Sen. Joe Lieberman has proposed that new tax be created to fund the "War on Terrorism":
Washington - An outspoken supporter of the Iraq war on Tuesday called for a new tax to pay for its astronomical cost as Congress opened a debate on President George W. Bush's $2.9 trillion budget plan for next year.Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut proposed a "war on terrorism tax" at a Senate hearing during which he said the Pentagon's $622 billion defense budget proposal for fiscal 2008 threatened to crowd out funds for domestic programs. (...) "I think we have to start thinking about a war on terrorism tax," Lieberman said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Bush's defense budget. "I mean, people keep saying we're not asking a sacrifice of anybody but our military in this war and some civilians who are working on it."Lieberman did not provide details of his tax idea.
Let's take this very opportune moment to simply step back and ask ourselves: Is there such a thing as a "War on Terrorism"? Can wars against a tactic, a method, be fought?
I, for one, would argue no. The "War on Terrorism" is a farce, an ideological ploy, an apparition to be swatted at in lieu of Soviets. Now, before I'm dismissed as 'radical', (and therefore categorically discredited--for Chomsky is correct in saying that the 'space' of discourse in the U.S. unbelievably constricted) consider this:
(1). There is a very real threat by Islamist terrorists. These organizations are the co-production of their own domestic social/cultural/political environments, military-industrial involvement from the West, and the lingering wounds of European Imperalism. No one is blameless. Yet instead of taking a positive, but culturally self-conscious role in ameliorating the problems in the Islamic world, we have exacerbated the problem infinitely in Iraq, Israel, and Saudi Arabia (we should have never kept American soldiers in the land of Mecca and Medina).
(2). These threats are interconnected, but separate, and many times local. Islamism--the political ideology that is (are) Islamism(s)--manifests itself quite differently all over the Muslim world. Hezbollah does not equal Hamas does not equal Al Qaeda. This is quite obvious to the informed, but not so to most, as our own government has perpetrated a campaign to construct an Enemy, and make that enemy a monolith.
(3.) Al Qaeda is a serious threat to the American Republic. We know this. We knew it before 9/11. Why wasn't the response to 9/11 simply framed in these terms?
Because the Bush Administration knew that to maximize its control over the Republic, it had to frame the attacks in large-scale ideological terms, to constrict real debate in America. The American government has been doing this since the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798. Or perhaps you could ask the Rosenbergs, or Sacco and Vanzetti. Conservatives knew what a boon a shapeless, ineffable enemy could to remaking the country according to their design. So they choose themselves over the long-term health of the Republic.
But Democrats joined them in endlessly parroting the term 'War on Terror". And that parroting continues today. Shame on most of them for not having the courage--for I know many have the intellectual capacity--to challenge the term prima facie. There is no "War on Terror", and I anxiously await an elected officials admission of this.
This brings us back to Senator Lieberman's proposition for a "War on Terrorism Tax".
Taxes represent a basic component of any system of government; taxes can thus be equated with fundamental, and systemic, legitimization of whatever is being taxed. It would be to sear the "War on Terror" into the very fabric of the Republic, to turn a specious ideological device into a basic plank of the of the political system. It would be to systematize, in Gore Vidal's words, "perpetual war for perpetual peace."
No, Senator Lieberman, I not only reject your tax, but the very intangible ideological device you believe worthy of a tax. The "War on Terror" would be rotten to its very core, but it has none, for that would implicitly assume it actually exists.
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