Obama's mad Mohammed decision

The 9/11 attacks killed 2,973 innocents, and were intended to kill many times more. Those two quarter-mile-high World Trade Center towers during working hours amounted to the densest concentration of humanity anywhere on earth -- 50,000 people stacked in two buildings just a couple hundred feet per side each. The third plane which smashed into the Pentagon was meant to decapitate the United States military, and the fourth plane which was crashed by its passengers was bound for either the White House or the Capitol, to decapitate the United States government.

It takes a special kind of madness to extend the rights and protections of American citizens to the enemy leader who planned those attacks, more murderous than even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the worst in American history.

Within days of the Obama Administration's decision to bring the professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to a New York City civilian courtroom for "his day in court," a CNN poll found the American people were against it, 64 percent to 34 percent. The pollster called the decision "universally unpopular -- even a majority of Democrats and liberals say that he should be tried by military authorities." Then Obama's job approval rating fell below the 50-percent waterline for the first time in the Quinnipiac and Gallup polls.

Those real people from the real world understand the fundamental thing, that the 9/11 attacks were no "crime." A "crime" is smashing a storefront window, or mugging and stabbing a passerby who takes a wrong turn down a dark alley. The 9/11 attacks were an act of war and a terror atrocity.

And though you'd never guess it from the Mohammed decision, the Obama Administration does occasionally show signs they know there's a war on. This same Obama Administration has if anything increased the unmanned aerial strikes on enemy targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If information comes over the transom that some worthwhile enemy is holed up in an open spot, then a drone gets airborne, locates the target, and unceremoniously drops a Hellfire missile or a JDAM on his head.

Those enemy belligerents are not arrested and read their rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States, then flown to New York for their taxpayer-funded legal representation and their day in court. They're summarily blown to kingdom come, along with any poor innocent souls unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because this is war, not some law enforcement operation. And in war, when an enemy is captured and given trial, there is a centuries-old mechanism for dealing with him: military tribunal.

All the way back in 2001, the Bush Administration created a system of military commissions precisely to deal with the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the commissions were immediately challenged in court by leftist legal activists who've never met an enemy of the United States they didn't like. The activists managed to obstruct the commissions in their good work until 2008, when after two Supreme Court rulings, the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress finalized a military commissions system which passed muster with the Supreme Court and the notions of the decadent 21st Century.

The Obama Administration and its hardier water-carriers who imagine that civilian trials for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are only right and proper, insist that of course Mohammed will be found guilty and put to death, and on the off-chance he isn't, why, we'll just re-arrest him on the spot, come up with some new charge, and try, try again until we get the verdict we want. But if this trial is so predetermined, and the system may simply be gamed until we have our way, then why on earth can we not dispense with the pretense and leave Mohammed's case with the special military commissions, where he was on course to plead guilty and have his "martyrdom" by execution until Obama suspended the process?

How might American civilian law have to be compromised in order for this Mohammed case to be heard at all in a civilian courtroom? Until now, it never occurred to U.S. agents to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as they would an American citizen accused of a cooking up illicit whiskey or some such thing: he wasn't read his rights, for a start, and he happens to have been the primary subject of that practice called waterboarding. Unless some exception is made, those kinds of things would be grounds for tossing the case out in the civilian system. And how might national security be compromised if and when Mohammed demands discovery -- placing the raw military intelligence to do with his case in his hands?

Of course the United States can defend its greatest city against terror attacks made more likely by a high-profile trial of the 9/11 mastermind just blocks from Ground Zero, but why should it have to? Why should New Yorkers be given new reason to fear? Why should the Armed Forces and law enforcement be given a new threat to defend against? Why should the American taxpayer have to put up $75 million for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's "day in court," and endure his harangues for however long it takes to come to the end of this ghastly process?

This is not the will of the American people. There's a reckoning coming, and Obama's mad Mohammed decision is just another milestone along the road to it.

The war they can't get right

I made the mistake of watching James David Robenalt's presentation on his new book The Harding Affair -- Love and Espionage During the Great War, carried on C-SPAN's Book TV, and it was problematic enough to prompt this post.

