Category Archives: Just War

UPDATED: Adam Kokesh In ‘Amerofantacy’ Land

Iraq, Just War, libertarianism, Military, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

Adam Kokesh the soldier returned from Iraq and sobered up. Now, Kokesh is truly fighting for authentic American liberties. But does the Idiocracy even have an inkling what freedom is, any longer? Are Americans as stupid as the small and select sample interviewed by Kokesh for the YouTube clip “The Truth About American Sniper from An Iraq Combat Veteran”? Judging from the mantra mouthed throughout the exchange with viewers of American Sniper—“Navy SEAL Chris-Kyle-was-fighting-for-our-freedom”—the answer is, “Yes, they are.”

After writing for the North American market for almost 20 years—and certainly since I became persona non grata among Republicans for exposing their war propaganda—I suspect the courageous Adam Kokesh is fighting a losing battle.

But so am I.

UPDATE: Chris Kyle, Worse Than Just A Bad Ass.

Jack Kerwick does an exhaustive job of “sorting out truth from myth” about Chris Kyle. Wow. I didn’t know the half of it: “Once we are swept up in hero-worship—or maybe its idolatry—reason, facts, logic, evidence, and, most importantly, considerations of fundamental fairness and decency are all too easily swept away.”

Kerwick, moreover, cites one A.J. Delgado, who made short work of Kyle on no less a mainstream publication than National Review.

So why the hysteria over those who refuse to hero-worship this guy?

On Killing The ‘Right Way,’ For The ‘Right’ Reasons

Democracy, Islam, Jihad, Just War, Middle East, Terrorism

“Killed in an un-Islamic way” is how Jake Tapper of CNN described the torching by ISIS of a captive, caged Jordanian pilot. In case you didn’t know, beheading is killing the Islamic way.

Killing à la America, now that’s an entirely different matter. We do it right. The US is civilized: America strafes from above.

Villagers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen already know it, although the people on the ground near American drone bases in Somalia and Ethiopia are still blissfully unaware of it—Barack Obama is the uncrowned king of the killer drone. In Iraq, ordinary men and women scan the skies nervously for the telltale metallic shimmer, wondering whether they are being simply surveilled from above, as promised, or targeted by Hellfire missiles. Ditto the Iranians, who once even downed, and promptly displayed to the world, an RQ-170 Sentinel, launched into Iranian airspace by Uncle Sam.

Here is the face of disfigurement by American forces.

Still, the “good” killers can claim they are without mens rea—criminal intent—we don’t mean to disfigure and kill all the little Shakiras we’ve disfigured and killed.

The child, reported London’s Daily Mail, “was burned beyond recognition by a U.S. drone and left for dead in a trashcan. … She was found by a medical mission team two years ago and was described as ‘lucky’ by staff as two other children found with her were killed by the military attack.” “[B]rought to the U.S. from her home in Pakistan,” the girl’s American surgeons patched her up.

As you can see, not much remains of the small, charred face. Nevertheless, as the narrative goes, the little girl and tens of thousands like her, should be grateful that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put little Shakira together again. (Or would have if they could have.)

That’s how we role; we reduce the “bad guys'” countries to rubble, decimate their neighborhoods with Daisy Cutters—all with good intentions and for a good cause: Democratizing the devils!

Ours is “The Jupiter Complex”: “the ability granted by the possession of huge air forces, to rain thunderbolts on the wicked.” “The Jupiter Complex,” writes (neoconservative) historian Paul Johnson, “was to be with the United States for the rest of the century.”

And into the next.

Savages all, if you ask me.

UPDATE II: The ‘Selma’ Or ‘Sniper’ No-Brainer

Affirmative Action, Film, History, Hollywood, Just War, Military, Race

“Sniper” Or “Selma”? Which flick would you rather see? I will pass on both. However, if forced to choose between a 2-hour long, historically inaccurate guilt trip, laid on thick by the MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever), and an action movie about an all-American “son, husband, father, and, most of all, decorated military man”; I can see why “American Sniper” is a box office sensation, while “Selma” circles the drain. “Sniper” grossed $105.3 Million on the week-end of its release; “Selma” $11.5 million.

Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the subject of the “Clint Eastwood’s biopic,” in my opinion, squandered his talents as an assassin for Uncle Sam. Kyle’s claim to fame, by the news media’s telling, is that he “held the record for number of kills by an American sniper. The Pentagon has confirmed more than 150 of his kills. The previous record was 109.”

As I wrote at the time the SEAL passed away, “live by the sword, die by the sword. Or in hippie speak: Kyle had bad karma.”

