Our Future?

ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

Hillary: Polygamy, Polyamory a Civil Right

By Jeffrey Lord on 3.28.13 @ 6:09AM

Hacked Clinton e-mails: Adultery supported in April 1 announcement.

Uh-oh.

A draft statement for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, released from an anonymous hacker and dated April 1, 2013, reveals the potential 2016 presidential candidate will become the first presidential hopeful of either party to formally endorse legalizing polygamy, polyamory and adultery.

Clinton is also lending her name to a new coalition being formed by a number of celebrities including former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, South Carolina ex-Governor Mark Sanford, and golfer Tiger Woods.

The Clinton draft statement for April 1 reads this way:

Like so many others, my personal views have been shaped over time by people I have known and loved, by my experience representing our nation on the world stage, my devotion to law and human rights and the guiding principles of my faith. Marriage, after all, is a fundamental building block of our society. A great joy, and yes, a great responsibility.”

For example, I have learned much from the wisdom of my great friend Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa. Jacob, as you can see here, is the world’s most prominent polygamist, having married his lovely sixth wife, Gloria Bongi Ngema. Ms. Bongi Ngema already shares First Lady duties by accompanying the president on official trips, along with President Zuma’s three other current wives. In truth, President Zuma’s several wives have shared their husband with much more grace than I shared my own husband with Monica Lewinsky or Gennifer Flowers or Paula Jones or the many other women, famous and unknown that were my husband’s various attractions.

I owe each and every one of those women an apology. I was unaware at the time just how bigoted were my reactions, and I was wrong to have felt as I did.

My great friend Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud has, as I know was reported years ago, four wives, seven sons and fifteen daughters. He is a wonderful man who has provided me with much wisdom on this subject. And of course, our British allies, the United Kingdom, have begun the long journey to civil rights and fairness by legalizing polygamy for Muslims in the UK.

A few years ago, Bill and I celebrated as our own daughter married the first serious love of her life. I wish every parent that same joy. To deny the opportunity to our own daughters and sons to have multiple partners solely on the basis of how many they love and when they love them is to deny them the chance to live up to their own God-given potential, as Bill has so often said to me.

I know that many in our country, like my friend Maria Shriver, still struggle to reconcile the teachings of their religion, the pull of their conscience, the personal experiences they have in their families and communities. And people of good will and good faith will continue to view this issue differently. So I hope as we discuss and debate, whether it’s around a kitchen table or through flying dishes, as Bill and I have occasionally discussed the issue of multiple partners for so many years, or in the public square, we do so in a spirit of respect and understanding.

For those of us who lived through the long years of the civil rights and women’s rights movements, the speed with which more and more people have come to embrace the dignity and equality of Polygamous, Polyamorous and Adulterous Americans has been breathtaking, and inspiring. We see it all around us, every day, in major cultural statements and in quiet family moments. Who can forget Big Love, the touching HBO series on plural marriage? Or the sheer joy of Ellen DeGeneres celebrating the reality TV show Sister Wives, the true story of the courageous Kody Brown and his four wives? As Ellen noted on her show that day, “I don’t judge because I really believe whatever works for somebody should work for somebody and it’s nobody else’s business.”

Amen to Ellen.

In my own personal life, I can never forget the wonderful and deeply courageous women who have made my marriage to Bill so richly diverse and distinctly memorable, whether in our days in Arkansas or the White House. But the journey is far from over, and therefore we must keep working to make our country free, fairer and more chilled out.”

Over the years I have come to realize the sheer bigotry, not to mention futility, of keeping people from loving the people they want to love.

There is no reason in the world my marriage can’t be shared with Monica, or as I call her “Sister Wife Number 17” not to mention with Gennifer (Sister Wife Number 5), Paula (Sister Wife Number 6) and, well, not to bore with names, Sister Wives Number 2, 3, 4 and 7 thru 16.

Over time, I must say my husband and I have reached agreement that adultery laws are antiquated relics. I mean, who’s kidding whom, right?

Clinton’s stunning statement comes on the heels of the blockbuster news she is to be the honorary chair of a new human rights organization called Proud, Polygamous, Polyamorous and Adulterous Too (“PP —PAT” for short). Serving as honorary co-chairs with Clinton will be her husband, former President Bill Clinton, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, golfer Tiger Woods and polygamist Kody Brown. Particularly notable is that Clinton tried to enlist Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, a GOP 2016 presidential prospect, as an honorary co-chair. Senator Paul’s office issued a statement that fell short of endorsing PPPAT but calling for Americans to “embrace liberty in the personal sphere.”

Political observers noted that one Clinton staffer had smirked when questioned as to why Clinton’s potential 2016 opponent, Vice President Joe Biden, had not joined the group. Biden, an outspoken supporter of gay rights, was called a “bigot” and “so yesterday” for his refusal to join what the Clinton aide called “the next fundamental fight for civil rights and marriage equality.” Adding a reference to Mrs. Biden, the Clinton aide said sadly: “And the shame of it is Jill is so hot.”

PPPAT is also challenging the Human Rights Campaign’s support for what it calls the “LGBT” community, saying the HRC’s refusal to include polygamists, polyamorists, and adulterers effectively and ironically makes the longtime human rights group guilty of discrimination.

“It’s outrageous Establishment BS,” said PPPAT Executive Director Mary Ralph Pelosi, the longtime San Francisco activist who identified herself as the openly bisexual cousin of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Aiming her remark directly at the Human Rights Campaign and liberal gay rights groups, Mary Ralph Pelosi said: “What’s the point of being bisexual if I can’t have a husband and a wife? To shut the door on the civil rights of polyamorists is outright bigotry and a violation of our civil rights. It is a disgraceful attack on marriage and relationship equality.”

