Lincoln’s Code:The Laws of War in American History By John
Fabian Witt Free Press, 512 pages To hear President George W.
Bush’s critics tell it, the steps the United States government
took to fight terrorism after 9/11—from the holding of detainees
at Guantánamo Bay to the Patriot Act—amounted to an
unprecedented assault on civil liberties that was at odds with
America’s long, noble tradition of upholding the rule of law
even in wartime. Yale law professor John Fabian Witt is hardly a
Bush partisan, but, based on his meticulous study of legal and
military history, he reaches a very different conclusion—one
that is more complicated and more interesting. “From the
Revolution forward,” he writes in Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of
War in American History, “the United States’ long history of
leadership in creating the laws of war stands cheek by jowl with
a destructive style of warfare that has come to be known among
military historians as the ‘American way of war.’” Rather than
detecting a universal respect for the l