30 Sep The War on Terror, 2001-08
I think it’s over. As is true with notational wars, it takes another, more serious threat to take care of the displacement. The end isn’t in the way of armistice or surrender. The wars on drugs and crime continue to be fought under more prosaic headings, but they no longer have a hold on the national imagination. And in the face of the financial crisis, that’s where we’re heading with the war on terror.
Too bad the market turmoil doesn’t lend itself to the “war” label in the absence of a clear adversary (“the war on short selling” doesn’t have much of a ring to it). But the analogy works at other levels. There are equivalent calls to rally round the flag in the face of what appears to be a genuine emergency. As Eric Posner points out, the kind of power that the White House is exercising (or trying to exercise) here looks like the power it was asserting on September 12.
I suppose it’s possible that we could keep fighting on two fronts, maintaining the war on terror and the crisis economic footing at the same time. That might work for real wars. But I don’t think it works for proverbial ones, which depend too much on collective psychology and which can thus be crowded out by competing concerns. And if any administration could pull off such a two-front conflict it certainly isn’t this one. We’re seeing now the first clear episode in which executive overreaching on the war on terror has depleted executive power in another context.
Of course, just because the war on terror is over doesn’t mean the terrorist threat has disappeared. Who knows, a global financial meltdown might make it even more serious (my instincts are otherwise). But anti-terror efforts don’t have to be prosecuted on a war footing. That’s how we did things pre-9/11; and I suspect that’s how we’ll do things going forward. Nor does it mean that we have resolved the host of constitutional questions that come with globalized enforcement activities. But they don’t have to be confronted in a war or quasi-war paradigm. We can start to shift back to our usual presumptions about the exercise of governmental power, which are probably adequate to the task.
Peter: I’m not sure quite what you mean by suggesting that the terrorist threat will no longer be “prosecuted on a war footing.” Put aside the proverbial (and largely rhetorical) war on “terror.” Congress authorized the use of military force against al Qaeda and the Taliban by a 518-1 vote. I don’t know that there are any members of Congress, let alone a majority, who are urging that such authorization be reconsidered. And certainly both McCain and Obama have indicated that they would seek to continue to use military methods, not simply a criminal model, against al Qaeda and the Taliban — indeed, Obama has suggested that he would more aggressively prosecute the war against al Qaeda, at least in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Am I misunderstanding the thrust of your post?
Marty, sure, there will be those elements of anti-terror efforts that qualify as military conflict, especially in Afghanistan (Pakistan seems to me more like special ops stuff, run by the military or not, but not real war). But the global war on terror and especially the domestic war on terror — those are history. I don’t think we’ll hear it as a rallying call in the next administration.
The authorizations will remain on the books. But so is the 1955 Formosa Resolution. An authorization by itself doesn’t suffice to establish a war footing.
Thanks, Peter, but I suppose that merely piques my curiosity even further. OK, so it won’t be a “rallying cry.” But what, concretely, are we talking about here that has been present for the past seven years but that is about to become extinct? As a practical matter, what tools has Bush used that McCain or Obama will not?
You agree that the armed forces, including Special Ops, will play an important role: There will be military action, covert actions, targeting, detention of “enemy combatants,” etc.
No domestic “war on terror”? Well, there will be expansive electronic surveillance, under the new FISA amendments. What else? Detentions outside the criminal justice system of persons detained in the U.S.? There have only been two of those, right? — Padilla and al-Marri. Perhaps the next President will not act likewise — will leave such persons in the criminal justice system — and I would be heartened by such a change, but even if it happens, that’s hardly been a major aspect of the “war on terror.”
What else did you have in mind?
Marty, I guess it’s the discourse of “war” that’s set the premise for everything post-9/11. So long as it’s been prevalent, it gives the benefit of the doubt to extraordinary measures. I think it’s more that Padilla and al-Marri, although their significance goes way beyond the numbers — Guantanamo counts, doesn’t it, along with material witness detentions, exceptional uses of immigration measures, and just about everything that Yoo and Addington got away with while they had the chance, along with the pervasive culture of deference even to so flagrantly incompetent an Administration as this one. Domestically, the formal actions may have been limited, but globally there have been many, and many of them outside the theaters of military operations. Of course the war premise has been wearing pretty thin in the last couple of years, and we’ve got a couple of Supreme Court decisions to prove it. The financial crisis just gives it a final necessary shove out the door. The war footing changed the presumptions, but now things will shift back. McCain and Obama won’t be able to put the genie back in the September 10 bottle, at least not right away, but a lot of it will be unwound, starting with Guantanamo. Do you think there’s… Read more »
A friend of mine suggested last week that the current economic crisis is indirectly a result of 9/11–that the economic shock of 9/11 caused Greenspan to hold rates at artificially low levels for years, partly leading to the real estate bubble and also to the search by many for higher yields than offered by the government, thus to Fannie and Freddie mortgage-backed securities, among other bad ideas. There has been plenty of partisan finger-pointing for the current economic mess, and as Prof. Spiro notes the war premise has been wearing thin, so perhaps no one wants to make this argument now, nor to give bin Laden anything further to crow about. But I am a little surprised that I had not heard it discussed publicly. I see via google that a few others have suggested this connection (http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/488 from a year ago), but I had not heard it discussed before. What is clear is that the two events are separated by a lot of stupid decisions made by many different people.
Prof Spiro is right that Al Qaida is getting replaced in the headlines by the economy, but it seems in part to be a knock-on effect.
It may eventually prove right that the rhetoric on the war on terror is fading away (whatever the next US President, one hopes things will be done differently). What I find interesting, though, is that we seem to ‘need’ some kind of public emergency at all times. – Does this mean that Naomi Klein (not someone who I’d expect many readers of OJ to agree with, or even read) was right after all in her ‘Shock Doctrine’?