In what is apparently to be an organized campaign to, in the words of a Bill Clinton e-mail to his wife, “fulfill my wildest dreams”, conservative lawyer and former Bush Solicitor General Theodore Olson and liberal lawyer and former Al Gore attorney David Boies have prepared a draft article supporting the Hillary Clinton PPPAT initiative for publication in the Wall Street Journal. PPPAT has joined Olson and Boies by filing a friend-of-the-court brief with a law suit in favor of marriage and relationship equality that Olson and Boies have taken to the Supreme Court. The lawsuit is aimed at a referendum supporting opposite sex marriage passed by South Carolina voters.

The Olson-Boies article reads in part: 

Four years ago, the two of us joined forces and launched a federal constitutional challenge to Proposition 1,373, a ballot initiative which eliminated the right of polygamous, polyamorous marriages as well as adulterous relationships in South Carolina. Our lawsuit was joined by former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, a conservative Republican, along with 100 prominent Republicans with similar interests as well as former President Bill Clinton, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and television star Kody Brown.

We represent 277 loving and committed polygamists, polyamorists, and adulterers. In many ways, our clients’ relationships are indistinguishable from our own: They have lives, they breathe air, they go to the bathroom, and they are raising children — lots of them — they have jobs, they pay bills, they run errands. They experience together many of the joys and sorrows and laughter as a family in America. Not long ago, the Boston Globe wrote a touching story of practicing polyamorists, revealing just how widespread is this consensual practice between human beings whose only desire is to share their love. Newsweek has also focused on the unfairness in making polyamorous marriages illegal, saying the obvious to many of us: “It’s enough to make any monogamist’s head spin. But traditionalists had better get used to it.”

But South Carolina has locked our clients out of the institution of marriage and the relationships of their choice because they are polygamists, polyamorists, and adulterers. Governor Sanford himself was forced to flee to Argentina to conduct his affair. As the official voter guide expressly stated in 2008, Proposition 1,373 was enacted to communicate, with the force of law, that polygamous, polyamorous and adulterous relationships are not ‘okay.’ This sent the unmistakable message that such relationships are unworthy of the respect, dignity and status that society accords to opposite-sex and same-sex marriages — a status even our opponents describe as ‘indispensable to the integrity of the individual.’

While we file this case some suggest that the American people are not ready to embrace polygamous, polyamorous, and adulterous men and women as equals with respect to the right of marriage and relationship equality.

In fact, public opinion has shifted dramatically in favor of polygamous, polyamorous, and adulterous marriage and relationship equality. This very month, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 58% of Americans favor marriage equality, compared with just 36% against. The same poll found an astonishing 99.999% of adults under 30 in favor of sex with as many married or unmarried partners as possible. That poll came on the heels of the above mentioned friend-of-the-court brief on marriage equality filed by, among others, more than 100 prominent sex-starved yet decidedly proper Republicans.

As we have proved during a 12-day trial we won in a South Carolina federal court in 2011, laws like Proposition 1,373 cause devastating harm to the lives of polygamous, polyamorous, and adulterous men and women. President Clinton was unfortunately almost excluded from the White House. Governor Sanford was threatened with the loss of his governorship and is, as this is written, the target of a campaign to deprive him of an opportunity to serve in Congress once again. Former Governor Schwarzenegger has been forced to star in D-list movie flops.

Exclusion because of participation in the institutions of polygamy, polyamory, and adultery marks those targeted with a badge of inferiority, doomed to result in famous and lucrative television shows, bad movies, appearances on the Ellen DeGeneres show or, most horrifically, condemned to raise money for activities at which Lady Gaga must shake her booty in their face or force a once-distinguished governor to canoodle on South American beaches. The damage this does to their hearts and minds and wallets and egos and private parts is immeasurable — and the damage it does to all of us and our belief in the nation’s ideal of equality is incalculable.

For one to say that the Supreme Court should leave the question of marriage and relationship equality to the political processes of the states is to sully the reputation of one of the Court’s own, the late Justice William O. Douglas. Justice Douglas proudly committed serial adultery in the course of three of his four marriages, each of which are now known to have involved so-called “cheating” as he married successively his second, third and fourth wives almost immediately following divorces from wives one through three. As the Justices of this Court well know, a humiliating impeachment resolution targeting Justice Douglas was filed in Congress by then-Congressman Gerald R. Ford, a future president. For this pain to have been imposed on Justice Douglas, accompanied in the media by suggestions that his adulterous affairs were somehow not “okay” and therefore not a fundamental right caused devastating pain and humiliation not just to Justice Douglas and his wives 1 through 3 but to the governmental harmony of the United States itself.

The Constitution forbids such an indecent result. It did not tolerate it in separate schools and drinking fountains, it did not tolerate it with respect to bans on interracial marriage, and it does not tolerate it here.

Because of their sexual drive, a characteristic with which they were born and which they cannot change — our clients and hundreds of thousands of polygamous, polyamorous, and adulterous men and women in South Carolina and across the country are being excluded from dozens and dozens and dozens of life’s most precious relationships.

Opening to them participation in the unique and immensely valuable institution of marriage and hot sex will not diminish the value or status of marriage and hot sex for those who prefer a two-couple marriage, whether gay or straight. But withholding marriage or adulterous relationships causes infinite and permanent stigma, pain and isolation. It denies polygamists, polyamorists and adulterers their identity and their dignity; it labels their families and their relationships as second rate.

This outcome cannot be squared with the principle of equality and the unalienable right to liberty with presidential interns, Argentine hotties, or even a gubernatorial housekeeper — happiness — that is the bedrock promise of America from the Declaration of Independence to the 14th Amendment, and the dream — the fantasy — of all Americans.

This badge of inequality must be extinguished.

A covering e-mail also released by the anonymous hacker was a simple one-line sentence from former Secretary Clinton to her staff. It read:

After long and intense discussions with my husband, I finally decided: “What the hell.”

There was also one last e-mail, an incoming e-mail from Bill Clinton to Hillary. It read:

“Go baby!!!!”

About the Author

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com.

E-mail to a friend.

