Category Archives: War

Is Israel Weak For Negotiating To Free Prisoners Of War?

Family, Israel, Military, Pop-Culture, Terrorism, War

While the specter of the parents of returning POW Bowe Bergdahl babbling, sobbing and conveying encoded, incoherent messages to their son on national TV was inappropriate and undignified (although not atypical of the pornography of public grief in this country)—the fact that the soldier’s government has worked to get him released from Taliban captivity is entirely appropriate. It’s a good thing that, as Reuters reports, “Army Sergeant Bergdahl, held for nearly five years in Afghanistan, was freed in a deal with the Taliban brokered by the Qatari government. Five Taliban militants, described by Senator John McCain as the ‘hardest of the hard core,’ were released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and flown to Qatar.”

But not if you ask the usual suspects.

Nothing much has changed since, in 2004, the neoconservatives at National Review had “grumbled about Israel’s ‘lopsided prisoner exchanges’ over the years. One ‘sofa samurai,’ … noted the startling disparity of exchanging 5,500 Egyptian soldiers, following the Sinai campaign of 1956, ‘for the lives of the four Israeli soldiers captured in the fighting,’ and over 8,000 Egyptians, after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in exchange for 240 Israeli soldiers.”

When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon released 430 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in exchange for three dead Israelis and one live one, people worried, and for good reason. Many of the prisoners were said to be very dangerous men. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would probably have supported the Sharon swap. According to Dr. Ganor, Rabin said categorically that when military action to free hostages is not possible, ‘real negotiations should be held.’…

… President Bush sat bone idle, never lifting a bloodstained finger to haggle for his countrymen beheaded … Abandoning hostages as the Bush administration did as a matter of ‘principle’ is … not an option, at least not an ethical one. President Bush bears the mark of Cain for looking on as Americans continue to be butchered. …” (“AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS”)

“Bergdahl was flown to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for medical treatment,” reports Reuters. “After receiving care he would be transferred to another facility in San Antonio, Texas, U.S. defense officials said, without giving a date for his return to the United States.”

MORE.

Government Begat Government Which Begat More Government

Government, Intellectual Property Rights, Regulation, War

Myron Pauli on the malignant, metastatic cancer known as government.

Government Begat Government Which Begat Government
By Myron Robert Pauli

My friend at the Federal Trade Commission is assigned to fight “monopoly” in the field of laser eye surgery. The Food and Drug Administration approved ONLY “laser A” and “laser B” for doing eye surgery [of course, WHY did the FDA get to approve lasers and why should ONLY these two lasers be approved over other capable lasers???]. It seems that the Patent and Trademark Office then gave patents (e.g. virtual monopolies) to the companies holding these two lasers (something of which Jefferson and many libertarians disapprove). Then the FTC claimed that these two companies “colluded” in making a monopoly which was, in fact, created by the state power of the FDA and the PTO. In other words, the solution to government-created-problems is, of course, more government.

And then there is a recent article in The Atlantic for government reparations for black Americans – after all, one had government slave codes, government Fugitive Slave Laws, banishment of free blacks, franchise denial, Jim Crow Laws, racist FHA, racist Agriculture Department, racist zoning laws, racist licensing restrictions, racist closed shop laws. Social Security transfers money from black men [who die at age 65] to white/Asian women who live near 90 years. Reparations were given to wealthy widows of 9/11 stockbrokers [another obscenity]… and thus, government should now extract money from Vietnamese refugees in the form of taxes to compensate descendents of people victimized by government in 1850 … and government begat government.

Speaking of Vietnamese refugees, it was the government which sent millions of warfighters (many conscripted with the draft) to fight in senseless wars of nation building in Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan …. where these veterans return with chronic injuries, addictions, and mental problems. The solution, of course, is not to allow them to seek private health care but to dump them into a VA system [chronicled in the movie “Born on the Fourth of July”] which, being government, is an unaccountable, uncompetitive, sovereign monopoly. The solution to problems in the VA or the DC schools or public housing or Amtrak or anything is, naturally, to increase the budget. In the beginning, there was government … and government begat more government … which begat more government. If X fails, try 2X and 3X and 4X. American Dream Downpayment Act begat Housing Bubble begat Wall Street Bailout begat more Income Inequality … solution – more government, of course!

