Unqualified Offerings

Quondam UO guest-blogger Kerry Howley explains that using the military to quarantine areas of bird flu outbreaks would be a really really bad idea. Excerpt:

More cracked than the idea of an enforced quarantine is the blithe suggestion that men and women trained to kill outside U.S. borders are the ideal candidates for dealing with vulnerable flu victims stateside. The Great Influenza is, as much as anything, a work that limns the dangers of ignoring the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the military from taking police action in domestic situations.

The 1918 flu struck at a time when U.S. forces were repeatedly asked to keep order at home, and repeatedly trampled individual rights to do so. The War Department was busily and brutally quashing strikes, U.S. army intelligence operatives were gathering intelligence on suspicious Americans, and government officials actively encouraged Americans to inform on one another.

The information freeze was, in Barry’s telling, a major contribution to the spread of the epidemic; no one wanted to bear bad news and risk hurting morale. Speech was restricted through an expanded Sedition Act, and if someone was going to shut you up, it would more than likely be the military. To read Barry’s account, consider the dearth of facts surrounding the current epidemic-in-waiting, and cry “call out the cavalry!” requires a special kind of hyper-militarized mindset.

Which, of course, the President has in spades. Kerry also points out that soldiers, being human beings, are perfectly adequate disease vectors themselves. The larger story here is that “hyper-militarized mindset.” Call out the troops becomes the first resort rather than the last.