Now, for my sins, I am an obsessive student of the First World War. The gateway drug of the Second World War having become too mild for me, I moved onto the harder stuff. Garand M-1s wouldn't do it for me anymore, so I graduated to water-cooled Vickers-Maxim heavy machine guns. And it is the bane of anyone who knows anything at all about the First World War that it is very probably the war most freely pronounced-upon by people who are so far out of their depth on the subject, they wouldn't know a pikelhaube from a piccolo if they sat on one.

Unless the work is by the likes of Hew Strachan or Paul Johnson, or John Keegan or Victor Davis Hanson, it's a good policy to avoid 21st Century perspectives on the First World War. They're too often worse than useless. Your typical History Channel "In the Classrom" early-morning documentary which bears on the First World War will make some blithe assertion like that the generals thought trench warfare was a fine idea, and would make a great plan for winning the war. That's the kind of I-think-it-therefore-it-must-be-so-and-there's-no-need-of-checking-it that gets written up, passed through a layer or two of editors, and then passed off as a TV documentary on the First World War.

(That example is legitimate, by the way, though to save my life I couldn't think of the title of the thing. And in case you're wondering, the trenches were nowhere in the plans for the First World War; trench warfare was what happened when the lines stopped moving, and there was nowhere to hide from anti-personnel artillery shelling, long-range, high-powered rifle fire, and sweeping machine gun fire. The trenches weren't some general's idea for winning the war, they were a desperate resort to keep men alive. They weren't planned at all, they just happened when men were faced with the choice of digging a hole or not seeing the next sunrise.)

So I should have known better than to see what this James David Robenalt had to say on the subject. But I'm a sucker for C-SPAN's Book TV, so I watched a bit and promptly had my instincts confirmed by this novel piece of reasoning:

James David Robenalt: "When [then-President] Woodrow Wilson asked for
war, he says it's a war to make the world safe for democracy. And the
reason he says that is he believes democracies are inherently more stable
and less likely to go to war. [So far, so good.]

"[Then-Senator Warren G.] Harding disagrees. He thinks --
and how's this for a modern theme? -- he says, and you can find his
speech on the Senate floor, 'It's none of our business, to go tell somebody
else what government they should have. We should take care
of ourselves, and we really shouldn't be involved in regime change.'
[I take it that wasn't Harding's exact phraseology, which apparently
can be found somewhere on the Senate floor.]

"Now, who was right in that debate? History will tell
you. But I can tell you this: Russia became a democracy, for
about six months, and Wilson recognized them immediately, and he was
joyful. And six months later the Bolsheviks take over. [So
"Russia became a democracy", and the next thing you know, "the Bolsheviks take
over". And it's all the fault of that darn Wilson and his darn
democracy.] And you have Lenin and Stalin, and you know, what
happened in Russia.

"The Kaiser eventually abdicates. Germany becomes a democracy.
But they weren't ready for it. It was a weak democracy: the Weimar
Republic. Naziism comes about, Hitler comes about. [Another
straight line: "Germany becomes a democracy" then "Hitler comes about".]

"So it's a great debate about who was right in that debate about
regime-change. But it's a modern theme. I mean, it's the issue of
Iraq, revisited." [Just in case you hadn't worked out that he was talking about Iraq all along.]

So there you have it. The history of the 20th Century, according to James David Robenalt. Or, James David Robenalt's entry for most buffoonish argument ever made having to do with the First World War and its aftermath, being that it was democracy that gave us the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

According to this line of reasoning, Germany wasn't "ready for democracy" in 1919, though it demonstrably was ready for democracy in 1945, and if only we hadn't insisted on democracy for Germany 26 years "too soon", there'd have been no Hitler and no Second World War. Of course, several generations now, from the 1930s on, have blamed Hitler and the war on the less-than-total victory in the First World War, the ruinous, humiliating, and impossible reparations in the Treaty of Versailles, and the war costs and economic collapse. But James David Robenalt has a different idea: it was the democracy that did it.

