…is its inefficiency. That’s a quote from Eugene McCarthy, and I always interpreted it as a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek phrase, like Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst form of government (aside from all the others). I just found a reason to take it literally and be thankful for it.
The CIA has apparently been hiring contract killers on the free market. They had an agreement with Blackwater, everybody’s favourite soldiers of fortune, to locate, capture and kill suspected terrorists since 2001. The saving grace is this line from the article: “Several million dollars were spent on the programme but no militants were caught or captured”. Thank heavens! There are a lot of very big problems with this (beyond the fact that they couldn’t even do it efficiently). Some of the obvious ones:
It’s questionable whether any government has the authority to kill anyone, so how could they have the authority to contract it out? I mean, a government is either the guys with a monopoly on the use of violence, or a collective fiction (sorry, ‘social construct’) we endow with the authority to regulate public goods, turn some private goods (taxes) into public ones (roads, defence, etc.), and manage some resource flows in society. The USA is fortunately (hopefully) in the second category, so how could a collective fiction be entitled to kill? I’m not a never-say-die pacifist (sorry), and I think that killing people can be justified in cases of self-defence, even if that defence is an effort to protect ideas. You wanna curtail my freedoms, I’ll ask you nicely to refrain once, but otherwise it’s gonna get ugly. I even think this can be aggregated up to a collective state level, but then there must be some substantial hurdle, like a fair trial or parliamentary/congressional approval. A government mustn’t, or at least ought not dare, claim the authority to kill people at will. If the government is only barely able, how in tarnation could mercenaries ever pretend to be able.
There’s a less principled and more instrumental reason too. There’s an election in Afghanistan going on as I write this (go guys!). If Afghanistan is to avoid falling back into the barbaric and cruel state of civil war that existed before the US/NATO invasion, we in the West need to sell our system to them. We need to convince them that there are ways to redress grievances and resolve social problems without relying on coercion alone. Part of that is the belief that if someone wrongs you, you can seek redress in an impartial court under the rule of law. If you are accused of wrong, you will be able to defend yourself with exactly the same legal rights as your accuser. This is a great system, despite the lawyers it necessitates (sorry Chris, Chris and Ron). The Afghans have experience with the system of might makes right and summary justice. They’ve practiced it quite a bit. We couldn’t teach them anything about how to make it work, and I sincerely hope that we can say with conviction that our system is the best alternative, it can work, and they should accept no substitutes. Neither should we.
The same applies to Iraq and anywhere else we break, but Afghanistan is just really salient right now.
(Irresistible irony: American republicans are still going apesh!t because of unfounded claims that the democrats’ health care bill(s) will include death panels/death squads to decide who will get treatment and who will die – already ripped apart, you’re welcome. That the CIA had been hiring hitmen since 2001 to kill people without trial could, without much hyperbole, be construed as a republican policy of employing death squads/panels. Hey kettle! Why you gotta be so black?!)
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