Now I Understand Why They Hate Us

By David Hilfiker, AlterNet. Posted January 12, 2009.

Our democracy is in danger. Congress has chosen not to challenge the arrogation of presidential power, and the Supreme Court has come perilously close to declaring constitutional the "unitary executive theory" (under which this power as commander in chief has flowed to the president). Despite clear Supreme Court precedent to the contrary, the present Court appears now to be one vote away from giving the president the power he demands.

Unfortunately, the danger is not just one man or one administration that will be swept from office on Jan. 20. No modern president has ever turned down the power given to him. As he has discovered the power of the intelligence agencies under his control, for instance, every modern president has used it. The power of the presidency has grown without interruption since the Great Depression. Unless something is done, the next president -- or the one after that -- will maintain these powers and pass them on. Our democracy is in peril. 

Public Acceptance of Brutality 

The militarization of our nation has had other profound effects. One has been the increasing public acceptance of brutality on the part of the government. Immediately following 9/11, over a thousand foreigners were rounded up. All details of their cases were kept secret, including their names and the charges, if any, against them. They were simply seized, incarcerated -- mostly in New York prisons -- beaten by guards, and, after a lengthy time in jail, deported, usually for the most minor of offenses. Not one of those arrested turned out to have the slightest connection to the 9/11 attacks.

There was no legal basis for any of this. There was also virtually no indignation expressed by the people of this country. Habeas corpus, the right to be brought before a judge to hear the charges against one to prevent baseless detention, one of the fundamental rights of democracy extending back centuries, had been trampled and very few objected.

Over the past several years, as it has become clear that the Bush administration has not only condoned but also encouraged torture from the highest levels (their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding), there has been some objection from both the right and the left. But there has been no general outrage, no mass demonstrations in the street, no general calls for impeachment. According to polls in May 2004, over 50 percent of Americans believed that the government was employing torture "as a matter of policy," yet Bush was re-elected later in that year.

The United States has signed the Geneva Conventions, which means, according to our Constitution, that those provisions have the force of U.S. law. The Conventions prohibit any kind of violence to civilians. During the "shock and awe" phase of the Iraq war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his aides planned to try to kill "high-value targets" like Saddam Hussein. "According to the plans, Rumsfeld personally had to sign off on any airstrike thought likely to result in the deaths of more than 30 civilians. The air war commander  proposed 50 such raids and Rumsfeld signed the orders for each and every one." We have become so used to the euphemism collateral damage that many are surprised to learn that the term is not recognized or even mentioned in international humanitarian law. Even without the Geneva Conventions, any interpretation of the just-war theory prohibits violence against noncombatants.

We have apparently become used to our governments acting in immoral, illegal and brutal ways. We apparently find it acceptable.

It's Not as Effective as We Think

An inevitable aspect of militarism is the general tendency to see military force as far more effective than it actually is and to accept it as the first response to conflict. According to firsthand accounts, after 9/11 the administration gave no consideration to a nonmilitary response. The assumption was that only military invasion could capture bin Laden and put an end to al-Qaida's terrorism. Did anyone think that the powerful U.S. military would not be able to capture this one man? It is telling that very few Americans dissented from the decision to invade Afghanistan -- despite the illegality of the invasion and its inevitable, predictable violence toward civilians. Only one member of Congress, California's Rep. Barbara Lee, voted against it.

But what if -- as many of us suggested at the time -- we hadn't glorified bin Laden by declaring war on him and his organization? What if we had declared bin Laden and his accomplices criminals and used intelligence and policing methods to bring him to justice? We had the sympathy and proffered cooperation of virtually every nation in the world. (Even the Taliban government offered to hand over bin Laden to a neutral country, if we provided proof of his guilt; the U.S. government, clearly intent on war, rejected this offer without seriously considering it.) What if we had considered the invasion of Afghanistan the last possible alternative and we had seriously negotiated with the Taliban to hand over bin Laden or allow an international police force to find him? What if we had offered substantial foreign aid to Afghanistan to encourage the citizenry to see the United States positively (we had helped rid Afghanistan of the Soviets in the 1980s) and help us find bin Laden? I obviously do not know what would have happened if we had followed that path, but could it possibly have been worse than what we did, which has clearly increased the number of Islamic fundamentalists willing to wage jihad against the United States? Militarism is not even considering another possibility besides military force.

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David Hilfiker, M.D., spent his medical career as a physician with low-income people in rural Minnesota and inner-city Washington. He is the founder of Joseph’s House, a home and hospice for homeless men and women with AIDS and/or cancer. No longer in active practice, he is a lecturer and teacher and author of books and numerous articles on poverty and other subjects. His most recent book is Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen.

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