For the moment, let’s put aside the horrifying fact that such a bill was even earnestly discussed or advanced in Congress, or that indefinite detention without a trial of anyone is something we’re willing to entertain as acceptable.  Let’s put aside the disturbing practice of folding fundamental changes to U.S. military and legal policy into what are essentially administrative budgeting conversations.  And let’s pretend that the president didn’t sign such a groundbreaking bill on a holiday, a Saturday when most of the country was known to be preoccupied with celebrating the particulars of the Gregorian calendar.

All those things aside, President Obama still signed a bill that he says he disagrees with.   That’s fine if the bill says that unicorns might exist or that the White House will be painted green; sign it, put it in a file somewhere, work out the details later.  But a bill that authorizes the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial seems like it deserves a lot more than the “I don’t like it but I guess it’s what we have to do” treatment.

President Obama tried to reassure us by saying that his administration won’t actually USE these new powers, and that he’ll work tirelessly to change the parts that concern him.  ”My Administration will interpret and implement the provisions described below in a manner that best preserves the flexibility on which our safety depends and upholds the values on which this country was founded.”

I don’t know about you, but the times we’ve left the questions of “interpretation” and “implementation” to the preferences of individual leaders seem like the times where we’ve done the most damage to civil liberties or to a national sense of security about the aspects of “American life” that are core to our identity.  In this case, the starting point is that the reckless and dangerous provisions of the Patriot Act from ten years ago have been expanded and then made permanent.  Even if Mr. Obama faithfully steers the entire federal government and military-industrial complex to resist taking advantage of these new powers, what happens when the next president decides it’s not such a problem to lock up a few people — FOREVER — without a trial?

I think the president had on obligation to veto this particular bill.

It was the one option on the table that would have forced revisiting of the discussion about this ground-shaking change with the urgency and attention it deserved.  Now that it’s law, we’re left with incremental attempts to clarify the language of the bill to hopefully do less harm and court challenges that could take years to get to a Supreme Court that isn’t known for its civil libertarian leanings.

Some will say that this is an unsurprising move in a broken political system that already facilitates the amassing of power by a few to the detriment of the ordinary citizen.  Others will say that it’s not such a big deal and that surely in the end it will mostly be used to legitimately and necessarily fight terrorism.  Both of those may be true in some regard.

But for me, it’s a new low for the promise that was the Barack Obama presidency.  For a man who campaigned on such clear ideals when it came to civil liberties and the role of the U.S. Government in protecting and maintaining them, the signing of the NDAA represents a true lack of integrity that no signing statement or philosophizing about “this is the way the world works” can explain away.  There are a lot of wonderful things about the Obama presidency, and there’s a lot of good that’s been done on his watch.  But I can’t begin to imagine how, with decisions like this one, the president will make the case to progressive Americans for his re-election.

Most of the media coverage this week seems to be glossing over the significant detail that the U.S. investment in Iraq, in terms of personnel and dollars, will continue.  Instead of uniformed troops from the military, we’ll have 15,000-16,000 people there in the form of other government employees and private contractors.  We’ll be spending almost $4 billion there in 2012.  These numbers are lower than what we’ve been investing, but they are not small numbers, and they still represent a significant commitment on the part of U.S. taxpayers, let alone on the part of the soldiers still on the ground.  We can’t afford to start thinking or talking as though our involvement in Iraq is through.

It also seems appropriate that when we talk about the human life lost in the course of the U.S. presence in Iraq, we avoid artificial exclusions based on nationality.  The story and cost of war is incomplete if you only recognize the count of killed and wounded on one “side” of any conflict.  As we consider this particular milestone, let us reflect on the totality of what has been sacrificed, taken or destroyed along the way.

• we should stop doing some stuff that’s not good for the country
• we should do more of the things that are good for the country
• there are some special guests here whose personal stories will make you cry
• everything will be great, you’ll see
• USA is #1 YEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

It seems like if you have an audience of millions for an hour in prime time, you might mix it up a little bit.  Maybe some flip charts or a talking puppet or something? Oh well.