L,

I've was thinking about your friend when I came across an article in the National Review about military spending. Not that it would have any effect on your friend; in this area, as in most others, lefties don't care about facts since everyone knows that they are the reality based community. But just to give you some talking points if you ever want to go there again.

The article is Defense is Different by Jay Nordlinger in the January 28 issue.

He starts the piece with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize of 1953 to George C. Marshall for the Marshall Plan, aka, the European Recovery Plan that set about rebuilding Western Europe. He was awarded the prize by C.J. Hambro a Norwegian politician who had organized the escape of the royal family and major government officials to England as the Nazis were conquering the country. This was in 1940 before the fall of France. 

But Hambro knew that General Marshall, then Secretary Of State had been the American Chief of Staff, the boss of Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, MacArthur and all the rest. That Marshall had said in his Biennial report of 1941:"As an army we are ineffective. Our equipment, modern at the conclusion of the World War, was now, in a large measure obsolescent. In fact, continuous paring of appropriations has reduced the Army virtually to the status of a third rate power. Said Hambro, "The United States had no military strength that could prevent war or even an attack on America." Marshall "saw the total war approaching and his own country powerless." The Army had about 100,000 men under arms, though the newly signed draft would expand that number to 1,500,000. By the end of the war 12,000,000 would serve. Development on tanks had been somnambulent for twenty years, not only did we not have a weapon with a true turret for its main gun; we were still deploying horse cavalry to the Philippines. And in the area of aircraft we had nothing to match the Zero in the Pacific or the Me-109 in Europe. During the Louisiana Maneuvers in the summer of 1941 the troops carried broom sticks for rifles, and the tanks were trucks with "Tank" painted on the side. 

But we did have a whole raft of peace and disarmament treaties.

But that's how it is with America, ramp up when war is upon us, and disarm on the back end. We disarmed so fast after WWII that by 1950 North Korea could attack the south and drive us back over the peninsular to the Pusan Perimeter far to the south. 

When Marshall spoke he said, "My military associates frequently tell me that we Americans have learned our lesson"---about military preparedness, "I completely disagree with this contention and point to the rapid disintegration between 1945 and 1950 of our once vast power for maintaining the peace. As a direct consequence in my opinion, there resulted the brutal invasion of South Korea, which for a time threatened the complete defeat of our hastily arranged forces in the field. I speak of this with deep feeling because in 1939 and again in the early fall of 1950 it suddenly became my duty, my responsibility, to rebuild our national military strength in the very face of the gravest emergencies."

So spoke the man that Churchill called "The Architect of Victory". By the way, that was the last time a military leader would be awarded the Peace Prize.

So where does that put us today? As Buck McKeon (R-Ca.), head of the House Armed services Committee would say "We never think we're going to have to fight another war." But as Trotsky said, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

The 2012 Budget Control Act slashed $500,000,000,000 from the defense budget. The Sequester, with its 50/50 cuts to defense and entitlements, will result in indiscriminate slashing, though defense is only 19% of the budget, that's another $500,000,000,000. Thus the budget which stands at 4.6% of GDP will shrink to 2.4% in ten years, exactly where it was in 1940. To maintain our standing in the world the number should be 6%.

Under Eisenhower (Beware the Military/Industrial Complex!) and Kennedy (the man who built the Green Berets) the number stood at 10% GDP, and it was 50% of the budget. Under Carter it sank to $4.9% and 23%. The Reagan rebuilding gave us the Military that fought and won Desert Storm (classic heavy forces out maneuvered and destroyed), Afghanistan (Special operators on horseback calling in air strikes on al-Qaeda and the Taliban) and Iraq (again heavy forces going through that country like shit through a goose and then stepping up to destroy an insurgency.)

As Leon Panetta was leaving office he said these cuts will be devastating, leaving us with the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest navy since 1915, and the smallest air force ever. This also means a lack of training, spare parts and maintenance, and no modernization of systems. I know your friend doesn't care about these things; he's still nostalgic for the Cold War, a war he thought we should have lost. But War takes planning, and as Samuel Pepys noticed it's damn expensive, if you want to win. What does he want, to win or to lose?

JimG33  4/1/2013

Gun Control is Being Able to Hit Your Target

So the fight still rages, with the gun haters those calling for commonsense requirements to exercise your Constitutional rights own and register the transactions to gain weapons for hunting and target shooting. And yet the gun nuts seem to be moving on from strength to strength. The evil NRA gains $1,000,000 in January alone, that included a modest amount from me to add to my usual membership fees, and the dastardly organization takes in about 8,000 new members a month (that’s to add to the 4,000,000 already registered). Maybe it has something to do with that militia clause in Amendment 2, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”? As is stated in Miriam Webster definition two of Militia ”The whole body of able-bodied male citizens declared by law as being subject to call to military service” (Origin: Latin, military service, from milit-, miles First use: 1625). Thus if the definition is not prima fascia political, then why in Section 1, Paragraph 8 of the Constitution, the section defining the war powers of the Congress, are there two paragraphs on the militia; one on the calling forth of the militia, and one on its organizing, arming and disciplining right after three paragraphs on the raising of an Army and a Navy, wouldn't the militia paragraphs be redundant? Or maybe these men remembered that day at the bridge when British forces were driven back to Boston along their own trail of tears after being denied the militia magazines at Lexington and Concord.

Now I’m not gonna go and get my copy of the Federalist Papers to see what Madison, Hamilton and Jay had to say about this but it is troubling to see how easy it is for certain people to get their knickers in a twist when they see an easy victory dissolve before their eyes. Exhibit A--- Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast resorting to the laws of physics (Newtonian, Relativistic or Quantum he doesn't say) to show a growing silent majority behind the “common sense” position, akin to the growth of revolutionary fervor during the reign of Louis XVI. Doesn’t he know that Harry Reid ran on an NRA ratting of B? And can anybody please tell me why Lefties always pull their examples out of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France? It started with Marx and never seems to end. Exhibit B--- some writer in the NYT called his friend from the depths of the western mountains (Colorado) to come and visit in civilized Manhattan and explain the culture of the “gun lover” to him. The article was just too long and stupid to finish but you get the point.

