Bush officials argued this was due to necessity, but in fact that was fallacious, as the U.S. military is not, and should not be, considered an antiterrorist force. Militaries exist to defend against foreign armies attacking, not to conduct the police work required for counter-terrorism. But as we’ve seen, when a military takes control of a country, occupying it as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it enforces martial law on the civilians living there—in other words, the military operates as a dictatorship, or as our Supreme Court called it, “martial rule.”