Readers of Jesus Drives an SUV may already be familiar with the Church of the Orange Sky, which is a para-real Canadian religious organization which exists to proclaim the mysterious and terrible glory of the Orange Sky to a fallen world which has forgotten its way and no longer remembers the truth.

Jesus Drives an SUV is primarily a religious blog, however, which meant that despite its great support for that centre of revolutionary ferment, the Church required a new and official home to deliver its message, particularly on political subjects, and particularly ones that might get Jesus Drives an SUV into trouble for being too pro-terrorist, too anti-government, or some other nonsense that would upset the readership of an ostensibly apolitical blog, readers who presumably don’t go there to read about why banks in trouble should be nationalized. (Having said that, readers should be assured that the Church of the Orange Sky’s influence over secular worldly affairs is so great that, within mere hours of the publication of this pronouncement, the British government responded by nationalizing the bank in question.)

The impetus for this blog came with a somewhat dated story now from the National Post (otherwise known as the American Post by my queerly socialist first-year business professor, though technically it’s merely the Jewish-Manitoban Post, if we go by “ownership”) which tried to tell the story of Salman Hossain, a Muslim student radical in Toronto who wrote a number of provocative posts on Internet forums arguing that Jews made better targets than Americans, that Canadian involvement in the Afghan and Iraqi wars made us “legitimate targets,” and that “mass casualty” terrorist strikes here in the West will do more to end the imperialist war than will non-violent protests.

The Post didn’t like Hossain’s attitude and quoted a variety of “experts” on international terrorism, among whom the consensus seems to be that Hossain is an evil bastard who wants to kill people. Based on my own limited experiences as a graduate student in intelligence and espionage, as well as a graduate student at one of Canada’s bastions of conservative realist security doctrine, the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, I’ve encountered such “experts” before on occasion, and they live up to what I expected here.

Basically, there are the moderates and the extremists. The moderates, like Wesley Wark at U of T, admit the obvious – that Hossain is basically a harmless student looking for excitement, which in Wark’s terminology makes him a “ranter” – but warn that words might “tip over” into action, and therefore it’s time to pass new laws and make new crimes and punishments (Wark actually uses the term “reform” for this process, though most people associate reform with less intrusive authoritarian government, not more). Because part of his research funding has come from CSIS and the CSE, Wark sneaks in that new laws should overturn our current privacy protection and “ensure prompt and effective monitoring of potentially harmful Internet traffic.” This is a complete red herring because the police have evidently been able to identify Hossain even without the new police state powers Wark wants them to have.

Then there are the extremists, like Bruce Hoffman, who think that we don’t necessarily need new laws because the public inexplicably “owes” its soldiers moral support and we can’t afford to “demoralize” our soldiers. For this reaosn, Hoffman argues, we should arrest Hossain and charge him with terrorism, even though we know he hasn’t broken the law. Hoffman explains that this is because prosecutors need to “send a message” to radicals like Hossain to shut their evil little unpatriotic mouths, even if opening them is still legal thanks to some weird free-speech loophole in that goddamned Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

First off, this idolization of the soldier is lame. On the one hand we worship our warriors for their ability to slaughter the enemy, and on the other we fawn over their precious fragile emotional stability, worrying that we might “demoralize” them if we question whether or not they should be killing people in the first place.

More importantly, authoritarian twits like Hoffman are the reason the Canadian government is still, illegally and unconstitutionally, holding suspected “terrorists” at Kingston Pen, not only years after they were arrested without trial but also years after the Supreme Court of Canada ordered they could no longer be detained for this very reason. Stupid little medieval concepts like habeas corpus can’t be allowed to get in our way as we prosecute the terrorists, terrorism experts agree!

It’s funny how we have all these “terrorism experts” these days, isn’t it? It’s been an endemic problem in the developed world for decades now – we’ve had political, religious, and nationalist terrorist groups pretty much everywhere, even here in Canada once upon a time. (The FLQ’s agitation during the 1960s basically succeeded only in proving once again that “propaganda of the deed” doesn’t work, though it’s possible they indirectly contributed to the rise of the Parti Quebecois as a peaceful nationalist alternative.) It’s been there, hovering in the background, but it wasn’t really a true concern. Then, 9/11 happens, and all of a sudden the world of academic security studies is full of “terrorism experts” inexplicably qualified to offer practical advice to trigger-happy governments. One of the faster post-9/11 academic reflections to make it off the presses, an edited book called Worlds in Collision, actually had a chapter’s worth of advice on the question “Who may we bomb?”, the answer to which was basically “everybody.”

