[Peace-discuss] Crisis of the Republic

[Paul Patton]

*Farewell to Ground Zero *
  *by Jonathan Schell *


*This article will appear in the March 6, 2006 issue of "The
Nation<http://www.thenation.com/>"
magazine*.

This column will be my last "Letter From Ground Zero." The series will be
succeeded by another, "Crisis of the Republic." Until recently it seemed
possible to trace the main developments in the Bush administration's
policies back to that horrible, fantastical day in September 2001, as if
following an unbroken chain of causes and effects. Now it no longer does.
The chain is too entangled with other chains, of newer and older origin.

The war against Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had his headquarters and
support from the ruling Taliban, was, for better or worse, a clear response
to the attack on the United States. The Patriot Act and the reorganization
of the national security apparatus likewise were responses to September 11.
But with the launch of the Iraq War, the subject was already beginning to
change. The political support for the war still flowed from 9/11, but the
administration was already veering toward other objectives. For one thing,
we know that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others had wanted to
attack Iraq since their first days in office, and, for that matter, even
before. For another, the war proved to be a kind of test case of a far more
sweeping revolution in American foreign policy, soon outlined in the White
House document of 2002, the National Security Strategy of the United States
of America, which set forth American ambitions for nothing less than global
hegemony based on military superiority, absolute and perpetual, over all
other nations. Many friends of this policy frankly and rightly called it
imperial.

The Iraq test case has failed; in doing so it has tied down forces that
otherwise might have been given further aggressive missions. The imperial
plan stalled -- as the nuclearization of North Korea without an effective
American response, among other things, attests. Nevertheless, the
administration's international ambitions had a scarcely less sweeping
domestic corollary, for which no master strategic document was supplied: a
profound transformation of the American state, in which, in the name of the
"war on terror," the President rises above the law and the Republican Party
permanently dominates all three branches of government. That project had
even less to do with 9/11 than did the Iraq War. Its roots can be traced at
least as far back as the election of 2000, when the Supreme Court improperly
interjected itself into the electoral dispute in Florida and a majority
consisting of Republican-appointed Justices awarded the presidency to the
man of their own party. Or perhaps we need to look back even further, to the
attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to knock a Democratic President
out of office by impeaching him for personal misbehavior accompanied by a
minor legal infraction. (If those standards were still in force, President
Bush would have been impeached eleven times over by now.) Obviously, these
events had nothing to do with 9/11 or the Iraq War. Their roots are older
and deeper. To arrange all the new developments, domestic and international,
under the heading "Letter From Ground Zero," as if it all began with Osama
bin Laden, would therefore be misleading. It would be a kind of lie.

For the series' new title, I want to acknowledge a debt to Hannah Arendt,
who in 1972 published a book of essays titled *Crises of the Republic*. My
single-letter change in her title reflects a belief that today the many
disparate crises of the past have combined into one general systemic crisis,
placing the basic structure of the Republic at mortal risk. At the forefront
of concern must be the question: Will the Constitution of the United States
survive? Is the American state now in the midst of a transmutation in which
the 217-year-old provisions for a balance of powers and popular freedoms are
being overridden and canceled? Or will defenders of the Constitution step
forward, as has happened in constitutional crises of the past, to save the
system and restore its integrity?

The obvious precedent is Watergate. Then as now, the presidency became
"imperial." Then as now, a misconceived and misbegotten war led to
presidential law-breaking at home. Then as now, a quixotic crusade for
freedom abroad really menaced freedom at home. Then as now, the law-breaking
President was re-elected to a second term. Then as now, the systemic rot
went so deep that only a drastic cure could be effectual. Then as now,
opposition at the outset consisted not of any great public outrage but the
lonely courage of a few bureaucrats, legislators, and reporters. Then it was
the war in Vietnam; now it is the war in Iraq and the wider and more lasting
"war on terror." Then it was secret break-ins and illegal wiretapping; now
it is arbitrary imprisonment, torture and, again, illegal wiretapping. Then
it was presidential assertion of "executive privilege"; now it is a
full-scale reinterpretation of the Constitution to give the "unitary
executive" power to do anything it likes in "wartime."

Of course, there are obvious differences. In the early 1970s, the opposition
party controlled both houses of the legislature, which launched vigorous
investigations and, eventually, impeachment proceedings. Now of course the
President's party controls the legislative branch and possibly (it's still
too early to say, given the traditional independence of the judiciary and
its consequent unpredictability) the judicial branch as well. Then, the
movement against the war had forced a decision to withdraw; now the anti-war
movement is much weaker. On the other hand, when the crisis began back then,
the President's popularity was high; now it is low.

Yet what remains most striking and most surprising is the degree of
continuity of the systemic disorder in the face of radical, galloping change
in almost every other area of political life. After all, the cold war, which
seemed at the time to be the seedbed of the Watergate crisis, ended sixteen
years ago, in the greatest upheaval of the international system since the
end of World War II. How is it, then, that the United States has returned to
a systemic crisis so profoundly similar to the one in the early 1970s? By
looking at external foes, are we looking in the wrong place for the origins
of the illness? Is this transformation what a more "conservative" public now
wants? Or is there instead something in the dominant institutions of
American life that push the country in this direction? Those are some of the
questions that will be taken up in "Crisis of the Republic."

*Jonathan Schell is The Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. He
is the author of "The Unconquerable
World<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805044574/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>,"
among many other books.*

*This article will appear in the March 6, 2006 issue of "The
Nation<http://www.thenation.com/>"
magazine*.

(c) 2006 Jonathan Schell
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