The Long, Cost-Free War - New York Times
The New York Times

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November 6, 2006
Guest Columnist
The Long, Cost-Free War
By TED KOPPEL

IN the operations center at United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla.,
there is a wall of television screens, one end of the wall quartered so that
four
live feeds can be seen simultaneously. The signals originate somewhere over
Iraq or Afghanistan. The cameras are aboard pilotless drones.

"Predators," some are called, and predators they are. They can be equipped
with Hellfire missiles that are remotely fired by operators in Nevada who
receive
their orders from Centcom in Florida. The enemy, meanwhile, does much of its
killing with improvised explosive devices, the most sophisticated of which
are designed in Iran.

Such is at least one face of modern warfare, in which combatants exchange
mortal blows by remote control, once or even twice removed from the
battlefield.
The victims are just as dead or mutilated as those in previous wars, but the
notion of violence activated from hundreds or even thousands of miles away
is telling.

The Bush administration is trying to deal with a particularly nettlesome
problem: preparing Americans for a struggle that may last decades without
simultaneously
demoralizing them. Centcom's commander, Gen. John Abizaid, likes to refer to
it as the "long war," where "long," means generational, with no end in
sight.

To the degree that such a war can be fought at arm's length, with a minimum
of friendly casualties, it will be. To the extent that victory can be
achieved
with a minimum of personal sacrifice, the Bush administration will try to do
so.

Senior members of the administration frame that struggle in existential
terms. They invoke the nightmarish possibility of a 9/11 on steroids - a
terrorist
attack using weapons of mass destruction, rattling the very foundations of
our society. The Bush administration uses that frightening image to justify
a new worldview, within which even associating with someone who belongs to
an organization on the United States terrorist list justifies prosecution
here
at home.

This practice falls into the category of what Deputy Attorney General Paul
J. McNulty calls "preventative prosecution." It's an interesting concept: a
form
of anticipatory justice. Faced with the possible convergence between
terrorism and a weapon of mass destruction, the argument goes, the
technicality of
waiting for a crime to be committed before it can be punished must give way
to pre-emption.

Set aside for a moment the somewhat jarring notion of recalibrating our
constitutional protections here at home while our soldiers and diplomats are
given
the thankless mission of spreading democracy in some of the most
inhospitable regions of the Middle East.

There is a whiff of hypocrisy about conjuring up visions of a nuclear or
biological holocaust while urging the American public to go about its
business
and recreation as usual.

We are advised to adjust to the notion of warrantless wiretaps at home,
unaccountable C.I.A. prisons overseas and the rendition of suspects to
nations that
feature prominently on the State Department's list of human rights abusers,
because the threats we face are "existential."

But apparently they are not existential enough to warrant any kind of widely
shared commitment or sacrifice, like increased taxes or a military draft to
meet the Pentagon's growing need for manpower.

One can share the Bush administration's perception that the United States
confronts real threats that will not be eliminated easily or soon, but still
find
it impractical and immoral to get on with life as usual while placing the
burden solely on the shoulders of the young men and women serving in Iraq
and
Afghanistan, their families and friends.

We are left with the impression that the grown-ups in Washington would
prefer to make the difficult decisions for us without involving the courts,
Congress
or the press. That is precisely the wrong way to go about winning this war.
Back when the United States was widely admired, it was for all that was most
cumbersome about our democratic process.

America's efforts to transplant democracy elicit none of that admiration.
How can they, when we appear to have lost confidence in fundamental aspects
of
democracy here at home? What has historically impressed our allies and
adversaries has been our often flawed, but ultimately sincere, determination
to
operate within the law - if not always abroad, then at least within the
United States.

Does our system require calibration in the context of the Long War? Perhaps.
We cannot, for example, expect to know everything our government does when
transparency informs our enemies of what they must not know. That, however,
has always been the case. Indeed, there are courts and Congressional
committees
set up for the express purpose of reconciling the needs for secrecy and for
transparency.

Furthermore, when officials deem certain crimes (torture, for example)
unavoidable in the defense of liberty, those who commit those crimes must
still know
that they will be held to account before an uncompromised legal system.
Congress recently passed a law that ensures exactly the opposite.

It is going to be a long struggle, and we may have to live with whatever
adjustments we make to our liberties until the struggle is won, or at least
over.
Even liberties voluntarily forfeited are not easily retrieved. All the more
so for those that are removed surreptitiously.

One might have expected that these issues would feature prominently in the
debate leading up to the Congressional elections. They are scarcely
mentioned.

Apparently unnerved by the unceasing White House harangue that they are ill
suited to waging the war on terrorism, Democrats have largely forfeited the
argument that "war," particularly a "long war," may be the wrong prism
through which to view the dangers facing the United States.

Those who once argued that the task was one for police and intelligence
agencies have been mocked into silence. Democrats have given a wide berth to
the
invasion of privacy, selective suspension of habeas corpus and the
mistreatment of detainees, preferring instead to echo the drumbeat of
Republican warnings
about terrorism in general.

There is a war to be waged. We should be building protective ramparts around
our legal system, safeguarding our own freedoms, focusing on our own
carefully
constructed democracy and leading by example.

It's too bad that we have so little confidence in the most powerful weapon
in America's arsenal.

Ted Koppel is a contributing columnist for The Times and the managing editor
of the Discovery Channel.

Posted by Miriam V.