Legal Commentary

Are we at war? And what is the political consequence of that for conservatives in this election?

By Beldar

Are we a nation at war?

I ask you to ask yourself that question afresh. Most of my regular and even occasional readers, including some who are life-long Democrats, will be tempted to give a reflexive, automatic, and affirmative answer to that question. Certainly even Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's campaign stump speeches concede that we're "at war." I'm just asking that you think again, and do your best to re-weigh the evidence.

If we were to ask the ghosts of Ulysses S. Grant or Andrew Jackson, each of them might well answer in the negative. No foreign government or even potentate has declared war upon us. The Union is in no peril of being split asunder. No foreign army is likely to burn Washington; no army in the world can credibly challenge ours on the fields of battle. Our own territory is reasonably secure from all but infiltrated and covert attacks, as is that of our most important historic allies. Only criminals and brigands dare oppose us with force, and then they flee and hide.

"War" has always meant casualties, but the casualty rate in our all-volunteer armed forces ? while (as always) catastrophic if it's your dad or your sister who's just been killed ? is statistically trivial as compared to even to the numbers of military deaths from accident or disease during past wars. General Grant's ghost would gratefully note that our total KIA casualties since 9/11/01 have been smaller than his Army of the Potomac's on a single morning in Cold Harbor, Virginia, in an action that gained the Union not an inch of ground or an ounce of progress (even by attrition). And outside of our soldiers and their families, you will look long and absolutely in vain for even the slightest crimp in the domestic lives of our countrymen that can be directly attributed to the "Global War on Terror" (or its respective conspicuous incarnations in Afghanistan or Iraq).

If they found graves at all, the stockbrokers and firemen and receptionists and Pentagon functionaries and airline passengers who perished on 9/11/01 have rested in them for more than six years. Off American soil, in Europe, civilian casualties from follow-on terrorist attacks have measured in the dozens, not the thousands. To many of us, 9/11 now seems like a horrible anomaly, not the first major battle in a war.

And the two leading Democratic candidates continue to compete with one another over which can declare the war in Iraq "over" (some among their party already say "lost") and bring our troops home from there. They have yet to find some excuse to do the same for Afghanistan, but surely they'll have found one by the time they've disentangled our troops from Iraq. This causes them not a moment of shame.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on February 06, 2008 (boomark / email).