Friday, April 10, 2009

More on Piracy   [Andy McCarthy]

. . . but not much more, since David and Lee (including David's retort to Mario) have already said most everything I wanted to say, as did Mack Owens, better than I could have said it.

My column today is about the pirates, and I try to take away the larger lesson here, which is about the so-called "rule of law."  "So-called," I say, because transnational progressives, who are instinctively converting the Somali piracy into — as Secretary Clinton put it yesterday — mere "criminal activity," are perverting what the "rule of law" means. It's the same thing they've done with the challenge of radical Islam in general, the Muslim pirates being no different from other Muslim unlawful combatants who flout the laws and customs of civilized warfare.

The "rule of law" is not a civilized alternative to the use of force. As I contend in the column:

[A]s the hearts-and-minds game goes on, the “international community” on the receiving end [of billions in American foreign aid] stands unimpressed as ever. Turns out it’s a jungle out there. What impresses, as all America’s enemies from the Barbary pirates through Osama bin Laden have always known, is the strong horse against the weak horse. What makes possible global trade, which turns into American wealth, which turns into unparalleled American largesse, is American might — American might and an American commitment to use that might as necessary to ensure a civilized global order.

“Civilized” is a much-misunderstood word, thanks to the “rule of law” crowd that is making our planet an increasingly dangerous place. Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.

There is nothing less civilized than rewarding evil and thus guaranteeing more of it. High-minded as it is commonly made to sound, it is not civilized to appease evil, to treat it with “dignity and respect,” to rationalize its root causes, to equivocate about whether evil really is evil, and, when all else fails, to ignore it — to purge the very mention of its name — in the vain hope that it will just go away. Evil doesn’t do nuance. It finds you, it tests you, and you either fight it or you’re part of the problem.

The men who founded our country and crafted our Constitution understood this. They understood that the “rule of law” was not a faux-civilized counterweight to the exhibition of might. Might, instead, is the firm underpinning of law and of our civilization. The Constitution explicitly recognized that the United States would have enemies; it provided Congress with the power to raise military forces that would fight them; it made the chief executive the commander-in-chief, concentrating in the presidency all the power the nation could muster to preserve itself by repelling evil. It did not regard evil as having a point of view, much less a right to counsel.

04/10 07:52 AMShare