The Myth of Security Primacy

by dday

Chris Bowers wrote a post yesterday about how this idea that the primary responsibility of any President is to provide for the common defense is reductionist and wrong. This is a Republican view of government, that its only concern is keeping people safe. And it’s damaging our global stature.

Our growing national obsession with security over justice, liberty and democracy is one of, if not the, clearest sign of the eroding stature of America in the geopolitical scene. Until about thirty years ago, America had pretty consistently been the most progressive great power, or super power, in the entire world. Now, due to the rise of conservatism in America, we have unfortunately lost that title to the European Union. It is a painful irony that most of Europe has become more democratic than America itself: in a sense, they have become more American than thou. Our loss of priorities in governance is one of the main reasons for this. In an American contest, “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” should matter just as much as life (remember Patrick Henry?). Justice, the general welfare and liberty should matter just as much as the common defense and domestic tranquility. We have really lost our way on this front, to the point that even saying your first priority as President or in Congress is anything but security is considered blasphemy. That is an incredibly frustrating, teeth-grinding loss of our national purpose, to such an extent that it has become an untouchable symptom in our national decline.

It’s not an insignificant point. We are seeing basic human rights and practically the entire code of justice stripped away because of a false notion that security must take primacy. Because of this, we see our legal system twisted into such a knot that a President can indemnify lawyers who act on his orders and lawyers can indemnify a President if they act under their orders. Because of this, members of the executive branch are the only citizens in the country who don’t have to answer to Congress, simply by virtue of being in the executive branch. Because of this, companies who break the law are supposed to be rewarded with our gratitude. This is of course about aggrandizing power, but the fig leaf for all of this is national security. The lie that our founders created this great democracy with the singular goal of keeping themselves and their charges safe, this unbreakable, untouchable lie, is like a cancer on the body politic.

And even if you cede this lie, even if you measure the current Administration based on this and only this standard, the only conclusion you can reach is that they are complete and utter failures. Not only is this White House totally irrelevant in promoting any kind of democracy promotion or peace-building strategy, but its policies, which have the nominal goal of keeping America safe, could literally not be more destabilizing and endangering for this country and our allies.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by (Fatah strongman Muhammad) Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

This is really about as unbelievable as you can get. Condi Rice and the national security apparatus was out to lunch by pushing for elections in the Palestinian territories, even though the indications were very strong that they would result in a Hamas victory. When the inevitable happened, they rejected Mahmoud Abbas’ efforts to forge a unity government and backed what amounted to a Fatah coup to overturn the election results, using a strongman with a keen talent for sodomizing opposition detainees with soda bottles. Bradrocket picks up the story from there.

Long story short: the US government decides to bolster Fatah by sending them a bunch of arms. Word of these shipments leaks to a Jordanian newspaper. All hell breaks loose, Hamas and Fatah start a civil war. Hamas wins the war and proceeds to use the American-supplied arms it confiscated from Fatah against Israel. Now, here’s the punchline:

“You know,” says [Khalid Jaberi, a commander with Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades], “since the takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise. […]

Now that it controls Gaza, Hamas has given free rein to militants intent on firing rockets into neighboring Israeli towns. “We are still developing our rockets; soon we shall hit the heart of Ashkelon at will,” says Jaberi, the al-Aqsa commander, referring to the Israeli city of 110,000 people 12 miles from Gaza’s border. “I assure you, the time is near when we will mount a big operation inside Israel, in Haifa or Tel Aviv.”

Indeed, this provoked a bloody Israeli incursion into Gaza that was eventually repelled, and Hamas is touting: those rockets they got from America through Fatah.

Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, said that like Hezbollah, Hamas had “gone from the stone to the rocket.”

“What we learned from Hezbollah,” he said, “is that resistance is a choice that can work.” […]

But more than 200 rockets have been fired at Israel since Wednesday, according to Israeli military officials, including at least 21 longer-range Katyusha-style rockets, which are manufactured outside Gaza and brought into the strip. Palestinians and Israelis see the use of those rockets as another illustration of the growing similarity between Hezbollah and Hamas, the militant Islamic organization that controls Gaza.

“We are very concerned that the role model for Hamas in Gaza is the Lebanese Hezbollah,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, when asked about parallels between this conflict and the one with Hezbollah.

A strategy based on “security” and “strength” has imperiled Israel. It happened to violate international law as well, but of course the myth of security primacy cancels that out.

This is standard American meddling abroad, we’ve seen this for decades, although the core competency seems to have, er, eroded a tad. But in a national security state, failures of this stripe are even more devastating. This is practically all we have left in a country where justice and human rights have been completely hollowed out. We’re governed by people who are contemptuous of government and indeed want to destroy it. They have no vision of government other than being a protective shield. And yet that shield is so cracked and withered and broken, the policies so dangerous and stupid, that it only hastens this American decline. And without a determined and concerted effort to make government somehow more vital than just a security blanket, there’s not going to be much of a chance to turn things around.

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