Monday, March 17, 2003

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For the first time today, my partner and I made a plan as to what we would do -- how we would get our kid, and where we would go from there -- in case of an attack on Washington. We are generally not anxious about this sort of thing; we are anxious about plenty of other smaller and more personal things, but have not been worried about catastrophe. But we, like many of our friends, believe that the Administration's plan for war -- and the foolish un-diplomatic course that the Administration took in pursuit of that plan -- have made us all less safe in the short run, the medium run, and the long run. Now, if there were some reason to believe that wonderful things would happen half a world away as a result of this military action, then we could grit our teeth and remind ourself that our own personal safety is not the measure of a plan's merit; but we have heard no plausible chain of consequences by which military action against Iraq will bring peace, stability, moderation, and progress to any part of the world. My guess is that it will bring just the opposite. Add to this the fact that -- as Professor Balkin discusses today -- this Administration owes its very existence (after the 2000 election) to a series of accidents at best and a series of scams at worst. And add also the fact that there is a concerted effort by many right-wing voices to characterize dissent as treason, literally. These are bad times, in which it is hard to focus on anything else. Yet reading the paper, we see that the people with whom I disagree on all sorts of "mundane" non-military issues of domestic law and politics have not stopped their pushes on various fronts, as war gets closer; if anything, they are pushing harder as the war distracts attention from other issues. So let's keep on pushing back.

posted by sam 4:27 PM 0 comments

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