But, there were two ideas from the speech that I found a little different, and that seem worth following up on if they were offered in sincerity:

• it’s okay to think about the possibility of cutting military funding
• it’s possible that the departments of the federal government aren’t organized in the most efficient way possible given the modern technological tools available for conducting business

If even some small percentage of someone’s time is spent acting on those ideas and bringing about some change as a result, then I’ll be grateful they were held up during the speech.

Otherwise, thanks for all the fish jokes, see you again next year.

Lawmakers and executive branch leaders across the political spectrum are acutely aware that they’ll never be criticized for “supporting the troops” that serve in these operations.  In his recent speech updating the world on the status of U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he also acknowledged the tenuous state of the economy, President Obama said that, “as long as I am President, we will maintain the finest fighting force that the world has ever known, and we will do whatever it takes to serve our veterans as well as they have served us.”  The finest in the world.  Whatever it takes.  These phrases mean something coming from the President of the United States.

Locally in my community, as our City Council debates questions of funding various departments and programs, shrewd Council members have learned that they can shore up support for cutting the funding of any given budget line item by raising the specter of having to cut back on law enforcement or fire-fighting personnel.  In a newspaper article just today, a Council member pits public safety against funding the local Human Rights Commission, because he knows public safety will always win: “When you are forced to get rid of police officers and firefighters, I’m sure human rights is going to come up for discussion again.”

Is that what it’s come to?  We will be asked to endure any cost, any sacrifice as long as we don’t have to cut back our spending on police, fire, and military?  Why is that?

Essential Services

These public safety jobs have long been described as “essential services,” things that you just don’t give up on unless you’re abandoning your very participation in civilized society.  We use tax dollars to train emergency/public safety/military personnel and equip them with expensive, high-tech gear that (in our idealized narrative, anyway) allows them to solve problems in ways no ordinary citizen can:

• If someone is threatening to harm our country, these people of courage and might can use unparalleled military force to stop them!
• If a fire is threatening to harm our household, these people of courage and might can use special fire-fighting equipment and training to put the fire out!
• If someone is threatening to harm us personally, these people of courage and might can use the threat of force – or actual force – to stop that person in their tracks!

Members of the military, fire-fighters, police officers, EMTs – these aren’t just people doing an everyday job; they’re out there saving lives.  Whether we think we’ve ever directly benefited from their work or not, they become our protectors, our heroes, our saviors.  They are something reliable, essential, rock-solid in a world where so much can change so fast.

So raising the question of reducing funding for these heroes is of course unquestionable.  How dare we even consider what it would mean to ask someone who has put their life on the line to look for work elsewhere?  Where is our loyalty to the troops?  Where is our appreciation for their sacrifice?

Just Another Job?

While it would be a stretch for anyone to say that these roles in our society are “just another job,” we do need to remind ourselves that those who find themselves in the military, in a police force, in a firefighting department have almost always chosen to be there voluntarily.  They are made well aware of the risks involved, and they are paid for their time and for putting themselves in harm’s way.  This doesn’t make their heroic actions any less heroic, but it does mean that our contract with them has some limitations.

When we as taxpayers choose to pay people to protect us, we are not also committing to their life-long, tenured employment.  We are not committing to never question the value or utility of a given public safety program weighed against other community needs, or to never ask what a reduction in forces might look like.  We are not blindly saying that we’ll always do whatever it takes to keep those public servants employed, no matter what.

After all, what kind of bleak existence would we have if we always gave absolute priority to defense spending and police/fire budgets?  When we’ve whittled away our budgets for maintaining a given quality of life, when we’ve closed all of our parks and our public spaces, when we’ve traded local control of services and programs that ensure our rights are protected and our voices are heard for the empty assurances of monolithic state and federal governments, when we’ve accepted that you don’t have to be well-informed about the news of the day or about how the world works as long as you can be entertaining, when we’ve given up on providing educational settings that enrich lives instead of preparing us to pass tests, when we’ve destroyed the natural landscapes of the Earth so that we can buy a Big Mac more conveniently…will it really be enough to know that there are police and firefighters and military forces patrolling our streets, watching out for our safety?