“Chief Rain in the Face let us share a pipe and you will tell me of your people’s love of the fire weapon.”

“Yes, Bwana let us do this thing and I will not speak with forked tongue.”

Or maybe it just has to do with the liberals never being able to face up to the fact that JFK was killed by a Communist, using one of the better bolt action magazine rifles of the early twentieth century. Could it be as simple as that?

But nowhere in the arguments of, shall we call them the “commonsensers”, is any discussion of self-defense. Everyone can’t be as lucky as we New Yorkers in having a large police force that carries out a Stop and Frisk policy. Isn't that why Gabby Giffords owns a Glock 9? But I can give some examples, all from The Armed Citizen column in The American Rifleman.

A couple was approached by 29 year-old Christopher Rigby as they sat in a vehicle in the parking lot of Earl’s True Value around 11 p.m. Rigby, who appeared to be homeless, asked the couple for a dollar. When they refused, he walked away. Approximately fifteen minutes later, Rigby returned and approached the driver’s side window. Rigby then produced a knife and tried to stab the man in the driver’s seat. The driver quickly grabbed a gun from the console and shot Rigby in the chest as the woman in the car dialed 911. Rigby was pronounced dead at the local hospital. (The Free Lance-Star, Stafford VA, 5/24/12)

Duanne Ammann, 60, owner of a convenience store, was filling a cooler with drinks about 6 p.m. when brothers Quinton Felton, 17, and Eddie Felton, 20, entered the store. Both men were wearing bandanas and ski masks. Eddie was carrying a rifle. With the barrel of the rifle pointed at his face, Ammann was ordered to open the cash register. He was then knocked to the floor where Quinton began to violently kick the store owner. During the struggle, Ammann was able to reach the handgun he kept under the store counter. He fired once hitting Quinton in the abdomen. Ammann fired three more times in Eddie’s direction, who still had the rifle pointed at him. They fled, but the bodies of both men were later found nearby. Ammann was treated for his injuries and released from the hospital. (The Daily Advance, Hobbsville, NC, 5/24/12)

Just hours after being served with a restraining order that prohibited him from going within two miles of the house, 43-year old Sean Parsons arrived at the home of his ex-girlfriend Christina Lewis, 51, and her boyfriend Doug Snarski, 55. Parsons entered the home yelling and brandishing both a shotgun and a handgun. He fired the guns up the stairs where Lewis and Snarski were hiding. Snarski, from around the corner of a doorway, showed Parsons that he also had a firearm. When Parsons continued to advance up the stairs, Snarski fired at him. Parsons died of gunshot wounds to his abdomen and right hip. Snarski said, “I believe everyone should have some kind of pistol for their protection… If I didn't think like that I wouldn't be here right now.” (The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, WA, 5/15/12.

Two nineteen year old males entered the Palms Internet Café brandishing a baseball bat and a handgun. One suspect swung the bat at a computer screen while the other pointed the gun at customers. One customer, 71 year old Samuel Williams, took action. Williams pulled out his .380 caliber pistol and fired at Henderson. Both intruders suffered non-life threatening gunshot wounds and fled. One suspect later said their plan had been to “barge in, get the money and leave” and he “never expected anyone to be armed.” (The Blaze, Marion County, FL, 7/17/12.

Ruby Hodge, 89, heard someone knock at her back door twice before she decided to answer. By the third knock, however, Hodge heard the door being kicked in. The intruders, two men ages 31 and 42, entered her home and went into the guest bedroom opposite her own. When they turned around Hodge had her .38 cal. pistol waiting. Both men fled but were later caught. Sheriff Fred Knight said, “I was just amazed. When she told me she met them with a handgun pointed at them, she said they went out faster than they came in. She’s my hero!” (SCNOW, Blenheim, SC, 7/24/12)

She’s mine too, and these are only a few of the 100,000 such incidents that happen every year in this country. As the one of the oldest euphemisms about “common sense gun control” states, “When guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.” Is that really a world we want to live in? For as that other old chestnut says, “When seconds count the police are only minutes away.”

JimG33 4/13/13

UAVs pro and con.

Stratfor

Hellfire, Morality and Strategy

February 19, 2013 | 1003 GMT

By George Friedman Founder and Chairman

Airstrikes by unmanned aerial vehicles have become a matter of serious dispute lately. The controversy focuses on the United States, which has the biggest fleet of these weapons and which employs them more frequently than any other country. On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets. On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process.

Let's begin with the weapons systems, the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper. The media call them drones, but they are actually remotely piloted aircraft. Rather than being in the cockpit, the pilot is at a ground station, receiving flight data and visual images from the aircraft and sending command signals back to it via a satellite data link. Numerous advanced systems and technologies work together to make this possible, but it is important to remember that most of these technologies have been around in some form for decades, and the U.S. government first integrated them in the 1990s. The Predator carries two Hellfire missiles -- precision-guided munitions that, once locked onto the target by the pilot, guide themselves to the target with a high likelihood of striking it. The larger Reaper carries an even larger payload of ordnance -- up to 14 Hellfire missiles or four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound bombs. Most airstrikes from these aircraft use Hellfire missiles, which cause less collateral damage.

Unlike a manned aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles can remain in the air for an extended period of time -- an important capability for engaging targets that may only present a very narrow target window. This ability to loiter, and then strike quickly when a target presents itself, is what has made these weapons systems 

preferable to fixed wing aircraft and cruise missiles.

The Argument Against Airstrikes

What makes unmanned aerial vehicle strikes controversial is that they are used to deliberately target specific individuals -- in other words, people who are known or suspected, frequently by name, of being actively hostile to the United States or allied governments. This distinguishes unmanned aerial vehicles from most weapons that have been used since the age of explosives began. The modern battlefield -- and the ancient as well -- has been marked by anonymity. The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability. In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment. He was killed because of his membership in an army and not because of any specific action he might have carried out.

