While I'm doing Stephen Biddle quotes, this article has some good ones: Debating Ends, not Just Means, in the War on Terror US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute Newsletter March 2004. Biddle writes:
A "war on terror" pits us against a tactic, not an enemy; by contrast, wartime strategies typically seek to defeat specific opponents whose aims conflict with one’s own. A wide range of groups use terrorist tactics; many of these groups pose no particular threat to America. Clearly al-Qaeda is in the cross hairs, and surely should be. But should there be others? Hamas? Hezbollah? The Colombian FARC? At some point do we go from destroying threats to America to creating them by driving together groups we might otherwise be able to split apart? ...
A war such as this one poses unusually difficult civil liberties issues. The ultimate end in this conflict is the preservation of our way of life, an important element of which is liberty. Yet civil liberties are often restricted in wartime. Historically, the courts have permitted this, in part on the assumption that the war would soon be over and normal rights returned. But if we define the enemy and the end state in ways that create an open-ended conflict against an ill-defined foe, "wartime" could become a chronic condition, not an acute emergency. If so, then how can we preserve the civil liberties for which we are ultimately fighting in a war that could be potentially indefinite? Does it make sense to incarcerate potential combatants without counsel for the duration when the duration could be forever? But if not, then how is the public to be defended from real threats that no longer come in uniforms or with clear national insignia?
Basic issues of strategic direction - the ends for which one fights - are central to success or failure in any war. They deserve at least the attention normally devoted to the means of war in the public debate on national security. Without the right questions, sound answers are unlikely; we owe it to ourselves to pose the best questions we can on the ends, and not just the means, of the War on Terror. A war such as this one poses unusually difficult civil liberties issues. The ultimate end in this conflict is the preservation of our way of life, an important element of which is liberty. Yet civil liberties are often restricted in wartime. Historically, the courts have permitted this, in part on the assumption that the war would soon be over and normal rights returned. But if we define the enemy and the end state in ways that create an open-ended conflict against an ill-defined foe, "wartime" could become a chronic condition, not an acute emergency. If so, then how can we preserve the civil liberties for which we are ultimately fighting in a war that could be potentially indefinite? Does it make sense to incarcerate potential combatants without counsel for the duration when the duration could be forever? But if not, then how is the public to be defended from real threats that no longer come in uniforms or with clear national insignia?
Basic issues of strategic direction - the ends for which one fights - are central to success or failure in any war. They deserve at least the attention normally devoted to the means of war in the public debate on national security. Without the right questions, sound answers are unlikely; we owe it to ourselves to pose the best questions we can on the ends, and not just the means, of the War on Terror.
And this was long before the public revelation about the administration's massive, ilegal warrantless NSA domestic spying program.
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