That’s because the primary purpose of security studies “scholars” is to provide a veneer of academic sobriety to the constant budget lobbying by the defence, surveillance, and foreign affairs bureaucracies, who would otherwise be left at the trough with only their pet corporate contractors for company.

Security activism isn’t new (it was behind a lot of the popular nationalist militarism leading up to World War I too, for example), but the current phase started in the late 1940s, when the carnage of the Second World War – and a few conveniently funded public think tanks – convinced North American and European politics that they could no longer afford to turn inwards and proclaim peace for all. It may surprise people to learn just how influential the peace movement became in some states during the interwar period. Various student unions at major universities, like Oxford, actually pledged never to join the military and prosecute a war ever again (promises which were mostly cast aside later on), and in 1928, the Kellogg-Briand treaty actually renounced war as an instrument of state policy. The pact was the result of a failed Polish proposal the previous year which was then taken up by the French and the Americans, though the Americans promptly sabotaged the new law by claiming that war for self-defensive purposes didn’t count as “war” under the treaty. You might think it’s therefore just a meaningless scrap of paper, but in those days the rule of law did sometimes mean something, and so the Pact was resurrected after World War II (however briefly) to provide a legitimate legal basis for prosecuting leading Nazis as war criminals. Back then, you see, they didn’t just cram people into Guantanamo on some flimsy pretext.

Anyhow, one of the lessons of the war was that countries ought to have aggressive foreign policies. Networks of think tanks sprang up to help Western governments figure out how to spend the flood of peacetime military dollars which could no longer go just to resupplying units exhausted by actual warfighting. Some of these think tanks were literally just cover organizations for the military – the “RAND Corporation,” today a leading conservative think tank, was actually spun off by the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s, and its name is a peppy acronym for its original role as, literally, the “Research ANd Development Corporation” for the USAF.

Pretty soon Europe was thoroughly re-militarized, though once in a while tensions would rise again, as they did during the 1970s and 1980s when the Americans and Soviets occasionally sent new nuclear weapons into the field to try and make the other side nervous. For the most part, though, the superpowers pretty much preferred the status quo in Europe. During the 1980s, even while Ronald Reagan was denouncing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” the State Department and the CIA were quietly considering whether to help the Soviets shore up their ailing dictatorship in Poland, where pro-democracy dissidents were threatening to topple the communist dictatorship and thus overturn Europe’s delicate “strategic balance.”

The real battle, though, was in the Third World, where not only were there all sorts of newly “postcolonial” states eligible for recolonization, but there were plenty of opportunities to actually use our new weapons. Nuclear weapons are worth a lot of money, but at the end of the day they’re still sitting in their siloes.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make extra money on nukes anyways – for about twenty years the American army, air force and navy fought a running battle over who deserved which nuclear weapons and where, the result being that everyone got extra helpings of nukes and their own share in a ludicrously exaggerated war plan calling for a total of one-hundred and four nuclear bombs to be dropped on metropolitan Moscow alone.

But the real money is always in real war, and that can only be fought in the Third World, where the enemies don’t have nuclear weapons and can’t effectively resist us. Sure, they can fight insurgencies, which actually succeed with surprising regularity – the U.S. lost in Vietnam, and we’re currently losing in both Iraq and Afghanistan – but the convenient thing about fighting poor people is that they’re nowhere near the sort of threat to us that we are to them. Sometimes our soldiers die, but when we decide to invade Afghanistan, we don’t have to seriously consider what might happen to Canada as a result. It’s basically like investing in stocks – hopefully you gain, but at worst, you only lose the men and material you ship over there, wherever “there” happens to be in any given conflict.