Another facet of the controversy is that it is often not clear whether the individuals targeted by these weapons are members of an enemy force. U.S. military or intelligence services reach that conclusion about a target based on intelligence that convinces them of the individual's membership in a hostile group.

There are those who object to all war and all killing; we are not addressing those issues here. We are addressing the arguments of those who object to this particular sort of killing. The reasoning is that when you are targeting a particular individual based on his relationships, you are introducing the idea of culpability, and that that culpability makes the decision-maker -- whoever he is -- both judge and executioner, without due process. Those who argue this line also believe that the use of these weapons is a process that is not only given to error but also fundamentally violates principles of human rights and gives the state the power of life and death without oversight. Again excluding absolute pacifists from this discussion, the objection is that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is not so much an act of war as an act of judgment and, as such, violates international law that requires due process for a soldier being judged and executed. To put it simply, the critics regard what they call drone strikes as summary executions, not acts of war.

The Argument for Airstrikes

The counterargument is that the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war. Al Qaeda and the allied groups and sympathetic individuals that comprise the international jihadist movement are global, dispersed and sparse. They are not a hierarchical military organization. Where conventional forces have divisions and battalions, the global jihadist movement consists primarily of individuals who at times group together into distinct regional franchises, small groups and cells, and frequently even these groups are scattered. Their mission is to survive and to carry out acts of violence designed to demoralize the enemy and increase their political influence among the populations they wish to control.

The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals -- particularly the commanders -- isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible. Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.

The argument for using strikes from unmanned aerial vehicles is that it is not an attack on an individual any more than an artillery barrage that kills a hundred is an attack on each individual. Rather, the jihadist movement presents a unique case in which the individual jihadist is the military unit.

In war, the goal is to render the enemy incapable of resisting through the use of force. In all wars and all militaries, imperfect intelligence, carelessness and sometimes malice have caused military action to strike at innocent people. In World War II, not only did bombing raids designed to attack legitimate military targets kill civilians not engaged in activities supporting the military, mission planners knew that in some cases innocents would be killed. This is true in every military conflict and is accepted as one of the consequences of war.

The argument in favor of using unmanned aerial vehicle strikes is, therefore, that the act of killing the individual is a military necessity dictated by the enemy's strategy and that it is carried out with the understanding that both intelligence and precision might fail, no matter how much care is taken. This means not only that civilians might be killed in a particular strike but also that the strike might hit the wrong target. The fact that a specific known individual is being targeted does not change the issue from a military matter to a judicial one.

It would seem to me that these strikes do not violate the rules of war and that they require no more legal overview than was given in thousands of bomber raids in World War II. And we should be cautious in invoking international law. The Hague Convention of 1907 states that:

The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:
To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
To carry arms openly; and
To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

The 1949 Geneva Convention states that:

Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfill the following conditions:

(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) that of carrying arms openly;
(d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Ignoring the question of whether jihadist operations are in accordance with the rules and customs of war, their failure to carry a "fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance" is a violation of both the Hague and Geneva conventions. This means that considerations given to soldiers under the rules of war do not apply to those waging war without insignia.

Open insignia is fundamental to the rules of war. It was instituted after the Franco-Prussian war, when French snipers dressed as civilians fired on Germans. It was viewed that the snipers had endangered civilians because it was a soldier's right to defend himself and that since they were dressed as civilians, the French snipers -- not the Germans -- were responsible for the civilian deaths. It follows from this that, to the extent that jihadist militants provide no sign of who they are, they are responsible under international law when civilians are killed because of uncertainty as to who is a soldier and who is not. Thus the onus on ascertaining the nature of the target rests with the United States, but if there is error, the responsibility for that error rests with jihadists for not distinguishing themselves from civilians.

There is of course a greater complexity to this: attacking targets in countries that are not in a state of war with the United States and that have not consented to these attacks. For better or worse, the declaration of war has not been in fashion since World War II. But the jihadist movement has complicated this problem substantially. The jihadists' strategy is to be dispersed. Part of its strategy is to move from areas where it is under military pressure to places that are more secure. Thus the al Qaeda core group moved its headquarters from Afghanistan to Pakistan. But in truth, jihadists operate wherever military and political advantages take them, from the Maghreb to Mumbai and beyond.

In a method of war where the individual is the prime unit and where lack of identification is a primary defensive method, the conduct of intelligence operations wherever the enemy might be, regardless of borders, follows. So do operations to destroy enemy units -- individuals. If a country harbors such individuals knowingly, it is an enemy. If it is incapable of destroying the enemy units, it forfeits its right to claim sovereignty since part of sovereignty is a responsibility to prevent attacks on other countries.

If we simply follow the logic we laid out here, then the critics of unmanned aerial vehicle strikes have a weak case. It is not illegitimate to target individuals in a military force like the jihadist movement, and international law holds them responsible for collateral damage, not the United States. Moreover, respecting national sovereignty requires that a country's sovereignty be used to halt attacks against countries with which they are not at war. When a country cannot or will not take those steps, and people within their border pose a threat to the United States, the country has no basis for objecting to intelligence operations and airstrikes. The question, of course, is where this ends. Yemen or Mali might be one case, but the logic here does not preclude any country. Indeed, since al Qaeda tried in the past to operate in the United States itself, and its operatives might be in the United States, it logically follows that the United States could use unmanned aerial vehicles domestically as well. Citizenship is likewise no protection from attacks against a force hostile to the United States.

But within the United States, or countries like the United Kingdom, there are many other preferable means to neutralize jihadist threats. When the police or internal security forces can arrest jihadists plotting attacks, there quite simply is no need for airstrikes from unmanned aerial vehicles. They are tools to be used when a government cannot or will not take action to mitigate the threat.