And, according to this line, those Communists who'd been attempting revolution in Russia for decades before 1917 and finally had the complete societal collapse they needed to seize power, only managed it because Russia had "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917. I have to say, this Russia point looks to me like it goes beyond mere specious argument, to inventing an alternate history which may more conveniently be shoehorned into a potshot against the democracy project of the Iraq War. At what point in the First World War, and in what conceivable sense, did Russia "become a democracy"? That could only refer to what is called the Russian "Provisional Government" of 1917, but the the whole business was chaos from start to finish, the Provisional Government never did get around to holding the national elections which were its principal raison d'etre, and when finally those elections did come to pass, after the October Revolution, Lenin's Bolsheviks wound up the runners-up and without the electoral mandate or legislative votes for their Soviet totalitarianism, so Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly after all of one day, and the rest is history. 

And even if Russia had "become a democracy", the argument here goes that, if only the czar had stayed on and showed 'em who's the master, and Wilson hadn't got his "democracy", those Bolshies would never have gotten their little experiment off the ground. Just think, the Robenalt argument goes: no Soviet Union, no Stalin, no Cold War, if only Russia hadn't "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917.

Again, since just about the time of the Russian Revolution, it has been understood that the imposition of Communism in that country had everything to do with the mass national revulsion against the old system which had brought the nation to utter ruin, even unto starvation. The strain of the war brought things to breaking point, and the situation was seized on by the Communist faction called the Bolsheviks. And by "old system" I refer to the czarist regime of decades and centuries previous, not some half-imaginary six-month "democracy" in 1917.

I would dearly love to see Christopher Hitchens, who happens to be an authority also of the Bolshevik Revolution, take his rapier to that it-was-all-democracy's-fault line of historical argument.

Now I am no head-shrinker, but I don't think head-shrinking credentials are requisite in order to diagnose the condition of which that argument is a symptom. I'd reckon that it would never have occurred to James David Robenalt to argue that democracy caused the Soviet Empire and Third Reich, before the Iraq War. And I'd reckon that James David Robenalt altogether despises that war and the arguments for it -- particularly the argument that the democratizaion of Iraq sets the model for reform in the region which is our only hope for settling this business once and for all, and that democractization turns enemy to ally -- or if not an affirmative ally then at least a mostly-decent state not routinely invading some neighbor or gassing some unloved domestic minority or fostering hostile alliances or building up unconventional arsenals for the next big dust-up.

I'm just old enough, in fact, to remember a time when that kind or argument was much more likely to be found on the Left than on the Right. But then came 9/11, and the man whom history handed the decision of what was to be done about it happened to be George W. Bush. In what may be the sole deviation of President Bush from Candidate Bush, George W. Bush became arguably the greatest practicing believer in the democracy-makes-peace argument since 1919, and inarguably since 1945. I had my own Road-to-Damascus at about the same time, and became a zealous convert myself, at least for the duration of this war. And for a naive moment I assumed that the elite and the Left, if there's a distinction, would at the very least not oppose that democratization cause. But no. Because democratization necessarily meant war and occupation, and because it had become U.S. policy, and not only that but Bush Administration policy, the elite and the Left turned in one motion to positively demonizing democratization -- condemning it in such terms that anyone might have thought Bush wasn't trying to democratize Iraq but reinstitute slavery -- as if democratization were some grievous historic sin.

And after several years of that, the likes of James David Robenalt comes along and concocts the novel argument that Iraq-style democratization brought the Nazis in Germany and the Soviets in Russia, and all that followed. Funny that no-one thought to make that argument in the 90-odd years since the end of the First World War. And it's hardly as if the rise of Naziism and the rise of Bolshevism haven't been much speculated on in that time.

This book of James David Robenalt is supposed to be about a love affair involving Warren G. Harding, which ought to win some award for wringing 416 pages out of possibly the world's least-interesting historical love affair. But anti-Iraq-War-ism radicalizes, drives to extremes of argument, and infects even the driest historical romance. I won't pronounce on the rest of the book -- though I have to say I got a distinct whiff of German-sympathizing off this Robenalt -- because there's no way I'd look at 416 pages of this, much less pay to look at it.