The fact that these are basically powerless enemies, however, requires that we contrive a variety of different rationales for killing them, and this is where the security studies experts come in: they help us realize (1) why Others are so irredeemably dangerous and evil that they need to be imprisoned and, if necessary, killed; and (2) why the Others can be aggressive threats even when it is we who invade their countries, we who set up repressive dictatorships who then become the symbols of “secular modernity” to student dissidents in those countries, and we who fund and train the brutal and radical military movements in those countries when their governments turn against us.

Reason No. 2 isn’t without problems, since it requires us to regularly adjust our definitions. The latter, for example, is why various terrorist groups in Iran have become friendly “non-terrorists” in the eyes of the State Department, even while the Iranian armed forces has been defined as a terrorist organization by the same department, a blatant violation of their own definition of terrorists as non-state actors, which itself is a conveniently elitist workaround intended to prevent the inevitable comparisons of evil “terrorism” to Western governments’ strategic bombing of German cities, plans for strategic bombing of Soviet cities, innumerable air raids and interdictions and “blockades” of offending countries like Cuba and Nicaragua, etc., etc.

Reason No. 1, though, is an even bigger problem, because these “enemies of democracy” don’t usually look much alike. The Third World man is a sort blank slate of evil, onto which we can project communist radicalism (during the 1980s), violent ethnic nationalism (during the 1990s), or anti-democratic terrorism (during the 2000s). Fortunately for us, in security studies they normally don’t have many English-speaking representatives capable of speaking on their behalf, so very few people ask why Stalinist North Korea, secular Sunni Iraq, and religious revolutionary Shi’ite Iran belong in the same “axis of evil,” or how they managed to form such close friendships after we spent so many billions of dollars helping the Iranians and Iraqis kill each other during the 1980s.

One of the true ironies is that yesterday’s enemies always become less sinister in a twisted sort of nostalgia. We pretty much forgot all about Nazism and Japanese militarism pretty quickly after World War II, and the Americans even hired large numbers of Nazis as scientists, spies, and – of relevance here! – security analysts, in order to jump-start the new Cold War against the evil “communists,” who were inexplicably even more dangerous than the evil “fascists.” Then we were fighting the Muslim radicals and ethnic nationalists and rogue states and other chaotic elements, who for some reason are even more dangerous than the Soviets, despite the fact they don’t have nuclear weapons capable of eradicating almost all human life, because they are irrational, insane, “rogues,” etc.

In contrast to these silent but dangerous others, security scholars can speak on every subject at any time. Thus Barry Posen, who wrote about the future evils of ethnic war during the early 1990s, spent the years after 9/11 reflecting on the need for a “grand strategy” against terrorism. Some such scholars, recognizing how worthless democracy really is in the elitist game of global politics, write in the pages of arch-conservative international relations journals, like International Security and SAIS Review, that we actually need more dictatorships in the world, so that they can effectively administer capital punishments to the terrorists without having to bother with civilized niceties like fair trials and independent juries.

From what I’ve been writing here, you might think that being a security scholar means being hypocritical, elitist, and authoritarian. That’s probably unfair – there are lots of “critical” scholars who aren’t, though they tend to isolate themselves through liberal use of six-syllable words. However, there’s also bright sides of being part of the mainstream. For one thing, there’s often more money available in research grants of one sort or another.

More importantly, it can be a very liberating experience. Here’s why: when you’re a twenty-year-old student radical, saying that Canadian soldiers are legitimate targets during wartime, that killing them might help end the war, and that our governments have no business involved in an imperial war against people who aren’t really our enemy is “demoralizing,” evil, and might land you in jail.

By contrast, when you’re a forty-year-old terrorism “expert,” you can call for the overthrow of foreign governments, the ensuing slaughter of tens or or even hundreds of thousands of civilians, and subsequent repression of the survivors by autocracies and dictatorships, and we call this “important policy-relevant debate.” Even when you are thought to side with “the enemy,” it usually takes a few years to build a case just strong enough to get you fired, as happened with Ward Churchill in the years after 9/11.

The lesson for Mr. Hossain, therefore is this: if you want to be a pro-war polemical jackass, wait until you’re a professor, and make sure you’re advocating killing the right people. That way you can cheerfully advocate massacres right and left, but instead of having the RCMP arrest you, instead you can have the Department of National Defence pay you for your important work!