How To Win The War on Terror

Peace.

The only way to win the War on Terror is through the instruments of peace. It's through justice. Just as the only way to defeat disorder is through order.

You can't win a war against non-state actors. You kill their women and children, they win. You bomb them into the Stone Age, you're only bombing yourself. Yet every attack they launch on you hurts 10 times, because you have something to lose and they don't.

So the question becomes, how do we support order? How do we create justice?

And the answer is just as clear. We support order by endorsing order. We sign on to the International Criminal Court. We subject our own people – all of them – to its dictates. No one, not even the President of the United States, should ever again be immune from prosecution for war crimes. Including this one.

Have war crimes been committed, in Iraq and elsewhere? I don't know. We should investigate. That's what Congress is for, it's what prosecutors are for. Give those powers over to people who will do those jobs and you have the first step toward winning the War. Collect the information.

Americans have the lesson of 9-11 completely backward. We rounded up a posse, we went off to kill us some Indians. But what you have here is a Liberty Valance situation. The law has to deal with him. Shooting him in the back won't do – the world street is too well-lit.

And the world isn't powerless here, if the world is united. Trouble is the world is not united. And the only way to get unity back is to cede the high ground, something only the strong can do. The weak can't do that.

If this means sending the President to the Hague, send him. Same with anyone else justice demands. Same, by the way, with Saddam Hussein. A monkey trial in Baghdad isn't accomplishing the aims of justice, just vengeance. Send him where he belongs.

Now, if you've reached this far you know that it's an awful long political distance from where we are now to where we have to be. There are some Americans who say “impeach Bush” but they're fringe elements. (Or, worse, foreigners.) 

I'm not saying “impeach Bush.” Investigate, yes – we can do that. Indict – I don't think George W. Bush can get a fair trial anywhere in the U.S.  And I don't think the world, as a whole, would buy into any such trial. Our justice system has been too perverted by the events of the last several years for that.

What I'm proposing goes far beyond what even our political fringe is willing to propose, except in jest. But if that journey be a thousand miles, it is time to begin it.

And by proposing it, that is what I've done.