- limit the war (for now) to Afghanistan - limit the means of the war within Afghanistan (less reliance on aerial bombing, more on "special forces") - take more care to limit collateral damage (obey the Geneva convention) - conduct the war through the United Nations - limit the war aims to the apprehension and prosecution of al-Qaeda in the U.S. courts - as above, but conduct the prosecution in a UN-established body - as above, but limit the use of force to that level which could be characterized as 'law enforcement'
and so forth.
Someone like Doug, who characterizes his position as a "cops and courts" position, and would thus be found near the bottom rung of this force ladder, might object to my putting him on the same ladder with Colin Powell, who stands on the top rung. And Zak prides himself on being even lower down than Doug:
>Bring those guilty in the September 11th before an international court.
>How? By taking up the Taliban's offers of handing bin Laden over.
(Zak doesn't say how the Taliban is supposed to apprehend Osama bin Laden once the U.S. has deputized them to go get him. The Taliban's own record of using force against civilians in Afghanistan is not so great either, you know.)
Brett is further up, but is so proud of being on the third rung from the top that he mistakenly believes that everyone in the whole left is on the ladder with him:
>Besides, nobody is saying the US shouldn't use force in its response to the
>9/11 attacks. ..
[oh?]
>The terrorists should be forcibly taken into custody and
>forcibly removed from society so they can't hurt anyone else. They should
>be fired upon if they shoot at police or other security forces that are
>trying to apprehend them. But bombing a foreign country, where 99% of the
>population is just trying to live through the winter and had no part in the
>atrocity, is simply out of the question. Those people are innocent, and
>the US right to use force to find and apprehend the guilty parties stops
>when these people are put at risk by any potential response.
However, I think that Kelley was very much on to something when she pointed out that once one has gotten onto this ladder at all, all sorts of things are likely to happen that will move you up toward the top of the ladder:
> so, those who call for justice through legal mechanisms are fooling
> themselves if they think their solution would be a whole lot different
> from
> what's going on now. it may have been a little more palatable,
> operations
> wise. it might have seemed more legitimate b/c you didn't have a yahoo
> running around the planet telling everyone "my way or the highway",
> but
> that's about it.
----------------------------
There are a lot of situations where it is hard to distinguish the various shades of opinions in the "left", whatever that is, and to tell where the "left-liberals" stop and the "radicals" begin (to use a couple very imprecise terms for the moment). (For example, at a picket line against Laura Schlesinger.) And at those times it seems that the 'left' is a seamless whole. But then situations like the current war come up and show where some of those seams really are. In this case, I think there is a serious difference in approach between those of you who are somewhere on this ladder of force, and those of us who who are off this ladder completely and who are not supportive of ANY U.S. force being employed against al-Qaeda, at ANY level, in ANY guise. (Yes, I hereby declare, speaking personally, that if the only thing the U.S. had to do to apprehend Osama and bring him to a UN tribunal were to send over Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife to knock on his door, I would not support it.)
This division doesn't mean that we can't work together against the war. In fact, IN PRACTICE, it may not prove to be very important. This is because the Bush administration is committed to being at or above the top of the ladder, and is not going to actually accept ANY of the limitations that any of you want to impose on it. It is not going to stop killing civilians, or delegate the war to the UN, or obey international law, or limit itself in any meaningful way. Therefore, there is little danger in practice of Bush winding down the war to the point where any of you will really say "Yes, this is just about the level of war that I would like, so I shall opt out of the antiwar movement now."
But we should realize that these divisions are really there, and reflect real differences among us in who we see ourselves to be, and in what we see the U.S. government to be, and in what we see to be going on in the world, and in what we see to be 'reasonable' and 'appropriate' and 'realistic' and 'practical'. Some of you on the ladder of force consider us who are off the ladder to be simple-minded, mechanistic, stuck in the 1960's, unable to relate to 'common people', and, most of all, 'short on answers'. I believe these are unfair criticisms. If we seem to be 'short on answers', it may be because we have defined the questions differently from yourselves. If the question 'what should we do' is taken as being synonymous with 'what should the U.S. government do', or 'what advice would you give President Bush if you were invited to a cabinet meeting,' and we all react as if we were playing the U.S. side in some kind of diplomacy/combat simulation game, then the answers are pretty much forced by that context to be equivalent to a choice of some rung on the ladder of force.
As an example of the sort of things that people say about us off-ladder types, we are told that we have failed to grasp the fact that "we were attacked" on September 11, and that people demand "justice". This concept is supposed to be something which we have just failed to notice, because we are so completely disconnected from the real world, I suppose. The ladder people can pride themselves on taking a "balanced", "nuanced" approach. But how balanced is it really? Some of you seem to believe that it is so obvious that "murderers should be deterred / punished" that it is pure craziness or perversity, or maybe just "EVIL" as Bush says, to reject that kind of answer in this case. But even if you consider it in ordinary, liberal, non-Leninist, non-socialist terms, I think there is something to the argument that a system of justice, which is applied only to one set of people, is NOT A SYSTEM OF JUSTICE.
Suppose, for example, you lived in a society in which "nobles" had the power to commit all manner of crimes against "serfs", and were never punished for their murders, rapes, thefts, tortures, and other abuses, but in which "serfs" committing similar actions against nobles were hauled into court, tried, convicted, and executed. You would of course be repelled by this society, and you would hope that there were serfs who were struggling for equality, and even some nobles who were critical of the present reality and hoped for a better world. But what would you say about the "system of justice", which on paper, perhaps, might be neutral between serf and noble, but which in fact is always used to execute serfs and to avenge nobles, and never used the other way? Wouldn't you be critical of this? Wouldn't you be critical of a 'liberal' noble who enthusiastically works to prosecute violent serfs, justifying himself on the ground that he would personally like to see violent nobles prosecuted as well, although this is in fact impossible for the foreseeable future?
Well, isn't this precisely the regime of "international law" we have today? Everyone knows that the "noble nation", the U.S., and its leaders, will never be hauled into court for its crimes (barring a global revolution or some similar upheaval). And everyone knows that only "ignoble" nations, groups, and leaders, like al-Qaeda, Milosevic, etc., will get tried, and they will be tried only by the judges appointed by the "noble nation". Is this justice? Isn't it more like a hypocritical mockery of justice? In that case, why lend even verbal support to this kind of mystification of oppression? This is at any rate how I see it, and I think one can see it that way even if one doesn't accept the Leninist theory of the national struggle etc.
There is also this notion that people will not listen to us unless we propose ladder-of-force demands; therefore, unless we "get with the program" and get on the ladder of force, we of the off-ladder socialist left are condemning ourselves and everyone around us to impotence and irrelevancy. I quite agree that if the average person comes up to us on the street and says 'what do you think we should do,' he or she expects to hear something that involves damage to al-Qaeda, and not, for example, "meet Osama's demands." But what can we do about that? If people's thinking has been so corridorized that they can only see ladder-of-force solutions, then how do we help matters by failing to do our duty of challenging that limited frame of reference? Are we supposed to apply the same standard to other issues? "Which offenses should receive the death penalty?" "What is the correct way to break a strike?" "What is the most efficient form of racial profiling?"
These questions are going to come up over and over again in the days to come, despite the fact that, as I said, in some senses it is all theoretical, since the U.S. is not going to be restricted to any rung of any ladder. We don't have to become completely focused on this issue; it may be enough to know that the differences are there, and that they don't mean that the person on the other side is a fool or a moral degenerate, but only that he or she has a different view of the world.
Lou Paulsen member, WWP, Chicago