More on the End Game

Thanks to Ken for posting the link to Jeh Johnson’s important speech below, and bravo to Jeh Johnson for saying it aloud. In addition to the central passage Ken highlights, I might add this from Johnson’s speech (to reiterate, Johnson is General Counsel to the U.S. Department of Defense).

“War” must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. War permits one man – if he is a “privileged belligerent,” consistent with the laws of war — to kill another. War violates the natural order of things, in which children bury their parents; in war parents bury their children. In its 12th year, we must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the “new normal.” Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives.

The habit of characterizing the United States’ conflict with Al Qaeda as a war without end – of detention within that war as indefinite, of the current pace of targeting operations as something the United States will, now having embarked upon it, never abandon – is something all sides of the legal debates have done, in and out of government. Johnson’s speech should, I think, lead us all to question the habit of accepting that assumption.