by Dreams End » Sun Apr 09, 2006 12:37 am
This is not good. <br><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://prairieweather.typepad.com/the_scribe/2006/03/32406_harpers_e.html">excerpts from Harper's "hypothetical" coup issue</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br>This is VERY bad. I was worried back during Katrina that the "bring in the cavalry" media circus of General Honore arriving to bail out the city when the civilians could not was a step toward normalizing the idea of military takeovers. (To my discredit, I predicted a statewide or even region wide military takeover, and this did not happen..)<br><br>So, look who's talking in this piece:<br><br>Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University and the author, most recently, of The New American Militarism. He served as an officer in the US Army from 1969 t0 1992.<br><br>Brig. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., staff judge advocate at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. In 1992 he published an essay entitled “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.” Harper’s adds that his views “are personal and do not reflect those of the US Department of Defense.”<br><br>Richard H. Kohn, chair of the curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and editor of the book The United States Military Under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989, among others. <br><br><br>Edward N Luttwak, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of many books, including Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br>“The only truly existential threat that American democracy might face today,” the Harper’s editors write, could be the “unthinkable” – a military coup. The latest Harper’s pulls together “a panel of experts to discuss the state of our military – its culture, its relationship with the wider society, and the steadfastness of its loyalty to the ideals of democracy and to the US Constitution.” <br><br>Though we’re living under the threat of foreign terrorists, Harper's writes, the only way to “subdue America entirely” would be to “seize the machinery of state itself, to steer it toward malign ends – to carry out, that is, a coup d’etat.” The question is, under what circumstances would our military officers join in such an effort.<br><br><br><br>DUNLAP: One interesting scenario would be a crisis between the branches of government that are expected to control the military. I.e., if the armed forces were caught between the orders of the president, the Congress, or even the courts, and there were no constitutional path to resolve the disagreement.<br><br>KOHN: Wouldn't the armed forces simply freeze? They'd be paralyzed.<br><br>LUTTWAK: It's a very interesting line of inquiry. Let's say a president, exercising his proper and legitimate presidential authority, initiates a military action. Then Congress wakes up and says, "Wait a minute, this president is berserk; he's starting a war, and we're against it." But in the meantime, the military force has already been put in a very compromised situation. If things were moving very fast, the military might well take an unconstitutional action.<br><br> <br><br>"By design the military is authoritarian, socialistic, undemocratic."<br><br>WASIK: Let's get back, though, to the subject of crises, whether real or contrived. It seems as though the American public wants to see the military step in during these situations. A poll taken just after Hurricane Katrina found that 69 percent of people wanted to see the military serve as the primary responder to natural disasters.<br><br>DUNLAP: People don't fully appreciate what the military is. By design it is authoritarian, socialistic, undemocratic. Those qualities help the armed forces to serve their very unique purpose in our society: namely, external defense against foreign enemies. In the military we look to destroy threats, not apprehend them for processing through a system that presumes them innocent until proven guilty. And I should add that if you do try to imprint soldiers with the restraint that a police force needs, then you disadvantage them against the ruthless adversaries that real war involves.<br><br>WASIK: Then why do so many Americans say they want to see the military get involved in law enforcement, "peacekeeping," etc.?<br><br>DUNLAP: Americans today have an incredible trust in the military. In poll after poll they have much more confidence in the armed forces than they do in other institutions. The most recent poll, just this past spring, had trust in the military at 74 percent, while Congress was at 22 percent and the presidency was at 44 percent. In other words, the armed forces are much more trusted than the civilian institutions that are supposed to control them.<br><br> <br><br>Are we experiencing a “creeping coup d’etat” right now?<br><br>BACEVICH: The question that arises is whether, in fact, we're not already experiencing what is in essence a creeping coup d'etat. But it's not people in uniform who are seizing power. It's militarized civilians, who conceive of the world as such a dangerous place that military power has to predominate, that constitutional constraints on the military need to be loosened. The ideology of national security has become ever more woven into our politics. It has been e especially apparent since 9/11, but more broadly it's been going on since the beginning of the Cold War.<br><br>KOHN: The Constitution is being warped.<br><br>BACEVICH: Here we don't need to conjure up hypothetical scenarios of the president deploying troops, etc. We have a president who created a program that directs the National Security Agency, which is part of the military, to engage in domestic eavesdropping.<br><br>LUTTWAK: I don't know if this would be called a coup.<br><br>KOHN: Because it's so incremental?<br><br>LUTTWAK: It's more like an erosion. The president is usurping additional powers. Although what's interesting is that the president's usurpation of this particular power was entirely unnecessary. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which approves terrorism-related requests for wiretaps, can be summoned over the telephone in a matter of minutes. In its entire history, it has said no to a request for surveillance only a handful of times, and those were cases where there was a mistake in the request. Really, even a small-town sheriff can get any interception he wants, so long as after the fact he can show a judge that there was reasonable cause.<br><br>BACEVICH: Bush's move was unnecessary if the object of the exercise was to engage in surveillance. It was very useful indeed if the object is to expand executive power.<br><br>KOHN: Which is exactly what has been the agenda since the beginning of this administration.<br><br>LUTTWAK: Now you're attributing motives.<br><br>BACEVICH: Yes, I am! If you read John Yoo, he suggests that one conscious aim of the project was to eliminate constraints on the chief executive when it comes to matters of national security.<br><br>DUNLAP: I will say that even if it was a completely legal project, there is a question of how appropriate it is for the armed forces to be involved in that kind of activity. Since, as I noted before, the American people have much less confidence in those institutions of civilian control than they do in the armed forces, we need to be very careful about what we ask the military to do, even assuming it's legal.<br><br>WASIK: If we are talking about a "creeping coup" that is already under way, in what direction is it creeping?<br><br>BACEVICH: The creeping coup deflects attention away from domestic priorities and toward national-security matters, so that is where all our resources get deployed. "Leadership" today is what is demonstrated in the national-security realm. The current presidency is interesting in that regard. What has Bush accomplished apart from posturing in the role of commander in chief? He declares wars, he prosecutes wars, he insists we must continue to prosecute wars.<br><br>KOHN: By framing the terrorist threat itself as a war, we tend to look upon our national security from a much more military perspective.<br><br>BACEVICH: We don't get Social Security reform, we don't get immigration reform. The role of the president increasingly comes to be defined by his military function.<br><br>KOHN: And so our foreign policy becomes militarized. We neglect our diplomacy, de-emphasize allies.<br><br> <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
