Innocent Executioners: An Illustration of the Principles of Western Civilization in the Modern World

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We hear a lot about barbarism and backwardness and bloodthirstiness among the nations of the Middle East, where violent religious extremists are praised and supported — and often hold state power. A lot of this is hype and misinformation, of course, but sometimes it’s all too true. From the Guardian:

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday. ...

The soldier, who has only been identified as "Captain R", was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.

The manner of Iman’s killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was "scared to death", made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died.

… The military court cleared the soldier of illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident.  …

The army’s official account said that Iman was shot for crossing into a security zone carrying her schoolbag which soldiers feared might contain a bomb. It is still not known why the girl ventured into the area but witnesses described her as at least 100 yards from the military post which was in any case well protected.

A recording of radio exchanges between Capt R and his troops obtained by Israeli television revealed that from the beginning soldiers identified Iman as a child.
In the recording, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post’s operations room and describes Iman as "a little girl" who was "scared to death". After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot. ….

Palestinian witnesses said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.

On the tape, Capt R then "clarifies" to the soldiers under his command why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."

At no point did the Israeli troops come under attack.

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The Anti-American American Empire

The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile, the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. [ . . . ] The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class.

~Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke, as paraphrased by Wikipedia
 
The myth dies hard. Thomas E. Woods of the Mises Institute appeared last summer on Scott Horton’s Antiwar.com radio program to try to kill it, as quite possibly only he can, but even his deft hands are full. He’s up against a fallacy, wrapped in a half-truth, inside a pseudo-patriotic shibboleth. It may well be that nothing’s more powerful than an idea whose time has come, but a carefully cultivated Big Lie will invariably give that timely idea a run for the money. People know what they know. They know war brings prosperity. They know because “World War II got the U.S. out of the Depression.” They know because the government schools told them “World War II got the U.S. out of the Depression.” Beyond that, they know because of what they see. They see the manufacturing might of the military-industrial complex (MIC). They see it employing land, labor and capital. They see its technological sophistication. They see the high-paying jobs.   

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Deficit Hawks or War Hawks?

Individualist prophets of peace.

Last week’s TGIF asked if the American people can afford a world-girdling foreign policy more befitting an empire than a republic. Look at it this way: War hawks make poor deficit hawks. Facing a $13 trillion national debt and trillion-dollar-plus annual budget deficits, we can’t afford to be complacent about foreign interventions costing $12 billion a month.

It’s not just that the budget numbers are daunting: The very institutions of small-government republicanism are suffocated by the quest for global hegemony. As James Madison said,

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few…. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

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Humanitarian Bribery

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has finally asserted herself as a foreign policy leader of Metternichian or rather Machiavellian proportions. On January 6, the day before Rajiv Shah is sworn in as director of USAID, Madame Clinton delivered her first major policy address, “Development in the 21st Century,” at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The secretary conceded that it is hard to sell development aid to “farmers and factory workers and teachers and nurses and students, hard-working mothers and fathers [be grateful for the concession, fathers] who wonder, why is their government spending taxpayer dollars to improve the lives of people in the developing world when there is so much hardship and unmet needs right here at home.”

Then how can we justify throwing even more money down the foreign aid rathole? The honest and true answer—admittedly dressed up in the pseudo-humanitarian verbiage that politicians have to use if they are to snooker the American people—is that foreign aid is an important part of what politicians like to call “national defense,” though there are far more accurate words. Foreign Policy offers the key paragraphs.

“We cannot stop terrorism or defeat the ideologies of violent extremism when hundreds of millions of young people see a future with no jobs, no hope, and no way ever to catch up to the developed world…

“We cannot rely on regional partners to help us stop conflicts and counter global criminal networks when those countries are struggling to stabilize and secure their own societies.

“We cannot advance democracy and human rights when hunger and poverty threaten to undermine the good governance and rule of law needed to make rights real.”

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How to Win in Iraq and Afghanistan in One Easy Step

In one easy step, here’s how we do it: pull out completely. That’s it. Just leave. The countries will do just fine without us.

I’ll use history as a guide. In the 20th Century, America won just one war: Vietnam.

What’s that, you say? We didn’t win? We left in ignoble defeat, fleeing in our helicopters and pushing them off of our ships into the blue deep sea? How is that winning?

I’ll tell you how we won over there. We left, and the place is doing just fine without us.

If the U.S. had won, do you know what Vietnam would be like today? We’d still be there, spending billions of dollars a year to maintain military bases. Probably to “contain China .”

Ever been to a military base? I have. They are surrounded by bars and pawnshops. Oh yeah — and lots of whores. Most are disgusting places, and are certainly no place for a young man to be.

If we had won militarily in Vietnam , we’d have military bases there, surrounded by the same things as they are over here, only worse. Vietnamese hookers (and lots of half-breed kids), gambling, drugs, alcohol, crime, theft, rape, murder.

We’d have lots of dull-witted bureaucrats over there, screwing things up in their patronage jobs. The billions of dollars we’d funnel over there would be skimmed off by corrupt Vietnamese and end up in offshore bank accounts, and right before the crooks find the jig is up, they’d flee to the French Riveria, and spend the rest of their days in luxury, on my dime. And yours, too.

That’s what would happen if we had won militarily in Vietnam .

In the 20th Century, we did not win one war except Vietnam , and that “win” cost us 58,000 casualties and a few million dead Southeast Asians. If we had stayed out in the first place, most of those people would still be alive and whole, and Vietnam would probably be more advanced than it is now.

We did not win World War I, which was a European War and none of our business anyway. The combatants over there had fought to a stalemate and were about ready to quit — until we got involved.

Every country in that European war was equally guilty, yet all of it was blamed on Germany . Enter the utterly deluded Woodrow Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles, and the world ended up with Hitler, Stalin, and World War II.

After World War II, Christian Eastern Europe was delivered to Communist atheists for 50 years, Israel was founded in the middle of a 2000-year-old war, and the next thing you know, crazed fanatical Muslims are flying airplanes into our buildings to get revenge on us for supporting Arab dictators and Israel .

All those problems are what comes from the U.S. walking to and fro in the world, and meddling mightily in it, and certainly not following what George Washington said in his Farewell Address: trade with the world but stay out of their political problems.

Every place in the world where the U.S. Empire maintains bases has problems because we are over there and not over here. We even have bases in Portugal .

We still have bases in Germany . One of my cousins, who had been assigned to Germany when he was in the Army, said the Germans around the bases “hated us, so we hated them back.” Now when did World War II supposedly end? Sometime in the middle of the 1940s, I think?

What problems do we have with Vietnam these days? None that I can think of. Why? Because we’re not over there anymore!

I have decided a long time ago war is more the natural state of mankind than peace. Since at least World World I, we have been involved in a continuous war, with time off every once in a while for a breather. And none of it is necessary, if we would just pull out of other countries and just trade peacefully with them.

Fat chance of that, what with our worldwide American Empire trying to impose “democracy and freedom” on all those recalcitrant, ungrateful wogs. Mostly by killing them by the millions, like we did in Southeast Asia . Just kill enough of them, and they’ll be our friends!

The only thing good that will come out of the American Empire is that sooner or later it will collapse (as all empires collapse) and we will come home. Of course, it will happen after oceans of mud and blood and folly.

Orwell had it right: when the State gets involved, it tells everyone that War is Peace. Orwell also said one of the most important things in his life was tending his vegetable garden.

As far as I’m concerned, he was right on both counts.

Bob Wallace — Strike The Root