The Strategic Drawback

There are two points I have been driving toward. The first is that the outrage at targeted killing is not, in my view, justified on moral or legal grounds. The second is that in using these techniques, the United States is on a slippery slope because of the basis on which it has chosen to wage war.

The United States has engaged an enemy that is dispersed across the globe. If the strategy is to go wherever the enemy is, then the war is limitless. It is also endless. The power of the jihadist movement is that it is diffuse. It does not need vast armies to be successful. Therefore, the destruction of some of its units will always result in their replacement. Quality might decline for a while but eventually will recover.

The enemy strategy is to draw the United States into an extended conflict that validates its narrative that the United States is permanently at war with Islam. It wants to force the United States to engage in as many countries as possible. From the U.S. point of view, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because they can attack the jihadist command structure without risk to ground forces. From the jihadist point of view as well, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because their efficiency allows the jihadists to lure the United States into other countries and, with sufficient manipulation, can increase the number of innocents who are killed.

In this sort of war, the problem of killing innocents is practical. It undermines the strategic effort. The argument that it is illegal is dubious, and to my mind, so is the argument that it is immoral. The argument that it is ineffective in achieving U.S. strategic goals of eliminating the threat of terrorist actions by jihadists is my point.

Unmanned aerial vehicles provide a highly efficient way to destroy key enemy targets with very little risk to personnel. But they also allow the enemy to draw the United States into additional theaters of operation because the means is so efficient and low cost. However, in the jihadists' estimate, the political cost to the United States is substantial. The broader the engagement, the greater the perception of U.S. hostility to Islam, the easier the recruitment until the jihadist forces reach a size that can't be dealt with by isolated airstrikes.

In warfare, enemies will try to get you to strike at what they least mind losing. The case against strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles is not that they are ineffective against specific targets but that the targets are not as vital as the United States thinks. The United States believes that the destruction of the leadership is the most efficient way to destroy the threat of the jihadist movement. In fact it only mitigates the threat while new leadership emerges. The strength of the jihadist movement is that it is global, sparse and dispersed. It does not provide a target whose destruction weakens the movement. However, the jihadist movement's weakness derives from its strength: It is limited in what it can do and where.     

The problem of unmanned aerial vehicles is that they are so effective from the U.S. point of view that they have become the weapon of first resort. Thus, the United States is being drawn into operations in new areas with what appears to be little cost. In the long run, it is not clear that the cost is so little. A military strategy to defeat the jihadists is impossible. At its root, the real struggle against the jihadists is ideological, and that struggle simply cannot be won with Hellfire missiles. A strategy of mitigation using airstrikes is possible, but such a campaign must not become geographically limitless. Unmanned aerial vehicles lead to geographical limitlessness. That is their charm; that is their danger.

The projects may be gone, but the crime goes on forever.

Gangsterville

NRO February 5, 2013 11:00 P.M. by Kevin D. Williamson

Chicago – Hey, man. Hey, man. What you need?” The question is part solicitation, part challenge, and the challenge part is worth paying attention to in a city with more than 500 murders a year. The question comes from a young, light-skinned black guy with freckles. We’re in the shadow of what used to be the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects, only a 15-minute walk from the Hermès and Prada boutiques and the $32 brunch at Fred’s that identify Chicago’s Gold Coast as highly desirable urban real estate, a delightful assemblage of Stuff White People Like. Just down Division Street from the boutique hotels and the more-artisanal-than-thou Goddess and Grocer, Cabrini-Green is still in the early stages of gentrification, though it does have that universal identifier of urban reclamation: a Starbucks within view of another Starbucks.

All that remains of Cabrini-Green is sad stories and the original section of row houses around which the projects grew up. Those row houses are being renovated as part of the foundations-up effort to rebuild the neighborhood. Even the name “Cabrini-Green” is being scrubbed from memory: The new mixed-income development on the site of the old Cabrini-Green Extension heaves under the unbearably pretentious name “Parkside of Old Town.” But some of the old commerce remains, and Freckles is pretty clearly an entrepreneur of the street. “You buying?” I ask what he’s selling, and he explains in reasonably civil terms that he is not in the habit of setting himself up for entrapment on a narcotics charge.

Cabrini-Green has had its share of tourists — in 1999, the film Whiteboyz found a group of Wonder Bread–colored hip-hop fans from Iowa visiting the site. But real estate and the scarcity thereof is the ruling fact of urban life, and once downtown Chicago began to evolve from a place in which people worked in factories and warehouses into a place in which people work in litigation offices and university classrooms, Chicago’s near north began to fill up with the sort of people who prefer urban lofts to suburban picket fences, public transit to car commutes, and $32 Sunday brunches to church, all of them living in the orbit of Cabrini-Green. Chicago is a very liberal place, but it’s a very liberal place in which about half of the very liberal public-school teachers preach the virtues of the city’s very liberal public schools while sending their own kids to private schools. Chicago may vote for the party of housing projects, but nobody wants to live next to one, or even drive past one on the way to Trader Joe’s. One local tells of the extraordinary measures he used to take to avoid driving by Cabrini-Green, where children would pelt his car with bottles and trash whenever he stopped. And eventually, he learned not to stop at all, blowing through red lights on the theory that it was better to risk a moving violation than risk what the locals might do to him.

So they tore down Cabrini-Green. And they tore down the Robert Taylor Homes and the Henry Horner Homes and practically every other infamous housing project in the city. And in doing so, Chicago inadvertently exacerbated the crime wave that now has the city suffering more than twice as many murders every year as does Los Angeles County or Houston.

