Mukasey And The Constitution

Andrew Sullivan takes down Attorney General nominee Mukasey for his evasive, dishonest Senate testimony and proceeds to identify the defining issue of American domestic governance in the early 21^st Century:

 

 An attorney general who believes a president has a permanent right to ignore the rule of law because peacetime is now wartime for ever, is an attorney-general defending the rule of one man over the rule of law. If I were a Senator, (heh, indeed) I’d vote no. This is the faultline of our time. If we are redefining war as a permanent state of being, and redefining presidential authority to give him/her extra-legal and extra-constitutional power to what s/he wants anywhere in the world, including the United States and to its citizenry, then American liberty is in extreme peril. To approve an attorney general who does not dissent from this position is a terrible precedent. 

Don’t people see that this is what Cheney is doing? He is setting precedent after precedent for totalist, secret executive power. And with each precedent for unchecked, uncontrollable executive power - including the power to detain and torture within the United States - the America we have known is being surrendered. This is the other war - a constitutional war at home against American liberty and the Constitution - as dangerous in a different way as Islamism. One attacks our freedom from the outside; the other hollows out our freedom from within. The fight against both is the calling of the time.

  As he has noted in the past, the Bush Administration did not initiate this war on the Constitution; it was the Clinton Administration who took us back down the long, sad, twisted road of executive overreach.   With a looming Clinton Administration (or Bush administration in the person of one Rudy Giuliani) in the wings, it is time to reflect on what we as a country are doing to our most trusted institution; the Constitution.  IMHO, the Constitution and its forefather of principles (The Declaration of Independence) is the backbone of this nation.  Without this most incredible of intellectual human endeavors, we are little better than the next country. The withering assaults on it from the left and the right over the past few decades have been disturbing enough, but what has unfolded over the last decade is most disheartening of all. 

According to those engaging in this behavior, we’re a nation at war, so such abuses are necessary.  Yet they also insist we’re at war indefinitely, in a decades-long enterprise.  Instead of offering realistic, plausible alternatives or improvements to the Constitution we have, they instead specialize in backdoor manuevers and end-arounds when not in the glare of the media or critics, and smugly declare their dedication to the nation’s security when they are caught red-handed and use it as a shield of honor for their disgraceful behavior.

Rape War In The Congo

NYT:

While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say they fear that Congo’s problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.“It’s gone beyond the conflict,” said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said that the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become “almost normal.” Malteser International, a European aid organization that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this year, compared with 6,338 last year. The organization said that in one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the women reported being sexually brutalized.At Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Mukwege performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is filled with women lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, with colostomy bags hanging next to them because of all the internal damage.

“I still have pain and feel chills,” said Kasindi Wabulasa, a patient who was raped in February by five men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband’s chest and made him watch, telling him that if he closed his eyes, they would shoot him. When they were finished, Ms. Wabulasa said, they shot him anyway.In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills here, there is no shortage of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government soldiers; homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who slick themselves with oil before marching into battle; members of paramilitary groups originally from Uganda and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the past 10 years in a quest for gold and all the other riches that can be extracted from Congo’s exploited soil.The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 17,000 troops.

Few seem to be spared. Dr. Mukwege said his oldest patient was 75, his youngest 3.

———————————

I cannot begin to wrap my head around what is unfolding in the Congo at this point given the dozens of factions and agendas among armed groups, neighbors and multinational corporations (though one day I hope to).What I do understand is the horrible price of missing American leadership, in this case, the circa 1994 Rwandan genocide ghosts of inaction and obstruction, exacting a high cost on the African continent once again (not to mention the dreadful consequences of European colonialism).  America cannot be everywhere, and certainly neither can the UN, but given the disgraceful role the US played in obstructing other nations from acting to stem the killing by Hutu Power, we should have a special interest in what our ignorance and evil has accomplished.  Not to mention the fact we let the killers go free (while feeding, clothing and protecting them when they fled the scene of the crime), and they’ve been terrorizing millions of people ever since, quite successfully I might add.The current violence in some of the Congo makes me ask two questions that have implications far beyond this hellish zone of human suffering:

1. What are the long-term consequences on societies and cultures of such widespread breakdowns in morality and family as described in the above article?  Am I wrong to surmise this is the first time in modern history such an environment has not only been cleaved out of the dying heart of a failing state but has thrived for more than a decade, with no end in sight?

