Resorting to Legal Combat

The administration (hswib) has raised the specter of terrorists using our own court system against us. But maybe that's not such a bad idea.

But ticking-bomb scenarios exist in Hollywood for the most part; they should not drive policy. In the real world, lawfare hardly poses the overwhelming concern that the Bush administration claims.

Truth be told, we have every reason to embrace lawfare, for it is vastly preferable to the bloody, expensive, and destructive forms of warfare that ravaged the world in the 20th century. First, lawfare has the obvious advantage of being safer than conventional warfare: I would far prefer to have motions and discovery requests fired at me than incoming mortar or rocket-propelled grenade fire. Likewise, lawfare rarely generates the collateral damage of conventional warfare. In recent war zones such as Bosnia, Chechnya, and Iraq, the cumulative civilian death toll stretches into the hundreds of thousands.