Peace.
The only way to win the War on Terror
is through the instruments of peace. It’s through justice. Just as
the only way to defeat disorder is through order.
You can’t win a war against non-state
actors. You kill their women and children, they win. You bomb them
into the Stone Age, you’re only bombing yourself. Yet every attack
they launch on you hurts 10 times, because you have something
to lose and they don’t.
So the question becomes, how do we
support order? How do we create justice?
And the answer is just as clear. We
support order by endorsing order.
We sign on to the International Criminal Court. We subject
our own people – all of them – to its dictates. No one, not even
the President of the United States, should ever again be immune from
prosecution for war crimes. Including this one.
Have war crimes been committed, in Iraq
and elsewhere? I don’t know. We should investigate. That’s what
Congress is for, it’s what prosecutors are for. Give those powers
over to people who will do those jobs and you have the first step
toward winning the War. Collect the information.
Americans have the lesson of 9-11
completely backward. We rounded up a posse, we went off to kill us
some Indians. But what you have here is a Liberty Valance situation.
The law has to deal with him. Shooting him in the back won’t do –
the world street is too well-lit.
And the world isn’t powerless here, if
the world is united. Trouble is the world is not united. And the only
way to get unity back is to cede the high ground, something only the
strong can do. The weak can’t do that.
If this means sending the President to
the Hague, send him. Same with anyone else justice demands. Same, by
the way, with Saddam Hussein. A monkey trial in Baghdad isn’t
accomplishing the aims of justice, just vengeance. Send him where he
belongs.
Now, if you’ve reached this far you
know that it’s an awful long political distance from where we are now
to where we have to be. There are some Americans who say “impeach Bush”
but they’re fringe elements. (Or, worse, foreigners.)
I’m not saying “impeach Bush.”
Investigate, yes – we can do that. Indict – I don’t think George
W. Bush can get a fair trial anywhere in the U.S. And I don’t think the world, as a whole, would buy into any such
trial. Our justice system has been too perverted by the events of the
last several years for that.
What I’m proposing goes far beyond what
even our political fringe is willing to propose, except in jest.
But if that journey be a thousand miles, it is time to begin it.
And by proposing it, that is what I’ve
done.
I would hope by now people would realize that any time the government declares war on a generic thing — crime, drugs, poverty, terrorism — instead of an actual well defined entity, what they are really saying is that we would like untold hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on things of wildly variable utility and we don’t want to be held accountable for how we spend that money.
I would hope by now people would realize that any time the government declares war on a generic thing — crime, drugs, poverty, terrorism — instead of an actual well defined entity, what they are really saying is that we would like untold hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on things of wildly variable utility and we don’t want to be held accountable for how we spend that money.