a government denies enemies and the lands which harbor them, and those which it must withdraw from its own citizens in order to conduct war efficiently are significant. Presidents who declare war in rhetoric yet do not appeal to Congress for the official designation can too easily find themselves in a legal quagmire, their staffs inclined to use war powers – in good faith, but without having been given the authority. The degree to which rights, and our ideals, can be compromised must be made explicit.

Guantanamo Bay is just such a legal no-man’s land. Those held there aren’t officially prisoners of war, but neither are they simply criminals; thus they’ve been given the peculiar designation of ‘enemy combatants.’ President Obama wanted very much to process the prisoners via the civil justice system, but as a practical matter has found that virtually impossible. A martial court is wanted here, not simply for its comparative efficiency, but also to deny these prisoners one of their favorite weapons – a platform for speeches to incite further bloodshed.

That expediency is a legitimate principle of government is easily seen in the example of a municipal emergency medical service confronted with a mass-casualty incident, whether it be a localized event such as a multiple shooting or traffic accident, or a disperse emergency such as a weather disaster. Because resources are finite, triage is invoked, meaning that victims are prioritized: those with critical injuries but for whom intervention has a hopeful prognosis, those with serious but not life-threatening injuries, those with minor injuries, and those dead or sure to die regardless of any intervention. The commanding officer must explicitly declare the emergency because the care and resources to which the injured are normally entitled are limited. Additionally, he is assuming authority for some of the decisions usually made by his personnel and their patients – for example, patients must be distributed among all the area hospitals rather than overwhelming any one. The environment changes to a more military hierarchy, and his subordinates must know the rules under which they are operating. Competently performed, triage produces the best outcome for the greatest number of people. As with all exercises of power, however, even this is subject to corruption, such as distinguishing the worth of different victims (favoring a public figure over the anonymous, or allowing the instinctive maxim of ‘women and children first’ to overly influence one’s assessments.)

In like manner, the mode under which terrorism is being fought must be explicit – a president’s staff must know whether they have the licenses of war or are limited to the arsenal of police agencies, and they must know whether certain decisions are theirs to make or must be submitted to the chain of command. The more militaristic an administration must be the more responsible a president becomes for the competence and discipline of his staff.

Terrorism raises the problem that the enemy is not a government, but rather people who subscribe to an ideology, and who use guerrilla tactics; they aren’t easily identified, nor do they necessarily have a hardened chain of command. This makes a formal declaration under current definitions of war difficult. What is needed is a legal distinction for this class of conflict, to make clear the war powers (the intrusions into rights) that are authorized. We certainly had the power to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty in going after bin Laden, and most of the world community looked away, recognizing the continuing threat he posed and suspicious of that government’s complicity in harboring him. But might does not make right. While we constitutionally disallow submitting ourselves to any law outside our own, we still want an international standard that legitimizes such an action, a class that defines the war powers which may be employed against terrorists. Such a definition could apply also to actions against piracy, drug cartels, and the sex-slave machinery – groups with an internal hierarchy or community which commit or indulge profound violations of human rights on an international level, when their victims include our own citizens.

In peace one cannot legitimize assassination – that first-named right, life, is simply too sacred. But in war the utilitarian case is easily established that the killing of key figures is likely to weaken the enemy and ultimately minimize the loss of life and property both among the enemy’s and one’s own military and populace. The decision to compromise our principles has been made – the matter becomes a mathematics of what action will most efficiently allow us to return to those ideals of peace.

But materialism is imperfect, subject to decay; remembering that government is the servant of our ideals, morality requires that assassination be employed only against those whose death is likely to save lives or shorten war – revenge, retribution, and political gain,  are invalid grounds. In the class of war which terrorism represents, an administration should be required to submit the name of an individual to be targeted to the courts to judge whether, by military (not civil) standards, assassination is permissible. The executive branch at any level of government is disposed to the expedient, and needs the oversight of the courts, which are more directly charged to be mindful of our ideals and the extent to which government must compromise individual rights in its responsibility to secure them for all. Death sentences, especially without due process, are a far more profound intrusion into rights than, for example, wire-tapping.

