antikoan.net

Not the real one, anyway.

Pay attention, folks: If we end up with a military dictatorship in this country, it won't be enforced by the Army. It will be enforced by the National Guard. Here's one way it could play out.

It would start with the expanded use of domestic law enforcement resources to quell dissent. We'd see increased surveillance in public areas, a shift to a practical presumption of guilt, and a tendency to assume that anything that can be seen, if even through the use of technology, is fair game for Probable Cause. We'd also see a lot of pre-emptive arrests, and increased depth to the "zero-tolerance" zone around not just the President, but any officer or entity which provides a convenient excuse for zero-tolerance. We saw lots of this at the RNC protests in NYC in August/September.

This has already started, actually, as not just the FBI but also the Secret Service (in both their Presidential Protection and Treasury roles), BATF, the U.S. Marshall Service, et al., have used the Patriot Act to strongarm and threaten citizens ranging from the arguably threatening down to granola-grannies and those most dangerous radicals, librarians.

But that's all still civil, so far. Why do I even bother to fear the rise of military repression? The answer is that I fear it because of two trends: The increasing use of private contractors to escape oversight, and increasing federal control over the National Guard.

As the National Guard comes increasingly under federal control (a trend dating back to the Reagan era, and for which Clinton is not blameless in furthering), the temptation to use the Guard for domestic pacification will grow. It would probably start with anti-terrorism border patrols. (Along the southern border, those would also serve the purpose of drug and immigration control -- added benefits.) I could see a shift in Guard enrollment from "citizen soldiers" -- folks in it to make a few extra bucks while helping out in their state -- to a standing army of people who can't get reliable work anywhere else. If they know they can count on six to eight months of deployment every year, they might well just not bother to get any other real job.

I would expect these "opportunistic guardsmen" to replace the current principle constituency of the Guard. Charles Graners would begin to outnumber Joe Darbys; and with no Joe Darbys around to set a moral tone, the Lynndie Englands will party it up with Chuck. So what we end up with could look an awful lot like -- dare I say it? -- Ernst Röhm's SA: A collection of morally-weak souls looking for purpose, with no appreciable tradition and answering to leaders without strength of character.

The shift could be gradual, over a period of years. Or it could, just as likely, be quite sudden. Let's say there's another large scale attack -- say, something along the lines of the freighter-launched missiles Bruce Sterling has written about. The National Guard could rapidly be pressed into a large-scale, high-authority internal security role. Since their chain of command now effectively stops at the Executive, they would become the President's private army.

There are precedents in American history for the use of military force against civilians -- and many are Republican, for what it's worth. Think Eisenhower ordering in the Airborne to integrate schools; Hoover sending Macarthur to clear out the Hoovervilles; Lincoln ordering infantry into New York to quell the riots; Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion. What would be new for America in a Guard-backed "self-coup" would be that the exercises would be carried out by a group that amounted to the President's own private domestic army. It would have a level of -- for lack of a better term -- subtlety, that would make it more difficult to properly resis.

What would the regular Army do while this was going on? I've speculated before that our current officer corps would not happily stand by and watch the order of things overturned, especially in view of their low opinion of the Bushites. But setting duty against country is a recipe for confusion, and the most likely outcome of confusion is inaction. If the Bushites' actions were sudden and egregious, some large number of flag-rank officers might effectively mutiny -- really, put properly, they would be exercising their obligation under the Uniform Code to refuse unlawful orders. But if the pot were set to heat gradually enough, they might not be able to stir themselves to the concensus that would be necessary for that kind of action.

So I have come to believe that, should Rove and the Bushites choose to violently exercise what they see as their right to rule America as they see fit, the Army would stand by, feeling helpless. Much as the proud traditionalists of the Wehrmacht stood by while the SA and later SS wrought havoc, the Army might well stand by until it's too late to take lawful action.

Now, I've been assured that this will never happen in my lifetime. Why, I'm not clear; perhaps it's because for some people, anything that the President -- well, this President, at least -- wants to do is by definition justified. If he wants to usurp power, he must have a sound reason -- so the logic goes. We should shut up and get with the program. Get with their program, that is; that's the only program that matters....

More likely, though, the idea seems outlandish because we think it just can't ever happen, here -- that it has never happened, here. But as I'm occasionally reminded, on at least one occasion that we know of, a coup plan got fairly far along -- and was then hushed up, rather than its planners being punished.

So, yes, it can happen here. It almost did, once -- if they'd selected someone other than General Smedley Darlington Butler to be their stooge, it might have worked.