Category Archives: War on Terror
Freedom of Speech And The War On Terror
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke in Manchester, New Hampshire yesterday on the topic of freedom of speech. When it comes to applying freedom of speech to campaign finance laws, Gingrich made this excellent point:
MANCHESTER, N.H. –Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says First Amendment rights need to be expanded, and eliminating the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on campaign contributions would be a start.
Gingrich, a Republican, suggested allowing people to give any amount to any candidate as long as the donation was reported online within 24 hours.
“Just as tax lawyers always succeed in out-thinking the (Internal Revenue Service) because they stay after five and the IRS goes home, the private-sector lawyers will always out-think the (Federal Election Commission) because they stay after five and the FEC goes home,” Gingrich told about 400 people at the Nackey Scripps Loeb First Amendment Awards dinner Monday.
Newt’s absolutely right on this one. McCain-Feingold is one of the most egregious restrictions on political speech that Congress has passed in quite some time. The fact that it was upheld by the Supreme Court is even more distressing.
Where Gingrich falls apart, unfortunately, is when it comes to the issue of freedom of speech and the war on terror:
MANCHESTER – Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism.
Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a “different set of rules” may be needed to reduce terrorists’ ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.
“We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade,” said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP’s takeover of Congress in 1994.
I’m not quite sure what Newt means when he talks about “re-examining” freedom of speech, but it doesn’t sound good at all. In the wake of 9/11, we “re-examined” the Fourth Amendment and it brought us the Patriot Act. I hate to think what a re-examination of the First Amendment would bring us.
H/T: Hit & Run
Update 11/29/06: There has been discussion in the comments about whether the Union-Leader accurately reported what Gingrich said. A link to the speech can be found here, and here is the relevant part:
This is a serious long term war, and it will enviably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country, that will lead us to learn how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear of biological weapons.
And, my prediction to you is that ether before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.
This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.
And, I further think that we should propose a Genève convention for fighting terrorism which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous.
This is a sober topic, but I think it is a topic we need a national dialogue about, and we need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until actually we literary lose a city which could literally happen within the next decade if we are unfortunate
At the very least, Gingrich is theorizing that First Amendment right would be curtailed in the wake of another massive terror attack (a theory which I think is largely correct). On the other hand, though, I think it’s fair to say that he was advocating we at least look at doing this, and that’s where I have a problem.
Stuck in Iraq Longer Than WWII?
A friend sent me this via e-mail:
U.S. Involved in Iraq Longer Than WWII
U.S. involved in Iraq war 3 years, 8-plus months – longer than it was in World War II
Only the Vietnam War (eight years, five months), the Revolutionary War (six years, nine months), and the Civil War (four years), have engaged America longer.
Fighting in Afghanistan, which may or may not be a full-fledged war depending on who is keeping track, has gone on for five years, one month. It continues as the ousted Taliban resurges and the central government is challenged.
Bush says he still is undecided whether to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq or add to the 140,000 there now.
Well, this is CBS, so you know they’re reporting it to make it sound as bad as possible. But is this truly accurate?
Yes, we’ve been in Iraq longer than than the time between Dec 7, 1941 and August 14, 1945. But if you’re measuring the time we’ve been there against the date we get a signed surrender from the insurgents, you’re going to keep waiting. But we didn’t exactly leave Japan and Germany in 1945. We were still “involved” there for much longer.
The time it took to defeat the Iraqi military, of course, was much shorter than the time it took to defeat the Japanese or German forces. In fact, we quickly destroyed Iraq’s command and control structure, and shortly thereafter felled their government. If you want to compare, perhaps we should compare the situation we’re in now with the reconstruction of Germany (which ended in 1949) and Japan (ended in 1952). Against that comparison, we’ve still got years left before we’re involved in Iraq for longer than WWII. But then again, that doesn’t paint nearly as bad of a picture, so I think we know why CBS chose to highlight this.
Of course, the situations aren’t completely analogous. I think the violent insurgency and sectarian warfare we’re facing is a lot more serious than we saw in either Germany or Japan. But, then again, the wars were considerably different as well. World War II was a long, hard-fought war, where there was considerable collateral damage. It wasn’t called collateral damage at the time, it was called “bombing the crap out of the enemy’s cities to break their will”. After four years of constant war, Europe was tired. In Iraq, we lopped off the head but the body remained. Now it’s flailing around lashing out at anything it can.
I have no problem with people who can come up with reasoned criticism of the war or the handling of the occupation. I think some of our policies have been muddled, our government has done little to justify what they’re doing and what they hope to accomplish, and the best answer we get is usually “stay the course”. It’s unacceptable whenever government refuses to justify their actions to the people.
But it’s also unfair for the media to be disingenuous with the facts. It took six years for the Allies (with four of those years including America’s participation) to achieve a military victory over Germany and Japan. It took a few months to achieve a military victory in Iraq. Trying to defeat an insurgency and police sectarian violence is not analogous to Iwo Jima and the Battle of the Bulge. To act is if they are is to play the American people for fools. One would think a respected news organization like CBS should be above such a thing, but recent history has shown otherwise.
Is Iraq Winnable?
In a recent Slate article, Christopher Hitchens lays into James Baker, head of the Iraq Study Group. Hitchens: “Baker was quoted as saying, with great self-satisfaction, that nobody ever asks him any more about the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power in 1991.”
In 1991, for those who keep insisting on the importance of sending
enough troops, there were half a million already-triumphant Allied soldiers on the scene. Iraq was stuffed with weapons of mass destruction, just waiting to be discovered by the inspectors of UNSCOM. The mass graves were fresh. The strength of sectarian militias was slight. The influence of Iran, still recovering from the devastating aggression of Saddam Hussein, was limited. Syria was—let's give Baker his due—”on side.” The Iraqi Baathists were demoralized by the sheer speed and ignominy of their eviction from Kuwait and completely isolated even from their usual protectors in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing. There would never have been a better opportunity to “address the cause” and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was
shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable 12-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the “root causes” of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.
Whether or not you were in favor of toppling Saddam, the fact is: he’s gone and we’re there. So, the question now is: can we win? Can the U.S. and coalition forces quell sectarian violence enough for the fledgling Iraqi government to establish and maintain peace?
It seems that the newly elected Democrat House and Senate, and very likely, the Bush administration, are eagerly awaiting the recommendations of the ISG, which is expected to call for regional diplomacy (read that: negotiations with Iran and Syria). I wonder, though, what they hope to gain from such negotiations. Does anyone really think that Iran or Syria is interested in assisting the West; that they’ll suddenly tolerate liberalism and modernity and how to save money on car repairs allow Iraq become the “democracy” that Bush envisions?
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