Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Bush’s War

(Reprinted from the issue of July 7, 2005)

President Bush’s Fort Bragg speech on the Iraq war contained nothing new. He mostly repeated his usual themes: The war is going well, victory is vital, it won’t be easy, and announcing a withdrawal date prematurely would only help the enemy. This is pretty much what he was expected to say. If the speech differed from what he has said before, it was in emphasis. He was more somber than usual, avoiding the easy optimism he used to display. The country is in a darker mood now: Polls show declining support for the war, and military recruitment is dipping as casualty rates rise.

But then, one doesn’t look to Bush for fresh perspectives. His mind is so constructed as to be more comfortable with melodrama than with tragedy, and he has little imagination. He can only see the enemy as evil, cowardly, and base in every way; it never seems to occur to him that there may be some virtue, courage, reason, honor, and even heroism on the other side.

He has no conception of Christian chivalry in war, as witness his indifference to civilian casualties; I doubt that he has much acquaintance with Christian principles of just warfare. He seldom entertains the obvious possibility that his enemies may think they are defending their homeland against an invader. On the contrary, he assumes that his enemies see the war the way he does, as a contest between noble Americans on the one side and vicious terrorists on the other.

Does Bush ever reflect on how the whole situation must look to the ordinary Muslim? If so, it doesn’t show. He takes it for granted that everyone must know that American democracy — or what Americans call “democracy” — is superior to any alternative. It follows from this that America’s enemies are necessarily acting in bad faith, and must be destroyed. To hear him talk, they are hardly human; more important, he hardly acknowledges that this war has hurt or killed thousands of non-combatants, as modern wars always do.

Bush’s outlook is like a caricature of the Old Testament view of war, in which the enemy is entitled to no mercy. Not that the Old Testament actually says this, but this is the plausible superficial impression many people draw from it. It can easily be perverted to justify cruelty and self-righteousness and it often has been, even by Christians.

Bush takes pride in being resolute, decisive, and consistent, and up to a point these can be good qualities. Bad news doesn’t unnerve or discourage him. He will “stay the course,” as Richard Nixon did in Vietnam. The question, of course, is whether he can recognize when it’s time to cut his — and the country’s — losses.

He has hardly varied his approach since the 9/11 attacks. He immediately announced a “war on terror,” beginning with the Taliban in Afghanistan and soon adding Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Both were quickly toppled, but both wars have continued, yet he still insists on talking as if the enemy hasn’t changed. His speech explicitly connected the current Iraq war to September 11, yet made no mention of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or the actual perpetrators of those attacks.
 
Curbing the Court

The U.S. Supreme Court has been feeling its oats lately, adding to its long legacy of dubious decisions. But the Court reminds one of Mark Twain’s famous quips about the weather: Everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything about it.

First the justices ruled, 5 to 4, that local governments may take private property from the owner and allow a private business to buy it if this would result in higher tax revenues, provided that the owner is compensated. The majority said that this constitutes “public use” under the meaning of the Fifth Amendment. Needless to say, since countless commentators have already said it, this is a radical innovation in constitutional law, a defeat for — no, an evisceration of — property rights.

Sandra Day O’Connor wrote a surprisingly eloquent and incisive dissent, in which she was joined by the Court’s conservatives, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas. She observed, in essence, that this may allow the big fish, corporations, to swallow the little fish, homeowners. Homeowners, in fact, may “own” their homes only until the state chooses to grab them — a kind of ownership so precarious that one trembles to imagine where it could lead. The majority’s opinion was barely defensible, but only on principles of state and local authority the Court has long since abandoned. Rarely since Roe v. Wade has a Court decision provoked such immediate outrage.

The Court wound up its session with two more 5-to-4 rulings, on whether displays of the Ten Commandments on government property violate the First Amendment: no and yes. The distinction was sustained by specious hair-splitting that convinced few.

It may be mere pedantry, at this late date, to point out that the First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” That is, Congress, which is to say the federal government, has no authority to legislate, one way or the other, in this area. And an “establishment” of religion means an official church. So the First Amendment simply doesn’t apply to local and non-sectarian matters like displays of the Commandments.

All in all, the Court’s rulings had the effect of wounding its own authority. Both their substance and their reasoning offended common sense, and for once ordinary citizens weren’t disposed to defer to the “experts.” They saw that the experts were destroying traditional freedoms.

But again, what are we going to do about it? The Constitution provides a remedy: impeachment. But it’s never used — indeed, never mentioned. You’d think that removing justices for abusing their power were a form of cruel and unusual punishment. It’s all very well to speak of an independent judiciary, but the very possibility of impeachment means there are ultimately some limits on that independence. So does the phrase “during good behavior.”

It simply makes no sense at all to suppose that the framers of the Constitution meant to design a system of popular self-government and limited powers in which, however, one branch, whose members were not elected but appointed for life, should be unaccountable and uncontrolled even if they virtually amended the Constitution itself (or, by neglect, repealed parts of it) at their whim. Yet this is what the original system has degenerated into.

Alexander Hamilton said that the judiciary would be “the least dangerous” of the three branches, and the Constitution accords it only a few powers, not even mentioning judicial review or vetoing acts of Congress (let alone state and local laws).

Election and impeachment were supposed to eliminate the necessity of recourse to revolution and violence as remedies for tyranny. Since the courts are immune to elections, a few impeachments are long overdue.


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Joseph Sobran