And if Bush#1 is bad, the solution is Clinton#1. If he seems bad, try Bush#2 followed by Obama#1 followed by either Clinton#2 or Bush#3. Plus ca change plus c’est le meme chose (the more things change, the more they remain the same). Tired of the same old routine, folks, then try the New Freedom, the New Deal, the New Frontier, or the New Nixon. The new Messiah will solve the problems of the previous incompetent with “compassionate conservatism” or “hope and change” and “a more responsive government” and “more transparency” which amazingly always means: more laws, more arbitrary secretive government, more debt, more inflation, more drones, more spindoctors, and less liberty. As that noted ‘American-hating extremist’ Thomas Jefferson, observed: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

To Americans, most of whom have Orwellian memory holes, it has always been this way. Government has ALWAYS regulated X and Y and Z and provided for old people or college educations or health care or what not. I listen to the debate on voter ID – since you need a government ID to board a bus or have a drink, then you must have a photo ID to vote (can someone name which signers of the Declaration or the Constitution had photo ID’s ???). If photo ID’s are good enough for Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 hijackers, then they are good enough for everyone…. And so these arguments go … One loss of liberty leads to more. One actual terrorists leads to government reading all our mails and logging in all our phone calls. If government does A to us, then of course it should also do B and C and D …. – government begats government. And the people shout AMEN!

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

Hawks Want Their Interventionism Straight Up

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, War

There’s a surprise: West Point cadets, allegedly, hardly clapped in honor of President Barack Obama, who delivered a message about “limiting the use of American power to defending the nation’s core interests and being smart enough to avoid the temptation to use such power when it embroils the country in costly mistakes such as the decision to invade Iraq.” (CNN)

“Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail,” said Obama, who, rhetoric aside, is hardly a dove.

But hawks are furious. They want their interventionism straight up. If the Empire loses its grip, how will they remain the world’s Top Dogs?

“Is this how a great nation decides matters of war and peace”? demanded Chucky Krauthammer. The neoconservative columnist derides Obama’s foreign policy as “a nervy middle course between extreme isolationism and madcap interventionism.” More like the latter, if you ask me.

Krauthammer also bemoans Obama having “denied night-vision goggles, protective armor” and military assistance to “Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s newly elected president.”

I’m not cut up about it at all.

What Is True Patriotism?

Homeland Security, Military, Nationhood, Propaganda, War

American soldiers are “citizens of the world,” I wrote in “The International Highway to Hell.” “We pay their wages, but their hearts belong in faraway exotic places with which Main Street U.S.A can hardly hope to compete” for affection. This year’s Memorial Day Message” is gentler than that 2005 antiwar.com column, which was not as understanding about the specter of “misplaced loyalties,” where,

soldier after American soldier burbles on about how freeing Iraqis [Libyans, Afghans, etc.] inspires him … Or, if injured, … how eager he is to get back to his “buddies,” those he considers his real family. …

Celebrated on Memorial Day are “the … self-destructive sentiments too many American soldiers express – their willingness to give their lives for Iraqis [Libyans, Afghans, etc.]; their wish to rejoin their battalions as soon as they heal from being carved up in combat.”

But these point to a “profound alienation from all that’s important.”

And what it important? Not to live a contradiction and a lie, the one Jack Kerwick pinpoints in “The Consequences of American Patriotism” :

if morality consists in the observance of universal principles like “human rights,” then one of two things follow.
Either the partiality that we have toward our spouses, our friends, and our families is beyond the moral realm altogether, or it is actually immoral. There is no way to avoid this conclusion. Any morality affirming universal principles requires impartiality. In glaring contrast, the intimate relationships from which we derive our identities — “the little platoons,” as Burke described them — require partiality.
Thus, either patriotism is a moral fiction or our “little platoons” are.

Or perhaps “patriotism” is a devotion to “our little platoons”?

Perturbed I was back in 2005 “by the sight of compatriots who remain vested in a foreign polity.”

And convinced I was—still am—that “healthy patriotism is associated with robust particularism – petty provincialism, if you like – and certainly not with the deracinated globalism exhibited by our GI Joes and Janes.”