Carver: "Girl, you can't even call this a war."
Kima: "Why not?"
Carver: "Wars end."
--The Wire
"If I could free all the slaves and save the Union, I would do that. If I could free none of the slaves and save the Union, I would do that. If I could free some of the slaves and leave others alone, I would do that, too."
--Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln was afraid if he declared the Civil War was actually about freeing the slaves that half of his Union Army officers would throw down their swords and quit and all the border states--Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee--would join the Confederacy. Southern Maryland was very much slave country. There were riots in Baltimore over emancipation and abolition. The Maryland legislature was about to vote to join the Confederacy when Lincoln sent in the troops to send the legislators home.
Lincoln issued the Proclamation in September. By January, in his annual address to Congress he had seen the true importance of that document:
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
As Lincoln said in his second Inaugural Address, everyone hoped for a less drastic solution to the problem but there was none to be had, and the war came. Of course, not everyone hoped for a less drastic solution--the slaves and the abolitionists hoped for the most radical solution, complete abolition of slavery in both the slave states of the South and in the new territories.
Lincoln was, hands down, our greatest President, but even he could not see how a powerful will for doing the right thing could overwhelm even entrenched wrong. After he issued the Proclamation he went before Congress and told the representatives there could be no ducking destiny. We had to either gloriously succeed or meanly concede defeat, and if we lost, then the last best hope on earth would be lost.
That document, limited as it was, changed the course of the war--England and France, missing Southern cotton dreadfully, with cotton mill workers left idle by the Northern blockade were about to intercede and the South would have won independence, just as the French intervention won the Revolutionary War for the American colonies.
But anti slave sentiment in England was crucial and when Lincoln made the war a war to end slavery, that ended all talk of intervention. It turned out to be a master stroke, necessary but not sufficient to win the war.
We do not have a war with armies in the post 9/11 age. Like Lincoln, President Obama faces a new phenomenon in history, and like Lincoln, he wants to use the tools of the past to fight a new reality. As Radio Lab notes, in its examination "Sixty Words" a legal document, written by a George W. Bush lawyer in the White House has served to justify, legally, the "War Against Terror," voted through Congress. No declaration of war has been voted through Congress since World War II. There are simply no real circumstances appropriate. A nuclear war between the USA and USSR would not have allowed time for a declaration of war. All the other wars have been undeclared. Korea was a UN "police action." It looked a lot like World War II, with armies and air forces battling for territory but it did not end in a peace treaty ceremony. Technically, it's not over. Vietnam was justified by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, not a declaration of war and Iraq and Afghanistan were justified by the resolution writing by the Bush lawyer to say the President could do what he damn well please to protect the USA against terrorist, i.e. stealthy, attacks.
Those 60 words are just words, just lawyer games and fool nobody. They cannot compare to the Emancipation Proclamation, which actually meant something.
We are operating now in a world of practical action taken as a police force takes its action. Someone is about to hurl a bomb, you don't read him his Miranda rights--you shoot him.
The time for talkers has past.
Of course, that has left us with problems like Guantanamo.
Too bad the Congress was too cowardly to oppose Iraq, and even Afghanistan, after they got Bin Laden.
We will see how useless those lost lives in the War on Terror have been as we see Iraq and Afghanistan sink back into their respective morasses.
We needed to get Osama. For that, we needed bases in Afghanistan. But once that was done, good riddance to bad garbage.
Bring 'em home. Don't pretend we were there for any other reasons. And no document written by lawyers will protect anyone. The generals at Nuremberg all had their documents. Didn't help them. Soldiers are not governed by words as much as by bullets.
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