The Clinton Doctrine Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit The Clinton Doctrine: War as Executive Privilege by Frank Bardacke Hitherto, war has meant sacrifice. If a band or tribe or nation went to war, soldiers or citizens had to be willing to die as well as to kill. The men who led people into war dad to convince them that it was worth the sacrifice. Convincing a people to stay the course, to accept death and killing over an extended period of time, was considered one of the great acts of statesmanship. It was Pericles speaking to the Athenians, persuading them that their own civilization was worth tumbling the Peloponnesians into war. It was Lincoln, at Gettysburg, telling the citizens of the United States that their union was worth the carnage. It was Churchill in London, rallying the British to endure "blood, sweat and tears" in order to stop Hitler. It is the intention of the Clinton Doctrine to change all that. Now war will mean only a willingness to kill--not a willingness to die. No sacrifice, other than financial, is required; therefore, no soldiers or citizens need to be convinced. Leaders can conduct war without the art of statesmanship because they do not need to explain to their compatriots that all the killing and dying is necessary to the cause. War will be conducted without eloquence, without rhetoric. It will be just another policy matter. No debate in the UN. No debate in Congress. No debate in the country. Citizens will have to do no more than accept the killing. None of us need risk being killed. And after it is over, the leader will say he is sorry. This has been a long time coming, but the war in the Balkans is a serious departure, a frightening glimpse of the future, and a moral disaster with only a few semi-precedents in the brutal history of the Twentieth Century. Since the beginning of what is now being called the American Age, air power has promised to protect the killer from the killed. Death delivered by air, started small in the colonies. The British (with Churchill in the lead) tried to bomb African and Mesopotamian tribes into submission. Mussolini similarly terrorized the Ethiopians. Next, Franco and the Nazis brought the experiment to Europe, where air power was used against the Spanish Republic. But in these--and other, early trial runs--bombs were meant to work in conjunction with troops on the ground. The fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, for all their horror, were done in the midst of a war involving millions of soldiers, and with some risks to the pilots. The nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the technological possibility of producing massive destruction without any danger to airmen. But the technology was primitive and blunt. In Vietnam, after the Vietnamese had won, Kissinger and Nixon fought for a "decent interval of time" before an NLF takeover, by dropping bombs all over Southeast Asia from the essentially invulnerable B-52s. But they needed the coordinated efforts of South Vietnamese soldiers to replace the withdrawing American ones. In Iraq, a new technology of air power was first proudly displayed, but Bush--still wedded to the past--mobilized and used ground troops, and successfully convinced the UN and the American Congress to support war. But now comes the Clinton Doctrine. No ground troops will be employed, and there will be no formal policy debate--neither in the UN, in the Congress, or in the country. The waging of war is now executive privilege. We should have seen it coming. But we were distracted by all the Lewinsky, tale-wagging-dog arguments. Clinton bombed the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq with no commitment of ground troops and no significant attempt to get any kind of mandate to support his actions. We thought the bombs were only an attempt to distract attention from his domestic troubles. No, they were the beginning of his new approach to war. But the policy had not yet been perfected. Clinton still tried to get the nation to support the bombs. He sent a team of people on the road to engage in debate. The town hall demonstrations in Columbus, Ohio made him revise that strategy. This time there will be little attempt to convince any ordinary person that the war is justified. There is no need. After all, none of our boys will be at risk. As Clinton told the military families in one of his few formal speeches in defense of his actions, "America takes care of its own." that's the extent of the required statesmanship and eloquence. Plus, at the end of disaster, a splendid apology. Now we can understand Clinton's belated endorsement of Reagan's discredited Star Wars plan. For Reagan it was primarily a military boondoggle. But for Clinton it is crucial to his strategy. He dreams of a future where satellites will use laser beams to zap enemy cities from outer space. Not even airmen will be required. All we need is a command center in Houston and a couple of technicians working the computers. This is Clinton's promised bridge to the 21st Century. The Clinton Doctrine is also perfectly consistent with Clinton's character. By now we know him well. He is willing to kill but not to die. He executed a mentally crippled man in Arkansas just to give himself a little edge in an election; his draft dodging was cowardly rather than principled. Clinton thinks he can finesse war just as he finesses everything else. The logic that allows you to smoke but not inhale, enjoy fellatio but not have sex, fits perfectly with the notion that a country can fight a war without soldiers. And since Clinton has no sense of personal sacrifice and little concern for history, he is incapable of the grand rhetoric which earlier leaders have used to mobilize their countrymen. But he is very good at apologizing. He is the perfect man for the new war. The arguments which justify any war have always been bloody and brutal. They involve horrific calculations of ends and means, a dark calculus of lesser and greater evils. But on occasion, they have been convincing. Within those global arguments, however, has always hidden a smaller, ethical consideration. A solider's willingness to kill was matched by his willingness to die. It is a version of Kant's categorical imperative; it provides a measure of moral symmetry to war. But the Clinton Doctrine shatters this ethical foundation of soldiery, and makes any larger calculus of war that much more difficult to believe. When we kill from a safe distance we lose all moral perspective. Witness the national concern, whipped up by TV flaks, for the three captured American soldiers in the face of the awesome human misery provoked by our policy. Yellow ribbons, which used to be an expression of support for soldiers who risked their lives, now become a sordid measure of our moral idiocy. We will reap the consequences of such an ultimate denial of the humanity of others. Our daily estrangement from each other will intensify; our internal violence will spiral upward. Our gated communities are already matched by a gated morality, where people think only of their own interests and safety, while they let the security guards deal with the threats from without. The Clinton Doctrine will make it all worse. Soon no one will understand that old time phrase "the moral equivalent of war." What could it have meant? War will bring no on e together, will create no communal feelings, will be just another annoying, expensive government policy. There is only one good thing about the Clinton Doctrine: it probably won't work. Air power--even technologically advanced air power--has not been able to win wars. It certainly is not winning the war in the Balkans. Perhaps a war could be won from the air if everything on the ground were destroyed, if in the logic first uncovered by Tacitus, the lasers make a desert and the politicians call it peace. But, surely, those of us in the United States, those of us in whose name the Clinton Doctrine is being deployed, will not allow that to happen. Surely? *********************************************************** NUEVO AMANECER PRESS-PRENSA NUEVO AMANECER-N.A.P. To know us visit our web page in Spanish in Mexico at: http://www.nap.cuhm.mx/nap0.htm E-mail: General Director: Roger Maldonado A Press in support of the work in defense of Human Rights ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nyteeu-06.19.99-17:17:24-25575