Is that really the best future we can imagine?

Or,

Another Way

Can we start to turn this conversation around?

Can we start to ask questions about how the money we spend on the military and public safety services fits in to our priorities as communities?

Can we accept that discussions about changing how we use our community resources does not equate to bashing the service or worthiness of the heroes who have put their lives on the line?  That in fact, we best honor those who serve our community by being good stewards of the community’s limited tax dollars?

Can we put aside the absolutes and the unquestionable statements of “whatever it takes” and instead allow ourselves to sit with complex needs in a complex world?

Can we ask ourselves what we might spend money on if we weren’t driven by fear – fear of not being re-elected, fear of being accountable to our mistakes, fear of that which we cannot control or that which is not familiar?

Several years back, at a town hall meeting here in Richmond, I watched Congressman Mike Pence use this hero worship against one of the heroes themselves.  A police officer from the Richmond Police Department stood up and asked a question about Pence’s views on, I believe, healthcare benefit funding for police officers.  The question was one that challenged Pence and demanded more than a sound bite answer.  So what did Pence do?  “Ladies and gentleman, first of all, let’s just all give this officer a round of applause for the service and sacrifice that he and his fellow officers make every day.”  The room erupted in sustained applause, and by the time it died down and everyone was sitting again, Pence could have answered any question he wanted any way he wanted – we’d all forgotten about the officer’s good, hard question.

Mr. Pence knew what he was doing, and indeed, he proceeded to not really answer the question, the officer unable to push him further without seeming ungrateful for the applause.  It was a scary moment, one when the power of this particular form of hero worship was hit home for me.

Up to us

I appreciate what the police officers in my community do for me.  I’m glad to know that I can call 911 and expect a fast response if I need a fire put out.  I’m immensely grateful and touched that there are those who believe so strongly in their job that they’re willing to risk their lives as a part of it.

So let’s not take that for granted.  Let’s not let politicians and uninformed fear-mongers create a false dichotomy when it comes to funding the work of the heroes in our community while also maintaining a reasonable quality of life that includes protection of civil rights.  Let’s honor the service of those involved in public safety by being willing to truly understand whether their sacrifice and risk is actually necessary in the context of the future we really want to create for ourselves.

Unfortunately, most of the responses (and the ones favored by the Obama administration) are focused on paying insanely large amounts of money to private contractors to create and deploy complex technological solutions in hopes of addressing the threat.

What advocates of this approach fail to appreciate is that (A) most of the actual threat comes from uneducated human operators of the technology in question, and (B) deploying homogeneous, technologically complex solutions often makes us more vulnerable, not less.

Once you get past the flashy headlines and attention-grabbing introductory stories in these articles, meant to scare us into believing how real the threat is (basically, bloodthirsty hacker terrorists are trying to kill us all), each of them seems to come back to one of two recurring themes behind these threats.   Either a human being messed something up, or a piece of technology wasn’t secure enough and is now being exploited.

For the first case, it’s usually things like “so and so unknowingly downloaded a virus onto their USB flash drive and then plugged into a secure government network – things exploded!” or “an e-mail user clicked on a phishing scam link and had their password stolen.”  For the second case, it’s usually “Windows machines are insecure, and so they get taken over and absorbed into botnets, which can then wreak havoc through denial of service attacks” or “a security hole is found in a product made by a brand that everyone was supposed to trust, and so it’s running EVERYWHERE and OMG we’re all going to die.”

But in throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at cyberwarfare defense we will most likely see only minimal resources devoted to end-user education and training to defend against social engineering, poor personal security practices, and the related actual vulnerabilities.  The funding will also not include programs to hold hardware and software vendors more accountable for selling more secure products and services to end users.  Instead, it will go toward funding secret surveillance and the further shifting control of the Internet into military hands.

