Testing the Bumper Sticker

It takes two to make war, as the liberal slogan says. So we will stop waging war and--Presto!--war over. The president is decreeing that the war is over. So the president is distorting domestic laws to keep killing people who cannot be considered enemies because the war is over. Conservatives and liberals should be able to unite in opposition to this assault on strategy and civil rights.

Mission accomplished, it seems:

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama signaled, yet again, that the war in Afghanistan is effectively over. Soon, in fact, it will be over by any honest measure: The presence of American troops will be halved to 34,000 in the coming months, and erased entirely by December 31, 2014. On this arbitrarily chosen date, the president claims, we will “achieve our core objective of defeating the core of al-Qaeda.”

But jihadis inconveniently still want to kill us. So the president takes what is simple and lawful in war--killing the enemy wherever they are even if they carry an American passport--and attempt to stretch domestic law enforcement restrictions meant to protect civil rights so that those jihadis can still be killed when we find them.

Now, for those who believe that the war on terror is not war but law enforcement, (a) I concede that they will find the foregoing analysis to be useless and (b) I assert that they are living on a different and distant planet.

For us earthlings, on the other hand, the case for Obama’s drone war is clear. Pity that his Justice Department couldn’t make it.

This attempt to make war (now an overseas contingency operation) lawful under domestic law enforcement and justice standards is needless, ridiculous, and dangerous. We declared war on al Qaeda and affiliated individuals, organizations, and states. And allowed the president to define that in order to wage war.

Why complicate the situation further when the only justification seems to be in order to let the president check off a promise that he "ended the war" begun in the Bush administration and justify slashing our defenses?

Yeah, this will work out swell:

The left used to say that the ultimate tragedy post-9/11 would be if in fighting terrorists we lost our freedom anyway. I figured we had some room to maneuver to defend ourselves before we had to worry about that. But I did always say that the best way to avoid loss of civil liberties is to actually get on with winning the war. If we don't, loss of freedoms would ratchet up over time as the enemy attacked us in new ways and we reacted to stop the new method.

Now the left, as embodied by the president they adore, seems determined to grease the tracks on the descent into a civil liberties nightmare where due process is needlessly cheapened to justify waging a war overseas contingency operation that the administration doesn't want to admit is even being waged.

Our liberal brethren spend 7 years claiming the Bushtatorship was descending. And now we find it landing on the wings of a unicorn, virtually unnoticed.

UPDATE: More. Via Instapundit. Again, I'm not freaked out by our government killing Americans overseas without due process--as long as it is done under wartime conditions. An American passport is not a get-out-of-drone-free card if you join the enemy. As others have noted, we didn't send Grant and Sherman to arrest the Confederate soldiers who opposed them--on American soil, no less.

What I object to is trying to fit what should be a straightforward mission--killing enemy combatants during war--into our domestic law framework. How is that not going to dangerously warp our domestic law framework? And for all those of a liberal persuasion out there who have no problem with Saint Obama doing this, what if there is a President Cheney who inherits that power?

Yeah, I thought so. Now go change your armor.