Guantanamo Bay...
Are We at War, or Not?
June 20, 2008
By Patrick James
Last week a badly divided Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision in favor of giving detainees at Guantanamo Bay access to the U.S. justice system. Outrage followed quickly at the vision of terrorist suspects using the courts to their advantage. One justice even said that Americans would “live to regret this decision.”
Maybe not. Why? Because the ruling may help jar people awake on the issue of whether the U.S. is at war. This is a question in need of an answer. The president tells the American people that we are fighting a “War on Terror.” The U.S. also seems to be fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet no war has been declared. In fact, the U.S. hasn’t declared war on anyone since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Such ambiguity creates a perfect setting for the muddled, politicized results that accompany military action whenever the enemy isn’t a pushover. While post-Saddam Iraq isn’t much of an adversary in standard military terms, America has found it capable of producing a Vietnam-style, protracted conflict that only improved when U.S. leadership finally overcame the fear of deploying a level of military force more appropriate to the task at hand.
If the U.S. is at war, then the detainees at Gitmo are no different than POWs from previous wars. They should be dealt with by the U.S. military, rather than becoming part of a likely media circus. But American presidents long ago gave up what Harry Truman — or even lesser mortals on the subject of honest communication — would recognize as straight talk. Instead, we are fed euphemisms about “police actions” (Vietnam), “counter-insurgencies” (Iraq) and whatever else might sound inoffensive to the ear. American leaders are so driven by virtually instant polling, focus groups and other contaminants that they are ill equipped to fight a war at all. As a result, it was just a matter of time before the Twilight Zone of the Gitmo detention center produced the country’s current nightmare: fighting a “war” and building a legal Tower of Babel alongside it.
Another byproduct of the failure to speak plainly about war and peace is, surprisingly, the oil crisis. If we are at war, why are speculators allowed to run rampant? Pundits will say that the problem extends beyond the borders of the U.S. itself, but so what? Why not push the powers of the executive office to the limit on an issue that the public wants the president to address? Imagine Congress trying to stand in the way of legislation that would rein in speculators, pure and simple, without pork-barreling or other nuisance clauses. But so far, the leadership in Washington seems unwilling to act — business as usual.
What is the answer here? Straight talk. Some remedial action within the legal system is needed to minimize the damage that could easily result from the Supreme Court ruling; it should be brought forward by the president himself, in a way that emphasizes that the situation is one of war. Then call the oil crisis what it is, war profiteering; build a consensus against the speculators and take action there too.
Are we at war, or not? It appears that no one in Washington knows the answer.
Patrick James is professor of International Relations in the USC College and director of USC’s Center for International Studies. He is an expert on crisis management and strategic decision-making. James is the author of 12 books and more than one hundred other publications. He has lectured and held visiting professorships at universities in the United States and around the world.