The assassination of al-Awlaki is more problematic than that of bin Laden because our government is charged to recognize greater rights in its own citizens. No doubt the legal aspect will be a thorn to the administration. Utilitarian morality, too, obligates a government to honor its contract with all its citizens, however heinous their conduct. In an undeclared war, al-Awlaki couldn’t be classified a traitor, but neither was he a mere criminal; he may be named another ‘enemy combatant,’ and the assassination did occur on foreign soil, but that classification lacks legal status, and our government’s obligation to uphold the rights of its citizens does not disappear offshore (otherwise, neither would there be moral support for the intrusions of rescue missions such as that in Grenada.) With no formal declaration authorizing the war power to kill without the due process to which a citizen is especially entitled, our government has committed a moral infraction for our benefit and in our name for the sake of expediency.

One wants not only to forgive, but to thank them, but then to follow up by insisting on the declarations and the legislation that will involve the courts, lest the current or future administrations continue to expand their concept of when assassination may be employed. Recall that the very dangerous Al Capone was sent to prison for income tax evasion, rather than the murders, rum-running, and extortion for which he was wanted; the outcome was laudable, but that precedent established the technique of searching for any crime one can find when a prosecutor wants to imprison an individual, regardless of whether motivated by justice, public pressure, or personal or political gain. Congressmen may themselves be tempted to wield the law in like manner, as a political weapon. In just this way our principles decay.

During domestic disasters the ranking police officer is normally the incident commander, with whom fire, EMS, and other public safety agencies must consult. This is as it should be, not the least reason for which is that police are implicitly more cognizant of what is legal and what is not; fire officials will be more expert on what is a safe perimeter in an unstable environment, and paramedic officers will want some persons removed from a scene when they interfere with or place burdens on rescue efforts, but it’s the police who are given the training and authority to control the movement and behavior of the public in an emergency. Due to the nature and urgency of their work, firefighters and paramedics are especially motivated to act on their personal concepts of expediency, but their training and judgement is narrowly focused on the mission immediately at hand. And once the fire hose is rolled up the people must be free to go about their lives.

War is a comparable emergency, during which a government is given extra powers over a broad range of civilian matters, including control of domestic transportation, communications, and even the rationing of privately produced goods such as gasoline. But we must not allow war practices and agencies to become so deeply embedded that we have difficulty recovering our souls when peace is restored; when democracy returns we must not allow any official to be touted a tzar, lest we become complacent to a pre-socialist autocrat. It’s we who are the source of authority, and without our oversight even the most sincere official is tempted to reverse government’s role by attempting to mold the citizenry to her view of what an American should be.

With these considerations, such an entity as the Department of Homeland Security should not exist except in a time of war, however heart-warming its name may be during fearful days. This concentrates police and emergency powers, including privileges of secrecy, in one agency – more effective, but any of its excesses and corruption will be amplified. Police are the immediate instrument of government within the public at large, exercising that government’s authority to restrict rights, and it requires extraordinary character to resist the abuses – little and big – which such power invites. Separation of powers is inefficient, but is a necessary restraint, and a principle of our constitution.

Given this caution, however, when disasters occur police and emergency services must be given a degree of autonomy to implement their expertise. Even a mayor or a governor should limit his participation to discovering and providing any additional resources that could be available to his commander and subordinate officers. Likewise, past experiences such as in Vietnam have taught us that the concept of limited war should refer more to defined objectives than to the strategies which our generals employ.

What’s in a name? When that name is war, it’s the balance of our rights under our ideals,  as well as those of the enemy and the lands in which they operate. When Mexican gangs begin kidnaping our daughters to consume their lives in forced prostitution, should we send our military in for them? This is the moral and the obligatory course. Some will be lost despite our efforts, and some because of them, and some soldiers will suffer irreparable damage in body and in  soul, but such horror must be stopped. But crossing the border is an act of war, and war, with its goal, must be declared. As this is an imminent possibility, the Pentagon would be remiss if not already having a contingency plan – Mr. President, unleash them the very day that your agents report our lost children being forced into a van in Tijuana. We only require that you approach Congress soon after for the proper declaration.