Molly, Moira, and the San Francisco Discussion
Where I come from (the San Francisco Bay Area-- one of "the enclaves") you often find yourself in the midst of what people like to call "political discussions." These "discussions" are not conversations. There is no real exchange of ideas, no reasoned debate, no presentation or analysis of evidence. No arguments are presented for this or that proposition, because the propositions have already been agreed upon in advance. The role of the participant is to work within this framework and try to come up with the wittiest, the most articulate, the most "authentic," or (if the observer is unfortunate) the most hysterical way of agreeing with everybody else on all the major points. There is a little wiggle room around certain incidental matters, and opposing points may be offered as straw men prior to an inevitable demolition, but it is all in service of the goal of reinforcing the attitudes and cultural aesthetic shared by everyone present. The content is not, in fact, all that important; rather, these discussions are primarily a therapeutic exercise, intended to foster a sense of community and self-validation. If someone expresses a contrary opinion (that is, one that is not supportive of group solidarity) the reaction is not to refute the argument, but rather to express disappointment with the naysayer's lack of belonging: "I can't believe you're one of those people..." is the one I've often heard. That is usually enough to dispense with the objection. "One of those people" cannot possibly be a participant in a San Francisco discussion, by definition. Which is why I only listen when I stumble into one.
I overheard one of these San Francisco discussions the other day at the local Starbucks. They were talking about the Gitmo prisoners, and all found themselves in complete agreement: the government's claim that the prisoners were unlawful combatants rather than prisoners of war was automatically invalidated by the government's characterization of the Afghan campaign as a war. "Yeah," said one young woman earnestly. "One minute, it's a war, and the next minute, oh, no it's not a war, and they can do whatever they want to anyone. Either it's a war, or it isn't."
I wasn't taken in, though, because I had just read Moira Breen's response to Molly Ivins's "tired slander and hebetudinous failure of logic" on just this subject. Molly:
Now we've won the war. It's not clear what we've won, but we've definitely won, which is better than losing. So we take the prisoners we've captured off to our base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and suddenly announce that they are not prisoners of war after all, because this isn't really a war we've been fighting. Therefore the prisoners are "illegal combatants," and we don't have to treat them in accord with the Geneva Convention on POWs.
This rationale for why they are not being classified as prisoners of war exists only in Ms. Ivins' head. Elsewhere in the article she again displays her confusion by admitting that "[i]n fact, these prisoners are anomalous and do not meet the convention's standards for prisoners of war -- but we're the ones who keep claiming this is a war". One can only imagine how Ms. Ivins arrived at the notion that, somewhere in the text of the Geneva Convention, there is a stipulation that a designation of "war" removes all limitations on which fighters may qualify for prisoner of war status. If she'd bothered to peruse the document, she'd have noticed that the intent is to restrict the qualifications of a combatant for POW status in time of war, not extend it to anybody and everybody. Does she think the Convention rejects the idea of an "illegal combatant"? There's intelligent discussion and disagreement about the Geneva Convention going on now, but Ivins stumbles before crossing the debate's asses' bridge.