Wednesday, August 15, 2007
(1:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Continued State of Exception
Via Bitch PhD, I find the following interpretation of the administration's oxymoronic designation of Iran's army as a terrorist organization:Here's what it means on the surface, that U.S. -- which increasingly blames Iran for terrorist meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan -- can try to go after those who do business with the Iranian military unit. Still, it's clearly not a normal move -- the first time that a government military has received this terrorist designation -- something that's usually reserved for non-state actors like al-Qaeda. And so no one seems sure what this morning what the concrete impact of this unexpected move will be.This is one thing that political observers seem to keep forgetting: Bush still thinks that the Constitution is suspended for matters relating to terrorism and that the executive has the sole authority to designate matters as "relating to terrorism," just as it has the right to place individuals in the made-up category of "unlawful enemy combatants."
Nowhere yet have I seen what it seems clear Bush's Iran move is really all about.
The White House hawks in Dick Cheney's office and elsewhere who want to stage an attack on Iran are clearly winning the internal power stuggle. And an often overlooked sub-plot on the long road toward war with Tehran is this: How could Bush stage an attack on Iran without the authorization of a skeptical, Democratic Congress?
Today, the White House has solved that pesky problem in one fell swoop. By explicitly linking the Iranian elite guard into the post 9/11 "global war on terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's lawyers would certainly now argue that any military strike on Iran is now covered by the October 2002 authorization to use military force in Iraq, as part of their overly sweeping response to the 2001 attacks.
On the conceptual level, the declaration that a sovereign nation's regular army is a "terrorist group" is equivalent to designating Iran an "unlawful enemy combatant" among nations, a status parallel to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, with one important difference -- in this case, the US is of course unilaterally declaring (all but explicitly) that the present Iranian regime is not the legitimate government of Iran. What else can we possibly conclude from the fact that its army is being designated with a term that by definition refers to non-state actors?
These types of moves are what lead me to think that Agamben's theory of sovereignty does not capture the specificity of the present moment. Butler's approach to this problem in Precarious Life seems to me much more helpful -- it's not that the law is simply suspended, but that the law has become instrumentalized, has become a means rather than an end. Even Democrats now speak of laws as "tools" in the fight against terrorism, and the Bush administration has shown what can only be called genius when it comes to instrumentalizing the law, creating new complications and exceptions, pushing the literal meaning of the law to its limits. That's what's so infuriating -- they're right that non-state actors are not covered by the Geneva Conventions, they're right that the Vice President's constitutional status is ambiguous, even though "everyone knows" what the authors of the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution intended.
Never before has lawlessness been so relentlessly legalistic.
