Published in the Western Standard, May 17, 2004, p. 40. (Also available in a jpg scan.)

The War on Terror is Nothing Compared to the War on our Rights
by
Pierre Lemieux

 

It is clear that 9/11 had to be punished, even from a purely economic (consequential) viewpoint. One reason is the need to deter other such crimes. Deterrence is less effective against those who believe that their crimes will earn them a place with Allah and a few dozen virgins in heaven; but others besides Islamist barbarians would start blowing up people if there was no punishment. Another reason was to stop those barbarians who committed 9/11 from pursuing their crusade. It was necessary to go and get them, wherever they were and whoever was protecting them. They were not in Iraq. The operation in Afghanistan was probably justified. I say "probably" because the number one suspect, Osama bin Laden, is still at large, and no court has judged the other suspects captured there. The war against the third-rate Iraqi tyrant had little to do with 9/11. Just imagine, if the $100 billion plus that was wasted on that war by the U.S. government alone had been spent on capturing bin Laden and/or those guilty of the World Trade Center carnage and the following anthrax scare (remember that one?). I don't believe that we have a duty to liberate all the subjects of all the tyrants in the world. Even if we did, the Iraqi tyrant was not the worst. Attacking him was less costly than would have been a challenge to, say, the Chinese tyrant, so perhaps the cost-benefit ratio was better. But even then, the Vietnam-like occupation of Iraq shows that liberating a people that is not accustomed to free institutions does not automatically provide the blessings of liberty. Now, the wasteful war in Iraq and its danger in terms of being used for state-boosting propaganda are little, compared to the consequences of the war on terror. It should have been obvious from the beginning that this war would be waged more against our liberties than against terrorists. On September 10, 2001, our Western states already had much too much power. In many ways, they had more effective powers than any prince had been able to muster in any previous war, and more power than any citizen concerned with defending liberty would have granted them even to fight the worst intergalactic war. True, they have not (yet?) imposed conscription and warlike limitations on speech but, should they go this route, their pre-9/11 powers would probably make the enforcement of such laws more efficient than at any time in the history of mankind. On September 10, 2001, Western states were leviathans. If the war on terror had been primarily a war against the enemies of liberty, we should have expected the state (be it the American state, the British state or the Canadian state) to proclaim that it would immediately reduce its power and return lost liberties to the citizens, in order to make the war worth fighting. At the very, very least, they would have sworn not to make one more dent in our liberties. Instead, the so-called "war on terror" has justified a truly historic onslaught on our liberties, or what was left of them. It has dramatically reduced the political costs of assaults on privacy, the advance of official ID papers, the surveillance of borders and travel, the powers of arbitrary arrest, search and detention, and so on. And the new measures are so closely enmeshed into pre-existing laws that they would probably be impossible to abrogate even if the state was somehow forced to do it after the war on terror is won. In the statocrat's mind, the war on terror will never be won until our countries are transformed into the surveillance utopia of a vast airport terminal, for the real, practical purpose is the aggrandizement of state power. There is no need of a grand conspiracy to explain this; we just need to look at the nature and history of the state.