Category Archives: Just War

UPDATED: Portrait Of An Occupied Country (& Kids)

America, Just War, Middle East, Military, Nationhood, Republicans, War, Welfare

If my daughter was being looked over or even chatted up by frustrated foreign soldiers out on patrol, I would be worried. The image of this stunning, fragile, Afghan girl, dwarfed by the obviously “attentive” military men, conjures the fate of Abeer Qasim Hamza. (At least in the mind of this mother.)

Naturally, Republican deadheads like Laura Ingraham and James Hirsen railed against Brian De Palma’s depiction, in “Redacted,” of the girl’s rapists and killers.

“‘Redacted’: De Palma Tells The Truth”” serves as a reminder of the hazards to Their Children of Our Occupation:

“… A mop of hair, a delicate face and big black eyes: The only image we have of her is the one plastered on her Iraqi ID card. It was taken when she was a two-year-old tot. She lived with her mother, father and three siblings in the village of Yusufiyah near Mahmoudiyah.
Unfortunately for them, their farmhouse was situated near an American traffic checkpoint. The neighbors later said soldiers would watch the girl go about her chores, and gesture lewdly. The culprits, led by ringleader Pfc. Steven Dale Green—a school drop-out with a police record; recruitment standards are being lowered to fill quotas—would stage mock raids on the family’s home during which Green fondled Abeer.
Finally, Green, accompanied by Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, Spc. James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman, and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard, hatched a scheme to rape Abeer. In they went, shooting and killing Abeer’s parents and sibling, and then gang-raping her. When they were through with Abeer, they summarily executed her with a shot to the head.”…

In “Portrait Of An Occupied Country,” Al Jazeera intelligently analyzes how NATO (read the US) is rapidly replacing and usurping local Afghan societal structures.

UPDATE: Remember little, innocent Abeer and her family, who died a horrible death at the hands of American soldiers. May the family rest in peace; may the murderers be put to death for their crimes.

The Death Heads Are Just Dandy

Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, The State, War

The New Individualist’s Spring 2010 edition doesn’t carry one of my columns (The Winter issue featured two), but it has a good, much-needed photo-journalism spread titled “This is War.” Iraqi family homes flatted by SCUDS (ours), streets in the aftermath of stupid bombs (from the US with love), the purest of the pure—the body of a beautiful little girl—washed for burial (“we love ya, democratized Iraqis”).

Scrutinizing the ever-so sad images of war brought back those horrible years during which, in vain it seemed, I pelted my readers with non-stop facts and doses of reality, the kind these images transmit with such ease. I tried the power of the Jewish teachings; these instruct Jews to robustly and actively seek justice; Just War Theory, developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the libertarian axiom, which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors. And I mentioned over and over again the natural law, and what the Founding Fathers provided: “A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition,” I wrote in March 12, 2003, doesn’t, cannot, and must never pursue what Bush is after—a sort of 21st-century Manifest Destiny.”

If you have a moral compass I ask you to patronize moral writers (provided they have talent, of course), not the apologists who supported this wicked foray, and are still unapologetic about it. All of them, I wager, are doing well—walking around, grins on their smug, death-head mugs, their claws dripping with blood, their wallets stuffed with wads, the Empire’s counterfeit currency. Incitement to murder and war profiteering are lucrative occupations in fin de siècle America.

The blowhards and blonds who slithered on their bellies for Bush (still do)—why do you read them? Buy their sick-making “Obama-this; Obama That” Micky-mouse books? (Okay, some like Coulter and Malkin have real talent, but the rest? Nothing but a T & A show all.)

It’s the story of Job, that Hebrew individualist, all over again; the wicked and the foolisher prosper, the righteous suffer, isn’t it?

On Nuking Nonnuclear States

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Just War, Republicans, War

HERE’S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AMERICAN “CONSERVATISM”: Obama, who seldom does anything good, is “revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.”

The only country to ever nuke hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is committing to not repeat that shame. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Not if you’re a fire-breathing GOPier or conservative.

They object to the following policy outline, which seems to me more than reasonable:

“For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack. [Nuke a country for hacking into the state’s computers?! Are these people serious?]
Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with ‘a series of graded options,’ a combination of old and new conventional weapons. ‘I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,’ he said in the interview in the Oval Office.
White House officials said the new strategy would include the option of reconsidering the use of nuclear retaliation against a biological attack, if the development of such weapons reached a level that made the United States vulnerable to a devastating strike.”

Today’s GOP is too dim to double check their lust for blood against what their oracle Ronald Reagan would have preached. This via Andrew Sullivan:

“A Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. And no matter how great the obstacles may seem, we must never stop our efforts to reduce the Weapons of war. We must never stop at all until we see the day when Nuclear arms have been banished from the face of this Earth.”
– Ronald Reagan , 1984, in China.

Updated: Allowed History From Below ONLY

Federalism, History, Just War, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism, States' Rights

Confederate History Month: Declared anew by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, with the intent of honoring the Commonwealth of Virginia’s shared history. Read the April 2010 proclamation declaring it Confederate History Month. Reasonable stuff.

If you’re going to do something as controversial as honor the South’s sacrifice, be prepared to stick to your guns. Otherwise, don’t bother to put on the show. The specter of yellow-bellied pols capitulating to the pieties of political correctness is sickening.

The history of the US is what the Legislative Black Caucus, the NAACP, and so-called civil-rights activists say it is; it’s history from below; a litany of complaints and contrivances from self-styled victims’ groups on behalf of minor historical figures.

Update (April 8): I contacted my good friend the valiant Tom DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, for a comment about the fracas. Here it is:

“What would the race hustlers and the pompously politically correct do without Confederate History Month? How could the former frighten little old black ladies into sharing their social security checks with them if they couldn’t use it to scare them into thinking there are people out there who want to bring back slavery? As for the PC crowd, which includes the usual leftist suspects as well as such outfits as the ‘libertarian’ Cato Institute and the neocon Claremont Institute, Southerners must forever be demonized for the sin of slavery– but not New Yorkers and New Englanders, who also owned slaves and ran the transcontinental slave trade for centuries. No, only Southerners must be demonized because they were the only group in American history to seriously challenge the notion that the politicians in D.C. are ‘sovereign’ over everyone and everything.”