You cannot really understand Chicago without understanding the careers of Larry Hoover, David Barksdale, and Jeff Fort, the three kings of the modern Chicago criminal gang. Chicago has a long history of crime syndicates, of course, including Al Capone and his epigones. In the 1950's it had ethnic street gangs of the West Side Story variety, quaint in pictures today with their matching embroidered sweaters and boyish names: the Eagles, the Dragons. But in the 1960's, marijuana began to change all that. Marijuana, that kindest and gentlest of buzzes, was a major moneymaking opportunity, both for the international syndicates that smuggled it and for the street criminals at the point of purchase. Inspired partly by Chicago’s long mob history, partly by the nascent black-liberation ethic of the day, and a great deal by the extraordinary money to be made, Chicago’s black gangs came to dominate the marijuana business — an enterprise model that would soon become supercharged by cocaine and heroin. David Barksdale built a tightly integrated top-down management structure for his gang, the Black Disciples, while Larry Hoover and Jeff Fort did the same thing for their organizations, the Gangster Nation and the Black P-Stone Rangers, respectively. Barksdale and Hoover would later join forces as the Gangster Disciples, a group that, though faction-ridden, remains a key player on the Chicago crime scene today, with thousands of members — 53 of whom were arrested for murder in 2009 alone.

Fort had real organizational flair and transformed the P-Stones, a gang dating back to the 1950's, into one of the first true modern gangs, combining racialism, neighborhood loyalties, a hierarchical management structure complete with impressive-sounding titles, and the shallow self-help rhetoric of the 1960's into something new — and holding the whole thing together with great heaping piles of money. His audacity was something to be wondered at: He formed a nonprofit organization and managed to convince city and federal officials that he was engaged in efforts to help disadvantaged urban youth. Government grant money was forthcoming, and soon the Gangster Disciples got in on the action, founding their own project, called “Growth and Development” — note the initials. Bobby Gore and Alfonso Alfred of the rival Vice Lords secured a $275,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Like the Mafiosi of old, Chicago’s new generation of gangsters learned to recycle some of that money into political campaigns and donations to influential ministers.

In fact, though they trafficked in narcotics and murder with equal ease, as often as not it was financial crimes ranging from misappropriation of federal money to mortgage fraud that brought down many of the top Chicago gangsters. Fort went to Leavenworth in the early 1970's for misuse of federal funds and continued to run his operations from federal custody until just a few years ago, when he was shipped off to the ADX Florence supermax lockup in Colorado and his communication with the outside world severely curtailed. Hoover got 200 years for murder and a life sentence for a federal narcotics charge but also continued to run his organization from prison.

Those government grants may not have amounted to very much, drops in the roaring river of money that the drug business was generating, but government contributed mightily to the growth of the modern gang by providing the one key piece of infrastructure that the Barksdales and Hoovers of the world could never have acquired for themselves: the high-rise housing project. The projects not only gave the gangs an easily secured place to consolidate their commercial activities, they helped to create the culture of loyalty and discipline that was the hallmark of the Chicago street gang in its golden age. With most members living and working under the same roof, the leaders could quickly quash intra-gang disputes or freelance criminality. Fort, Hoover, and Barksdale were children of the 1940's and 1950's, men who came of age before the cultural rot of the 1960's — practically Victorians by the standards of the modern gangster. They were (and are) brutes and killers, but they managed to maintain some semblance of cohesion and structure. Barksdale went so far as to collect taxes — fees from unaffiliated drug dealers operating on his streets.

When the towers came down, Chicago’s organized crime got a good deal less organized, and a number of decapitation operations run by the Chicago police and federal authorities had the perverse effect of making things worse: Where there once were a small number of gangs operating in a relatively stable fashion under the leadership of veteran criminals, today there are hundreds of gangs and thousands of gang factions. Chicago police estimate that there are at least 250 factions of the Gangster Disciples alone, with as many as 30,000 members among them. Vast swathes of Chicago are nominally under the black-and-blue Disciples flag, but in reality there is at least as much violence between those Disciples factions as between the Disciples and rivals. Some are one- and two-block operations, many with young teens in charge. The Barksdales and Hoovers may not have been Machiavellian in their subtlety, but they were far-seeing visionaries compared with the kids who came streaming out of the projects in their wake.

Mr. Butt is dearly missing his AK-47. He’s a native of Pakistan, where Mikhail Kalashnikov’s best-known invention is as common as the deer rifle is in the United States, but in Chicago he cannot possess even a pea-shooter, which has him slightly nervous in his role as my ghetto tour guide, chauffeuring me through the worst parts of Englewood and Garfield, the biggest battlegrounds in Chicago’s 21st-century gangland warfare.

“In Pakistan, everybody has an AK-47,” he says. “But it’s not like here. They don’t go walking into a school and shooting people.” I ask him if he thinks that applies to the case of 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot by Islamists for the crime of wanting to go to school. He allows that this is a fair point. He points out Bridgeport, home of the venerable Daley clan, and informs me wistfully that in the old days blacks simply were not allowed to cross the bridge into Bridgeport, a social norm enforced with baseball bats and worse. Mr. Butt is a big, big Daley fan — “He was very strong, strong with the mob!” — and no fan at all of Chicago’s new breed of gangsters. “On the South Side, it is just like Afghanistan. Every square mile has its own boss, and everybody has to answer to him. From the business district through 31st Street, everything is perfect.” Perfect may not be the word, but I get his point. “Below 31st Street, everything is jungle.”

Mr. Butt locks the doors, and we cruise through Englewood and environs. Martin Luther King Drive, like so many streets named for the Reverend King, is a hideous dog show of squalor and dysfunction, as though Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s depressing reportage in 1965’s The Negro Family had been used as a how-to manual. Mr. Butt points out the dealers, who don’t really need pointing out. It’s about 8 degrees outside, and the Windy City is living up to its name. In the vicinity of Rothschild Liquors, grim-faced men in heavy coats smoke cigarillos and engage in commerce. Mr. Butt’s habit of pointing out miscreants by literally pointing them out brings scowls from the street. Lying low is not Mr. Butt’s strong suit.

