The One-Sided War

by Thomas L. Knapp

"It is well that war is so terrible," General Robert E. Lee is supposed to have remarked to a fellow Confederate officer as he watched Union troops throw themselves against his impregnable positions overlooking the Virginia town of Fredericksburg 140 years ago this month. "We should grow too fond of it."

If war is the health of the state, how much more so a perpetual war in which that state's own casualties are minimal and in which the enemy is carefully chosen for his non-aggressive nature?

I've been involved in the "War on Drugs" for some years now -- and I've "fought" on both sides. The time I spent engaged in counter-narcotics operations for Joint Task Force Six (pun presumably not intended) as a Marine infantry NCO was a major factor in helping me form the convictions which I now hold:

* That the War on drugs is evil.

* That the War on drugs is unwinnable.

* That the unwinnability of the War on Drugs is a multiplier of its evil effects.  

An unwinnable war is, perversely, a winning situation for the state so long as body bags and ignominious defeats -- which might arouse the populace to active opposition -- are kept to a minimum.  

Perpetual war means endless and ever larger appropriations of tax loot, bigger payrolls, more chiefs for more Indians, job security for the REMFs(*) who fly desks and fire off memoranda.  

From this standpoint, the War on Drugs isn't just the health of the state. It's the state's all-expenses-paid vacation to Puerto Vallarta, the state's personal massage therapist and the state's backstage pass on the Stones tour.  

Every time I attend a marijuana legalization march, the military orientation hard-wired into my brain by a decade of soldiering creeps up into my consciousness and starts asking troubling questions.  

We can march . . . but isn't there more to war than marching?  

The drug warriors have more than 70,000 POWs behind barbed wire at the federal level alone . . .  how many POWs have we taken?  

We think that police fatally shoot between 300 and 400 Americans per year. Oddly enough, this is one statistic that no government agency provides. The government's statistics mills can tell you how many yellow-bellied sapsuckers it takes to change a light bulb, but not how many people were shot by government agents in any given year. About half as many police officers -- 150 or so -- are killed "in the line of duty" each year.  

Granted, not all of these shootings are related to the war on drugs . . . but assuming some measure of proportionality, the state has a leg up on us when it comes to attrition.  

Back in the sixties, activists were fond of asking "what if they gave a war and nobody came?"  

The War on Drugs is the answer to that question. If one side fights and the other doesn't, then the war goes on forever and the side that doesn't fight bleeds and bleeds and bleeds.  

What if they gave a war and they got one, though?  

Quoth Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:  

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand . . . . The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"  

If you've read this far, you're likely either with me already or quaking in your boots at what must seem seditious. But let's examine this rationally.  

We’re not the ones breaking down peoples' doors in the middle of the night. They are.

We're not the ones arresting more than a million people a year because we don't like what they smoke, snort, inject, eat or otherwise ingest.

We're not the one keeping thousands of POWs behind barbed wire.

We're not the ones killing hundreds of Americans with impunity.

They're the ones who asked for a drug war. They're the ones who have fought that war, decade in and decade out, at our expense. They're the ones wearing ski masks, carrying submachineguns and terrorizing innocents, just like their spiritual siblings in al Q'aeda.

If they want a war, perhaps it's time they got one.

No, I'm not asking you to go out and kill a cop. If you're Joe Sixpack and some masked intruder does an unannounced dynamic entry into your home at oh-dark-thirty, I concur with G. Gordon Liddy: Aim center mass and unload on him. But don't go looking for battle against forces with superior armament and troop concentrations.  

It just isn't smart.  

And there are other ways.

We're under occupation. We can act like it. A marijuana march doesn't mean anything to a drug warrior except some nice overtime pay for hassling the participants. But . . . .

See that DARE car rolling down the street? The one with the sticker that says "confiscated from a drug dealer?" Stop at the next phone, dial 911 and report a stolen vehicle.

Do you own a business? Does your sign say that you reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason? Being a drug warrior is a reason. Send 'em packing. And tell 'em why.

Make being a drug warrior uncomfortable. Be condescending. Make it clear to that police officer that you're his social superior and don't want to be seen talking with him. Drug warriors should carry the same social stigma as child molesters.

The drug war will end when the drug warriors can't get served in decent restaurants or spend the night in decent hotels. The drug war will end when the drug warriors' children come home and complain that the neighbors' kids won't play with them.

The drug war will end when the drug warrior becomes a social pariah -- especially if he also stands a good chance of clocking out from his next shift at the morgue instead of the precinct house.  

Sound cruel? Remember, these people are the enemy. They are occupational troops who, according to their own proclamations, are at war with you. War is hell. Or it's supposed to be. Right?  

*Rear Echelon Mother Fxxxxxs