2. Thinkers from Robert Sowell to Ralph Peters have speculated on the future of African societies and cultures in the aftermath of full-fledged system crashes like this, exacerbated by the onslaught of AIDS, ravenous resource hungry neighbors, cheap automatic weapons, climate change and international myopia (i.e. the $500 million dollar election fiasco from last year). 

Their line of thinking compares similar events in Europe after the Black Death and WW2, as well as modern-day China, in asking if such an African renaissance is possible.  What could be the factors that could bring about such an emergence from the abyss?  Is Thomas PM Barnett right in saying, first the economics, then the political, then the security, in the context of growing Chinese and Indian interests in the region?  Is it African entrepreneurship, the proverbial triumph of the “cheetah” over the “hippo?”  Will it be AFRICOM and patient, expansive American strategy for developing states and building relationships? Is it all of them and then some?

In Review

1.

Soob links to and discusses Robert Kaplan getting back to what he does best; reporting about current events and trends while seeing the forest from the trees, in a short brief about Burma’s future. Kaplan sees the defining struggle for Burma as how to reconcile the country’s disparate ethnic groups with the majority Burmans. Soob asks exactly who is the “we” Kaplan refers to when Kap notes that “Don’t get me wrong: The United States and the rest of the world must continue to take a firm stand against the junta and support the Burmese democracy movement. But if we succeed, we will have to work even harder to help the Burmese resolve their ethnic conflicts.”

In the case of Burma, a mix of Chinese, Japanese and Indian forces on the ground together (perhaps under the aegis of an expanded ASEAN by such an unlikely time) with American air and naval support as required. What is more likely is a small peacekeeping force to assist in the facilitation of confidence-building measures between the various groups and the government. Keeping in mind the 400,000 strong military Burma has right now, as well as the more recently created paramilitary groups composed of ordinary citizens that the junta employed during and after the protests, that could take a good, long while. The key is that in almost every possible scenario for an evolution in Burma’s governance, the Chinese, Thais and Indians will have a defining say, because its their back yard and their interests most at stake.

2.

Mountainrunner’s “America Should Hire al-Qaeda’s PR Agent” is a welcome slap of reality in the direction of those who remain utterly deluded into understanding the dynamics of where we’re at in the “war on terror”.

“As the enemy shapes itself into a more and more fearsome force, America’s failure to understand or to participate in the war over public perception is not a noble act, but one of implicit suicide. Insurgents can now measure their success in terms of money, supplies, safe houses, and recruits—all of which come at the expense of trust in the United States and its influence on the people. The Administration must stop thinking of foreign audiences as sympathetic and become smarter about how to wage information campaigns. That means realizing that military action is diplomacy, and that embassies are advertisements. “

To go into another direction with this, the failure of thought, imagination and deliberation on the part of America’s leaders is stunning. We’ve become wedded to the false doctrine that our guns and bombs will somehow lead the way to a cultural and social makeover in societies. The real progress is in establishing the blueprint for a better future and a stake in the wider world for people in the MENA and elsewhere where the threat of terrorism looms large. You do that with simple but difficult things like rebuilding broken primary and secondary education systems, economic empowerment of the impoverished masses and oh yes, some serious and public infrastructure investments (that last bit probably coming from China). Now that’s an information campaign that will take a long time (we might actually be out of Iraq by then) but its well-worth waging.

Mountainrunner (who hopefully had his traffic spike after getting a nod from Andrew Sullivan) has been on fire of late hitting on his twin bread and butter subjects where few are his equal; the shameless state of our public diplomacy as impacted by policy, strategy and pure incompetence, and the many important issues at hand with private military contractors.

3.

Abu Muqawama, who is one of the best milbloggers with a healthy mix of regional and operational expertise informing his writing, takes the US Air Force out to the woodshed over their “childish” behavior. Nothing surprising if you’ve been observing the Air Force’s behavior in the War on Terror, but worth the read because of the idiotic comments made by a particularly bloodthirsty and ignorant Air Force general. Also he dismembers the flawed logic of giving the Iraqi Army M-16’s at a time when (a) they have yet to show the widespread discipline required with the maintenance heavy M-16 and (b) the porous, corrupt nature of the Iraqi Army itself, where already nearly 200,000 weapons have gone missing from arms caches, destined to be in the hands of insurgents and arms dealers from Baghdad to Yemen.