Perpetual War

This post by Andrew Sullivan talks about the perversion of our rights that has been perpetrated by the current administration. Of particular interest: Most Americans are not yet fully aware that this vice-president believes that the executive branch is not subject to domestic or international law, has inherent powers to arrest, detain indefinitely without charges and torture anyone on earth if it so wishes, and can wire-tap Americans without any court oversight for good measure. These are not emergency powers in wartime, but permanent new powers since we are in permanent new state of war. Sullivan gets to the heart of the matter... a few years too late. In 2002 (read, right after 9/11), Gore Vidal's book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace exposed the concept of a permanent state of war. Vidal made commentary on the 9/11 incident, but the book clearly reviews the ponderous US history of using perpetual conflict (or fear of conflict) to control the populace and to steadily chip away at our personal freedoms. It is not "new", as Andrew suggests, but carries back 60 years to the end of WWII. Most of the previous leaders, however, did it with far more subtlety than the current administration, as Vidal notes in his essay September 11, 2001 (A Tuesday): In any case, never before in our long history of undeclared unconstitutional wars have we, the American people, been treated with such impish disdain... The fact that the violations of our (and other nation's) "inalienable" rights are more overt now than in the past is the predictible result of allowing idealogues who believe they are above the law to operate as such. As tactics that are outside Comsky's famous "boundaries of the permissible" become more frequent, the propensity of the general population to be appalled by them is decreased. In this way, more and more rights are slowly eliminated by an ever-expanding central power structure, which engulfs destroys personal freedom like a mushroom cloud. This has been going on for 60 years, and we still seem to be unable to recognize it for what it is: perpetual war for perpetual peace. We seem surprised by it every time, from Korea and Vietnam ("war on Communism"), to Cuba and Nicauragua ("war on drugs"), to Afghanistan and Iraq ("war on terror"). Why are we surprised again?