With this approach, in the end we’ll be back to where we are right now.  End-users will continue the insecure personal practices that lead to security breaches, and the continued homogenization of hardware and software will amplify the potential impact of every security hole discovered.   This is not helpful.

1. The price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline in the U.S. will hit $6 a gallon sometime this Summer, and perhaps $10/gallon or more by the end of the year. Measures will be taken by the federal and state governments to temporarily alleviate the financial burden on some people, but nothing sustainable. Some people will not be able to get to work at all, while others will have to carpool more, take the bus, ride their bikes, and walk.
2. The U.S. will initiate military action against Iran, probably in the form of heavy air-strikes. There will be no clear notion of victory or desired outcome other than to significantly destroy the country’s own infrastructure, especially targets related to nuclear facilities. This action might be justified to the American people by…
3. An apparent attack on one or more U.S. locations, resulting in significant loss of life or infrastructure.
4. The U.S. airline industry will significantly cut back or even cease flight schedules as we’ve known them, and air travel will (once again) become a privilege reserved for the rich and famous who can afford private flights. Any frequent flier miles you’ve accumulated will become worth near nothing.
5. Most grocery stores will significantly scale back their inventories and restocking schedules, and significantly raise prices on what remains. Obtaining food from non-local sources, even basic staples, will be difficult at best, and most communities will begin to take emergency steps to feed their residents.

Hey, look, I don’t like the thought of these things happening any more than the next person, but perhaps there’s some value in naming what might be, even if it seems a bit outlandish or gruesome. Maybe if we believe these things are possible, we might feel more prepared to prevent or deal with them if they do happen.

What do you think? Too cynical? Worse? What are some other scenarios?

I know it will seem pretty far fetched and hard to picture in real life, but here are some of the salient events in the plot (spoiler alert!):

The U.S. military goes into a foreign country because we think it needs our help. They set up a “Green Zone” and establish patrols throughout the streets to deal with any threats. They assure the people watching from the outside that the secured country is safe and that reconstruction is making progress, when really it is just a facade of safety and progress. When we lose control of the situation, the backup plan involves mass violence and extermination of pretty much anything moving. Lots of people die, and there is no reasonable exit strategy or resolution to speak of.

Thank goodness this was a work of fiction and nothing like that is going on today. But still, in the name of improving the quality of our police state, let’s break down some of what we can learn from it:

1. You can’t set up a perimeter that is only secure in one direction of egress or ingress, especially when you’re dealing with infectious diseases. It should be as hard to get out of the secured area as it is to get in. Have we learned NOTHING from Resident Evil?
2. You always need multiple perimeters, again, especially when dealing with infectious diseases. A single set of doors, a single bridge, a single point of access is just not acceptable when you’re up against today’s zombie-making viruses. Did we learn NOTHING from The Andromeda Strain?
3. No one should ever have full access to everything, even really important people. If you have the privilege to make use of a computerized keycard access system, take advantage of the configuration options in the software that powers it to grant individuals access only to where they are supposed to be. For example, someone in charge of maintenance operations at a residential facility should not also have access to the inner holding rooms of a highly critical medical facility. Have we learned NOTHING from every action movie ever made?
4. If you take someone into custody who is acting strangely, has a mysterious or questionable origin, has been exposed extensively to flesh-eating zombies or who may be critical to some aspect of your operations, consider not leaving him or her completely unguarded and unmonitored in a trailer in some parking lot. Have we learned NOTHING from The Usual Suspects?
5. Firebombing an entire city is not a sufficient way to insure total annihilation of all life-forms. Now, when you add in a city-wide release of fatal nerve gas, you’re starting to think in the right direction, but you can’t just assume that every space has been accounted for. Total destruction is the only option. Have we learned NOTHING from The Terminator, Terminator 2 or Terminator 3?
6. You can’t necessarily depend on human beings to harm or kill each other in the name of following orders, even when they’re trained to do so. At least for now, the base human instinct is to create and celebrate life at all costs. Have we learned NOTHING from Cocoon?