Mr. Butt informs me that for many years the South Side dealers favored gas stations as bases of operation, which makes sense: Cars have a legitimate reason to be pulling in and out. Plausible deniability keeps probable cause at bay. Nobody is flying any obvious gang colors, no gold bandanas for the Four Corner Hustlers or crowns for the Latin Kings. But maybe that is simply because it is so god awful cold and even the proudest gangster is bundled up. I've been told to look for Georgetown gear to identify the Gangster Disciples, but it may be that the Hoyas have become passé. Commerce is impossible to hide completely, however, and in truth it doesn't look like the locals are trying particularly hard to hide it. A maroon Cadillac sedan of Reaganite vintage comes slowly rumbling around the corner with four very serious-looking young men inside. Another young man in a heavy coat, carrying a plastic grocery bag that I suspect is full of commerce, comes out of a house to parley. Maybe they’re talking about the weather, but probably not.

Mr. Butt takes me to see the sights: In front of Alexander Graham Bell Elementary School, there’s commerce. On Garfield Boulevard, at 58th and Ashland, in front of the various storefront churches, pawn shops, tax-refund-loan outlets, the mighty wheels of endless commerce roll on and on.

“They do this to their own neighborhood,” Mr. Butt says, exasperated. “They make it a place no decent person would want to be. Why do they do that? It’s very bad, very scary at night.” This from a guy who vacations in Lahore.

Malala Yousafzai was a 15-year-old schoolgirl who got shot for a reason — a terrible, awful, evil reason, but a reason. (Say what you like about Islamic radicalism, at least it’s an ethos.) All of Chicago is aghast at the story of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, who was shot — and, unlike Malala Yousafzai, killed — apparently for no reason at all, at 2:20 in the afternoon in a public park. Miss Pendleton was a student at King College Prep, and a majorette in the school’s band, which had the honor of performing at President Obama’s first inauguration. Miss Pendleton had just recently returned from a trip to the president’s second inauguration when she took shelter from the rain under a canopy at Harsh Park. Miss Pendleton was not known to have any gang connections — in fact, she appeared in a 2008 video denouncing gang violence.

The shooting of Miss Pendleton commanded the attention of the White House and, naturally, that of President Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, now mayor of Chicago and fecklessly reshuffling the organization chart of the police department. The usual noises were made about gun control, and especially the flow of guns from nearby Indiana into Chicago, though nobody bothered to ask why Chicago is a war zone and Muncie isn’t. But the mayor’s latest promises did not impress 17-year-old Jordyn Willis, who organized a march in Miss Pendleton’s memory. “He can’t control his city,” Miss Willis told the Chicago Tribune.

It’s not clear that anybody can. Chicago has had three police superintendents since 2007. Current superintendent Garry McCarthy, formerly the head of the Newark police, has instituted the data-driven CompStat system first developed by the NYPD. But in a city in which 15-year-olds are running criminal enterprises and shooting each other over the slightest of slights, it’s not clear that even the best policing practices will be sufficient.

“Some gangs require a shooting as part of the initiation,” explains Art Bilek of the Chicago Crime Commission. Mr. Bilek is a wonderful anachronism, a very old-fashioned gentleman who uses the word “wisenheimer” without a trace of irony and refers to his former colleagues in the Chicago Police Department as “coppers.” Now in his 80's, he joined the police force with a master’s degree in hand at a time when it was unusual for a cop to have an undergraduate degree. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant in Chicago and chief of the Cook County sheriff’s police, and founded the academic discipline of criminal-justice studies along the way.

“The purpose of tearing down the projects was to re-gentrify the neighborhoods. And now, where there had been projects, you have chain stores, exclusive restaurants, delis, everything people want. But it also sent those gangs out into the neighborhoods, into new places in the city and the suburbs, places where they had not been.” He estimates that about 80 percent of Chicago’s homicides are gang-related.

He sketches a pyramid. “In the old days, you had a Jeff Fort or a David Barksdale at the top of the pyramid. You had a very rigid structure, like the old Mafia, with a boss at the top, enforcers, and advisers. There was very strict enforcement of the rules — they’d beat you, maybe even kill you. And to an extent, the gangs could cooperate, because you had some structure. And you had it all going on in the projects, in those tall towers of criminality. And life was terrible for the people who had to live there. At the same time, you have a strong incentive to take those projects and do something else with them, to create revenue-producing lands — public housing pays no taxes. You can get rid of the towers, but the gangs that were in them don’t just go away.”

Worse, the move out of the projects has made it easier to bring juveniles into the gangs. “In the homes, they had a limited number of juveniles at any given time. Now, it’s unlimited,” he explains. “You have juveniles rising to positions of power, and they just don’t have the street smarts or wisdom that even a Jeff Fort would. They’re doing impulsive things that the old guard just wouldn’t have dreamt of. And the money is bigger now, too. Before, the money went straight up to Hoover, Barksdale, or Fort, but now you have 1,000 leaders all competing for that. And you have the street gangs, the Mexican cartels, the narcotics, and the violence forming a unitary cultural phenomenon.” He’d like to see stricter gun control and stiffer sentences — “burying them” — for violent offenders. He cites procedural changes in the legal system making it more difficult to secure charges as a factor in the growing violence.

Chicago was the only U.S. city to break 500 murders last year, and that is a spike — but a spike only over the past few years. Chicago has seen these waves before: In 2008 the city saw 516 murders, and it had nearly 1,000 in 1974, the year David Barksdale's past finally caught up with him and he died of kidney failure resulting from a gunshot wound suffered years before. Things have been worse in the past, but there is a sense that Chicago is moving in the wrong direction. New York City had nearly 2,000 murders in 1974 and more than 2,000 the year before. But those numbers are unthinkable today: New York City finally got control of itself, which is a big part of the reason why Rudy Giuliani, a thrice-married recreationally cross-dressing pro-choice big-city liberal, was taken seriously as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Rahm Emanuel would need a miracle worthy of his surname to follow a similar path, to get Freckles to give up commerce and to get Mr. Butt to regard him as something other than a municipal joke. Chicago may have torn down the projects, but building the city is a different thing altogether