Tuesday, September 10, 2002

Support Unlimited War or Become a Traitor

    When your country is attacked there can be no such thing as an "anti-war" movement. Protesters against America's war on terror, are not peaceniks, they are America-haters and saboteurs, and they should be treated as such.

Horowitz then goes on to label Jessica Quindel, president of the Graduate Assembly at UC Berkeley, “a traitor of the heart” for merely acknowledging that Old Glory has become a symbol of U.S. military aggression to many people around the world and perhaps believing, although it isn’t clear from what Horowitz quotes of her, that they are right. Horowitz also names Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn as being traitors and says that these three and those like them “would aid and abet any enemy, [Osama] Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein -- it really doesn't matter -- before she would embrace her own country.”

The piece, entitled “Editorial: America Haters,” makes it very clear that Horowitz doesn’t view their as being any legitimate criticisms of U.S. foreign policy that question the use of force. Horowitz is clear that he isn’t saying such people should be censored but there is a problem with this statement that is at least as large.

By including Hussein –the Iraqi dictator who has not been shown to have any intentions of doing harm to the U.S. since at least 1993- in this list, Horowitz implies that the White House should have free reign to go to war with anybody that it wants and that questioning the merits of any military action amounts to treason. In other words, there should be no constraints on the power of President Bush –and his successors?- to make war.

Section 8 of the Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority “To declare war.” Horowitz has previously defended the U.S. Constitution but perhaps, much like the rights of criminal defendants, limits on Presidential war making are on aspect of the Constitution he wants to get rid of.

No comments:

Post a Comment