Let this be a lesson to you, military strategy planners of the future!

Another relevant lesson is not to trust the movie showtimes you get from text messaging with Google, as dependence on them may result in the viewing of a movie that was not your intended showing. Feh.

1. There must be a really good reason: “force may be used only to correct a grave public evil…a massive violation of the basic rights of whole populations”
2. The injustice suffered by one party must significantly outweigh that suffered by the other
3. Only the proper authorities may wage war
4. Force must only be used in a truly just cause and solely for that purpose – correcting a suffered wrong is okay, but doing it for money or material possessions is not.
5. You have to have a good chance of succeeding – you can’t go to war if it’s futile
6. The force used must be proportional to the good trying to be achieved. (I remember my pastors metaphor here made it into my own speech: you shouldn’t kill a fly with a sledgehammer!)
7. War must only be waged as a last resort

Who wouldn’t be convinced by these? If all of those criteria are met, how can war not be justified, inevitable if abhorrent?

Perhaps as we leave the eighth grade and move on to more nuanced views of the world, we know that it may not be that simple. I have certainly come to learn that just war theory is presented within a particular moral framework that isn’t really my moral framework. But I certainly appreciated at the time that it was consistent within the framework it lived in, true to itself, and it was something you could hold onto when the horrors of what it means to be at war did have such a fogging effect on any thinking about the matter. I appreciated that if you’re going to go kill someone, or ask someone else to kill someone, you damn better well have thought it through at that level and gotten yourself crystal clear on what your reasoning and values say about why you would be a part of that act.

This is partly why it is so scary to me that U.S. troops in the Middle East are now receiving values training three years into this particular war. When requests like “don’t desecrate the dead” and “don’t cause unnecessary suffering” need to be put up in a Powerpoint presentation and read aloud to make sure everyone’s “got it,” I feel ill.

Of course, on one hand, it makes perfect sense, given that the war in Iraq, and perhaps any war waged, requires contemplation of what are probably unresolvable conflicts in moral and emotional principles. Of course there will be stories of troops killing innocent civilians. Of course there will be torture in prisons. Of course there will be horrible acts brought on by asking men and women to figure those questions out in the heat of the moment. How can we ask someone to reconcile the inherent mission of our troops – apply the use of deadly force to coerce people into behaving a certain way – with the conflicting values that are ostensibly behind that mission – respect for life, pursuit of freedom and democracy, instilling peace and justice, creating a better world for all?

I don’t think the U.S. military wants its soldiers pondering those questions in the field. I don’t think it can afford to have each person contemplating those moral judgments along the way. I don’t think it can afford to have real values training, because this is where war – from my perspective, anyway – ceases to have any integrity or consistency within its own moral framework. The justifications for war at a high level may work just fine, but when you drill down to what’s happening out in the field – human beings hurting and killing each other because they’re told to – there is no integrity, there is no moral code that one can follow to justify it. As Albert Einstein said, “A country cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”

For what it’s worth, I don’t make a judgment on those who are compelled to exhibit that lack of integrity in a war setting. I believe they are responsible to themselves for their own actions, and maybe they can be acting with integrity and morality within their understanding of their own worldview, even if they aren’t in mine. But if they’ve gotten that far down the path of war, they’re already working within a moral and cultural framework that doesn’t offer them any good options, at least in the context of creating peace, justice and a sustainable human existence.

Or, as I wish I could go back and say to my eighth grade class, there are plenty of ways to justify modern warfare, and a lot of them sound pretty good, but I don’t think any of them work for humanity.

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” –Ernest Hemingway

Note: This is a topic that I’m fairly certain the few folks who do read this blog may have some opinions about, and I’d really like to hear them. Please post your thoughts, even if anonymously; I’m done with the eighth grade, but I’m sure I still have more to learn and other points of view to consider.