If I'm Dick Cheney, and I realize that Congress is unlikely to make the same mistake twice and authorize (if not declare - who needs that?) a second war, I'm wondering what technicality might make such authorization unnecessary.
For the past few years, we have been outraged by the Bush administration's claim that it could label just about anyone an "illegal enemy combatant" and throw them into Gitmo for a few years of near-solitary confinement and the occasional round of 24-hour, 24-style questioning.
This has meant a violation of human rights and a national disgrace for the US. Wesley Clark just a few days back thought it important enough to write about in an op-ed for the NYTimes, "Why Terrorists Aren't Soldiers," explaining that to label a terrorist as an illegal sort of soldier rather than a criminal both legitimates terrorism and wrongly extends military control over civilians.
But the Bush administration, as just reported in the New York Times, has now become interested not in defining terrorists as soldiers, but in defining Iranian soldiers as terrorists. What's the difference?
If the former option has led to unspeakable travesties of justice and democracy, this latest wordgame may well get us into a war-and perhaps in ways we haven't yet considered.
(Update: Was reading too fast, and just realized I've diaried the same story as MLDB (link below). I think the slant is different enough to make deletion unnecessary, but will defer to the vox populi if it thinks otherwise... meanwhile, hat tip to MLDB for getting there first!)
Helene Cooper has reported in today's NYT that the Bushies are planning to label Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. According to Cooper, this "would be the first time that the United States has added the armed forces of any sovereign government to its list of terrorist organizations."
The article is, perhaps out of respect for the difference between reporting and analysis, more than a little understated in its treatment of the implications of this move. Cooper reports that this marks an escalation. Obviously, it follows a pattern we've all seen in recent years: the Bushies complain that the UN isn't acting quickly enough and so unilateral action is necessary. This puts "pressure" on the UN and our allies to act more quickly.
The article also enumerates some of the diplomatic actions that it makes more feasible for the Bushies:
Listing would set in motion a series of automatic sanctions that would make it easier for the United States to block financial accounts and other assets controlled by the guard. In particular, the action would freeze any assets the guard has in the United States, although it is unlikely that the guard maintains much in the way of assets in American banks or other institutions.
***
Because Iran has done little business with the United States in more than two decades, the larger point of the designation would be to heighten the political and psychological pressure on Iran, administration officials said, by using the designation to persuade foreign governments and financial institutions to cut ties with Iranian businesses and individuals.
So... it accomplishes jack $*^t in concrete terms. It freezes assets that don't exist. It creates more "pressure."
But that's not the story here.
Or at least I suspect it isn't. Given that this fits into a pattern of escalation and with Cheney's clear desire for another war -- see diaries here and here (by Cenk Uygar and MLDB) if you don't know Dick -- my questions are:
1. If Iran's Revolutionary Guard is defined as a terrorist organization, will this become a way for the Bush administration to circumvent the Congress in pursuing acts of war?
2. If Iran's Revolutionary Guard is defined as a terrorist organization, will this become an excuse to deprive captured soldiers of their Geneva rights and to use unlawful interrogation techniques against them?
These technical and practical questions seem so pressing that I haven't even mentioned the rather horrific relativization of the term 'terrorist' that this would imply. Once we start labeling soldiers of a sovereign nation as terrorists, what's to stop other countries from doing the same to our own soldiers and treating them accordingly? So question 2 is also a question about the consequences for our own troops.
I am not arguing that the Republican Guard is uninvolved in attacks against US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US military has an obligation to do something about this-but should do it in a way that contains rather than escalates violence, and that respects the differences between soldiers acting lawfully, soldiers acting unlawfully, and civilians acting as terrorists.
What needs to be done is to contain, to end, the activities of Iranian soldiers aiding the insurgency in Iraq, so long as US troops remain involved (and that shouldn't be for long). But to declare the entire Republican Guard -- 125,000 soldiers, the article estimates -- a terrorist organization is to divert attention from the problem on the ground and to open the door to useless and disastrous escalation.
Bush said this, uncannily, to the Iranian people in a speech on Thursday:
“My message to the Iranian people is, ‘You can do better than this current government. You don’t have to be isolated. You don’t have to be in a position where you can’t realize your full economic potential.'”
Just replace "Iranian" with "American." We are all, Americans and Iranians, in a struggle with our respective governments to keep those governments from dragging us into a war against each other.
Let's keep our eye on this story, keep talking to our representatives, and make sure that this latest wordgame doesn't become a license for Bush to use military force against a sovereign nation without the authority of Congress.