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On the Posse Comitatus, and Harriet Miers posted by me on 16:05 05 October 2005

We're letting this post do double duty: we look at the issue of using the military in domestic operations such as disaster relief, and some more comments about the Harriet Miers confirmation situation, which is rather complicated.

The whole disaster of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita—both the storms themselves and the response of the governments—has raised many questions about the use of the military in domestic US operations. Many are worried about either a) eroding rights or b) eroding the preparedness of the military for war. To our mind, neither is a concern, and the military is an excellent force for disaster relief.

The military is the most proactive part of the Executive Branch. They get things done like no one else. In a situation like a natural disaster, they are the ideal group of people to keep the “herd moving roughly westward.” Although our media is loathe to report it, our military does a tremendous amount of humanitarian work in many parts of the world, including Iraq, where for example they have been involved in helping Iraqi schools get back on their feet. So they are no strangers to this kind of work.

Moreover, in time of peace, the military—especially the Army—has an idleness problem. Putting them to work in disaster relief would eliminate a lot of the idleness, and additionally it would enhance the image of the military. The additional cost above and beyond the overhead to keep them on base would be minimal, relatively speaking.

Other parts of the world use the military routinely for this purpose. One place where I got to see this first hand was in China. There the military is used for all kind of civil works projects, to say nothing of disasters. Travelling about the country, one would see what we would term hay trucks, loaded with People's Liberation Army soldiers, heading to some project.

The PLA got to play a key role in the deadliest natural disaster in history, the Tangshan earthquake of 1976 (the year Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai died, Tangshan lost 750,000 residents in the quake.) Sometimes disaster relief is hard to stomach. One PLA veteran who became a Beijing cab driver told of being loaded up and trucked up to Tangshan right after the earthquake happened. They arrived at night, in a pouring rain, with no electricity or lights around. The next morning they got up to find shattered buildings and dead bodies all around them.

On a lighter note, one thing that I noted about PLA people was their lack of what we would call “military appearance.” To put it another way, they look like they slept in their uniforms (they well may have.) This must have proven frustrating to the Russians, who do know what military appearance is. It also proved a source of amusement to my brother and I in what turned out to be our closest encounter with the People's Liberation Army.

In 1982 the Society of Petroleum Engineers sponsored the first oil exhibition in Beijing. Our company exhibited there, having sold equipment to the Chinese the previous year. We were put up in the Friendship Guest House, formerly housing Soviet and other foreign “experts” in China. We had a spacious suite overlooking the courtyard, where we could see the PLA detachment guarding the place against “double-dealing capitalist roaders” like my brother and I.

My brother, veteran of five and a half years of military school of one kind or another and four years in the United States Coast Guard, was the perfect commentator for the proceedings. The PLA people would go through all kinds of drills (running in formation, etc.) Then they would stand for inspection.

“Now the officers are dressing down the troops for a lousy inspection,” he said, watching the officers get into the enlisted men's faces. After some of this, the troops were dismissed and the officers gathered around to talk to each other.

“Now the officers are telling each other what a lousy inspection it was,” he continued. Some things don't need a translator, just an experienced eye.

But, you will say, using the army for such things takes place in China, a country where evolution is taught as dogma in schools and Christian judges are punished when their religion is found out. Or is that the US...

Now to Harriet Miers: Even though my regard for Bush's Supreme Court nominations is lukewarm, I am taken aback by the bawling and squalling by conservatives over this woman's nomination. There are third specific items regarding this that need to be noted.

First, back in June we did a piece called Finishing the Job: A Watergate Reflection, along with some subsequent pieces on the Supreme Court nominations from a liberal and conservative view. In these three pieces, it was our conclusion that the two sides, with their absolutist view of themselves and their total oblivion to the unintended (and unwelcome) consequences of government power, were headed for a showdown, the result of which would be a Leninist idea of a two-party system: one party in power and the other in jail. (Ronnie Earle has already showed the left's hand on this with the DeLay indictments.)

With the conservatives' reaction, we despair of a constitutional solution to this conflict. We can no longer get it through our heads that democracy works in part because all involved exercise restraint and understand the limitations of the system. Our experience in Iraq should tell us that, in places where restraint is a dirty word (as it is in the Middle East,) democracy is impossible. We still contend that the left started this trend; evidently in the midst of their trying to take it all much has been lost in our society.

Second, as we indicated earlier, we think that conservatives that attack Miers because she didn't go to an Ivy League school are plain stupid. Ivy League homogeneity in our government is central to our problem; putting more of these people in power only makes it worse. It can be shown that this homogeneity is eroding in business. We think that conservatives, transfixed by their need to succeed, have placed Ivy League education in their pantheon. They do so at their own peril.

Third, we're positive that Ms. Miers' “born-again” experience will be used against her by the Democrats, if for no other reason than that their left-wing interest groups will demand it. Such was the case with fellow Texan Priscilla Owen, and there's no reason why the liberals (who we usually characterise as “God-hating” if they're from South Florida) won't do it again.

Footnote on Priscilla Owen: her father, an Aggie, was killed in the Korean War when she was just a baby.

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