I’m quite comfortable stating that poor Kyle was not in the business of defending American liberties, as the mouths on neoconservative media insist. That the war over in Iraq saved lives stateside is a dubious proposition at best. To the contrary, there is more proof of the opposite; that picking off women and children and other invaded species, “when he [thought it] necessary,” increased the danger to Americans stateside from the victims’ community. (Unfriend and unfollow me all you like; that doesn’t change this immutable truth.)

Still, if “American Sniper” is an apolitical rendition, a human story about a controversial, conflicted assassin for the state—much like “The Hurt Locker” was—I can see the appeal.

UPDATE I: A day after I wrote “Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword” (02.03.13), Ron Paul tweeted out the same (02.4.13). He was denounced, of course.

UPDATE II: Writes pat Buchanan, in “Selma, 50 years on”: … “The era of marching for civil rights was over, and the era of Black Power, with Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and The Black Panthers eclipsing King, had begun.”

UPDATED: ‘At Peace’ In War

Iraq, Just War, libertarianism, Military, Paleolibertarianism

He’s a fine man (inside and out), which is why it is numbingly absurd, if predictable, for a CNN correspondent to have drawn a moral equivalence between Jordan Matson’s mission and that of 100 or so other Americans, who’ve flocked to fight alongside the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

You see, Matson is an American soldier fighting, voluntarily, with the Kurds against ISIS. And he is not part of Rome’s tax-funded Army’s. Rather, after praying “about what to do for a month or two,” Matson resolved to help the Kurds: “For me, it’s for the Kurdish people,” Matson told CNN.

Matson is “from Sturtevant, Wisconsin, a ‘mom and pop town’ as he described it, with just a few restaurants and three gas stations. He worked the third shift at a food packaging company,” before enlisting with the Popular Protection Unit (YPG), “a Kurdish militia set up to protect the Kurdish areas” from ISIS.

Unless they are pacifists—a quality as odious as militarism—libertarians ought to have no issue with Matson: He is risking his own life, doing what he believes in, is fighting a Just War, and is not funded by the American taxpayer.

Although there is no doubt that this man would rush to the aid of his “little platoons” in America—Edmund Burke’s description of a man’s social mainstay, his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers—there is, seemingly, no place for Matson in an increasingly feminized, manliness-averse, honor-free America:

“Civilian life just wasn’t for me. The normal 9-to-5, I just wasn’t comfortable with it,” he said.

As to why there is no moral equivalence between Matson and ISIS enlistees:

* Matson is a Christian who prays to the G-d of the Hebrews and the Christians. Some of us think that Islam is problematic and that “ISIS is Islam.”
* Matson does not behead, rape, enslave anyone, much less innocent civilians.
* Matson is not fighting an expansionist aggressive war, his is a defensive war against an aggressor.
* Matson is on the side of the only people that has made good on their sovereignty; are westernized and are profoundly pro-American (G-d only knows why).

UPDATE (10/28): Tinny libertarianism, again. From the Facebook thread:

Myron Robert Pauli: Funny thing but I said about the various neocons like Krauthammer and Kristol that they ought to put their $$ where their mouths are and lead volunteers to fight rather than commit a collective national effort. Jordan Matson decided to do as an individual fight against some international evil that he personally cares about – fine for him. It is the policy of forcibly dragging the nation as a whole into imperial efforts that I object to.

Ilana Mercer: Myron Robert Pauli, so ISIS is just some amorphous “international evil.” Don’t lapse again into tinny, “lite libertarianism.”

Myron Robert Pauli: ???? ???? ISIS has not attacked the US. They have attacked Kurds, Shiites, or opposing Sunnis in Syria and Iraq which, last time I check, are not in the US – which makes them external – now perhaps I should have used the word external instead of international. But a non-interventionist policy for a limited-government republic would not “go around searching for monsters to destroy” (John Quincy Adams). So maybe we have a disconnect but I am not sure what you call “lite libertarianism” here – people overseas have the responsibility to defend themselves against the scumbags that attack them but we don’t have an obligation to help them (and it usually is counterproductive when we “help”) but if some individual wishes to help, that is probably fine.

Ilana Mercer WTF, Myron Robert Pauli: From the fact that ISIS has not attacked the US, it does not follow that one is morally neutral as individuals to their deeds against other innocents. We went over this “argument” when I wrote “Masada on Mount Sinjar.” By your “argument,” no individual had the right to mess with the Germans who murdered close on 6 million Jews and others.