Like Imperial Rome — USA versus Syria — missile strike

© 2018 Peter Free

 

16 April 2018

 

 

Law, what's that?

 

Jon Schwarz addressed the legal logic for the (13 April 2018) US missile strike on Syria. Let's look at what he said.

 

We will set aside preliminary concerns that:

 

 

(a) the Trump Administration probably lied about who caused the gas attack that it was supposedly retaliating for

 

and

 

(b) the missile strike itself was illegal under international law.

 

 

Schwarz's domestic gist is that the President's Office of Legal Counsel came up with a secret justification for last year's (equally illegal and equally lied about) missile attack on Syria.

 

The 2017 memo's logic — if one can call defended illegality that — probably was used to justify last week's attack, as well.

 

Schwarz's point is that the Administration has refused to reveal its legal reasoning (for these strikes) to anyone:

 

 

[P]revious presidents appear to have always made public their legal justification for any overt military action on a significant scale. No matter how shoddy their explanations were, this at least made debate possible.

 

© 2018 Jon Schwarz, Donald Trump ordered Syria strike based on a secret legal justification even Congress can't see, The Intercept (14 April 201)

 

 

The demented American rabbit trail

 

Our Constitution limits war authority to Congress. We, however, know that this imperialistically unprofitable concept got trashed, in practice, decades ago.

 

We now assume that the American Emperor can expand the pillaging range of the United States' Military Industrial Complex with a simple wave of his scepter.

 

The public generally takes it for granted that Congress is mostly composed of voraciously greedy blowhards, who do not know what the Constitution is or once was.

 

Congress' refusal to do its constitutional duty does not matter to us, anyway. We also don't know what that Document was supposed to mean.

 

 

However . . .

 

We can assume that our Uniformed Service do know what the Constitution is, having taken oaths to uphold it with their lives.

 

Nevertheless, these same Services appear to reason that they are just nobly following the American Emperor's orders, whenever they do whatever he says.

 

 

The moral? — We have heard this logic before

 

At the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.

 

When a world reacquainted itself with sanity. And executed a handful of criminally murderous, law and ethics-defining morons on simple principle.

 

We are (we say) different than "them" Nazis. Heaven speaks to us and did not to them.

 

Ergo, I guess, we can blame our enthusiastically indulged modern illegalities on Jesus or God. Or both. One can never have too many sources of claimed righteousness.

 

We seem to be pretty darn sure that He approves of us randomly blowing people and things up. For no rationally thought-through strategic or truth-embracing logic. Except to accumulate lucre and our own self-advancement.

 

There is tiresome sameness to History. It demonstrates the viciousness of institutional power.

 

When we are caught committing sins against humanity, we like to pretend — like deceased comedian Flip Wilson used to for laughs — that "The Devil made me do it."

 

Theologian Paul Tillich's widely quoted (but seemingly never sourced) phrase — "Every institution is inherently demonic" — makes Wilson's excuse seem reasonable and humanly unavoidable. Evil-doing people almost never pay a price for their nastiness.

 

This "rats win" truth may be the first obstacle that a decent course in proposed societal ethics would have to overcome. Certainly, we have not. Constitution, professed righteousness, or not.