I wish I had a little more absolutism in my bones. I am fine enough on the tactical level. I made my living with serene certainty planning the use of a variety of weapons systems, ranging from the novel to the horrifying.

But I always had the sense that what I was doing had an intrinsic rightness about it. If you had told me that the defeat of the Soviet Empire was going to release an unhappy and virulent bacillus on the world that was possibly worse, I would not have believed you.

But there it is. No one actually believed in Communism, at least not on the strategic level. I knew that with certainty when I purchased my first Rolex Watch in a drunken shore leave in Hong Kong. It was a handsome GMT Master model that may be the last machine I fully understand. The instructions came in English, of course, and a host of other languages, including Cyrillic.

If good Communists were purchasing high-end Swiss watches, I reasoned, their system must have some loopholes in it.

But no matter. We spent them into the ground, and my comrades were victorious in the war that had no closing parade. Almost without pause, it was on to the next one.

The Senate has been busy in their mission of providing Advise and Consent to the President. The Judiciary Committee held hearings on Judge Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, though the proceedings are not the grand forum they once were. The Senators spend more time pontificating than asking questions.

Maybe that is because the nominees have wisely decided not to say anything, and the Loyal Opposition has counted the votes and determined that the nomination was a done deal. Joe Biden, Senior Senator from the great state of Delaware, spent fully 72% of his time with Mr. Alito talking, leaving the nominee less than a third of the allotted time to answer.

With that nomination reported out of Committee to the full Senate, the next agenda item is the domestic spying imbroglio.

The latest polls show the American people are just about evenly split on the matter, depending on how the question is asked. If it is phrased as a tool against terrorists, a small majority favors whatever it is NSA is doing.

If the question is phrased another way, whether NSA should eavesdrop on ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority opposed to it.

President Bush had a press conference to talk about it last Friday. He used the term  “terrorist surveillance program” twice to describe whatever it is, apparently sensitive to the polls.

I am a true believer in winning wars. However we came to this place in time,  once the troops are engaged I think the debate must be placed on hold. How the Executive handles matters of War as Commander in Chief is certainly his constitutional business. I am a believer in the ruthless and efficient prosecution of armed conflict.

Vacillation in that regard certainly was a contributing factor to the length of the Civil War, though not its ultimate character. Korea and Vietnam well illustrate the results of uncertain objectives that fall short of victory.

Of late, I feel better about the situation in Iraq, though I do not believe enough troops were deployed at the beginning, and am not sure enough are now. But the Iraqi-fication of the defensive force may turn the tide on that. Certainly a precipitous and well-telegraphed withdrawal, al la Vietnam, would be a disaster.

I recently happened to be leafing through a National Geographic from 1973, late in the year, and read a story about the success in turning over the war to the South. It was a glowing account, published less than two years before Saigon fell to the Communists.

So I take the government and with a gain or two of salt. I have a friend who tends toward the absolutist position. He considers the debate to have its origins in President Washington’s dispatch of General �Mad Anthony� Wayne to the northwest territories of the Ohio. The bold General was fully empowered, and he quashed Chief Pontiac’s depredations against the tide of American settlers moving onto his people’s land.

My friend considers the central issue to be the inherent power of the Chief Executive to make war. I was born in Wayne County, Michigan, and once drove a Pontiac, so I take his contention with the gravity it deserves.

But there is more to it. Pontiac was vanquished, and his threat eliminated. This war, as we are told again and again, is a generational one. Once a generation passes, it may not be possible to revert to a time when a citizen may expect a modicum of privacy in his or her life.

True believers laugh at that, saying the age of voice-over-internet-protocol communications has rendered everything we communicate open for inspection. It is hardly like opening letters in the olden days. It is just something we have to get comfortable with.

The Government’s position goes like this: the trigger for NSA to engage in a collection is that one end of the communication must be with an overseas terrorist.  Once NSA detects the link, the information is passed to the FBI, who assumes jurisdiction. Then the Bureau goes to a judge in the FISA Court and a domestic “roving wiretap” is authorized under the provisions of the Patriot Act.

I’m OK with that, and all the communications that must be sorted to get to that. Some of my old pals who rail about constitutional liberty would probably also approve, if they believed it. Their mistrust is fueled by the press and history and what passes for leadership in the Democratic Party. They cite long history on their side of this argument as well.

They note that the excesses of the Executive have always gone along with the exercise of his extraordinary wartime powers.

They point to the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were proposed by President Adams in 1798 against a backdrop of an increasing French threat to our new liberty. The last of the four laws (the Sedition Act) declared that treasonable activity included publication of “any false, scandalous and malicious writing,” and constituted a high misdemeanor, punishable by fine and imprisonment.

Twenty-five men were arrested, most of them editors of Republican newspapers, and their presses were stilled.

One of the men arrested was  Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of the Patriot and editor of the Philadelphia Democrat-Republican Aurora . He was charged with slandering President Adams, a man of great personal probity and enormous personal dignity.

The constitutionality of the laws was the subject of heated discussion. In the end, public opposition was so great that Thomas Jefferson was elected President in 1800.

A half century later, Mr. Lincoln suspended habeus corpus for the duration of the Civil War, so that he might imprison Copperheads without recourse to strict laws of evidence. There is not record of how many innocent were arrested, not does it appear to be a matter of much interest. It was eventually restored.

But the suspension did not last a generation.

Mr. Roosevelt stripped American citizens of their property and transported them to prison camps. Given the times, it was perhaps not unreasonable. But it was certainly unconstitutional.

In our own times, the Nixon White House considered itself engaged in a war at home, which required the exercise of extraordinary powers. The abuses against civil liberties that ensued resulted in the establishment of the FISA court, which is at the root of the current controversy.

The Senate is going to hold hearings about it this week. The Patriot Act is still hanging by a thread. It had been due to expire before the holiday recess, and the House does not come back to work until this week. I don’t know what they have been doing, but their absence has made the morning a commute tolerable.

That will end with their return.

The President is going to tell us about the State of the Union on Tuesday. Although I am not a true believer, I will of course be interested in hearing what he says.

I truly believe we should do something about an oil policy that stops us from funding our enemies with the proceeds of the gas pump. They are true believers in our collective destruction.

I think addressing their funding would be an excellent place to start.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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