Category Archives: War

UPDATED: Tea Party Must Go To War With The War Party (Abu Ghraib à la Afghanistan)

Debt, Economy, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, War

Ending the warfare state is the only ray of hope for down-and-out, indebted America. With laser-like precision, Pat Buchanan zeroes in on the tack the tea party must take if it is to tackle the federal-induced “deficit-debt crisis, a national debt nearing 100 percent of gross domestic product and a deficit of 10 percent of GDP.” There is only “one place where a bipartisan majority may be found for major spending cuts: defense and the empire, the warfare state.”

“After Iraq and Afghanistan,” writes Buchanan, in “Tea Party vs. War Party?”, “the American people are not going to give the establishment and War Party a free hand in foreign policy. Every patriot will do what is necessary and pay what is needed to defend his country. But national security is one thing, empire security another.”

There is another matter I have raised in “Statism Starts With You!” and other recent columns, and it is “America’s fondness for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which combined, account for close to half of the federal government’s budget.” “Only 7 percent of the country will consider slashing the first two welfare programs. And a mere eleven percent of those living in the ‘Land of the Free’ are prepared to pare down Medicaid. Keep the government out of my Medicare!”

For a lack of any other viable option for stalling State spending, the Tea Party must position itself in opposition to Obama’s volitional and inherited wars; ignore Mr. Hannity’s nagging about “Empire security,” and preach and proselytize about the end of Empire.

If ever there was a religious cause, ending America’s military forays abroad is it.

UPDATE: Abu Ghraib à la Afghanistan. You remember the pornographic pictorials from Abu Ghraib prison, starring some sadistic and slutty servicemen and women? Well, GI JOE and GI HO have relocated. And they will continue to do their thing until the US government stops unleashing them in other countries. (Place them on the US-Mexico border where they can scare some gangsters their own size—drug cartel members—if that’s not posse comitatus.)

HERE goes:

Those who have seen the photos say they are grisly: soldiers beside newly killed bodies, decaying corpses and severed fingers.
The dozens of photos, described in interviews and in e-mails and military documents obtained by The Associated Press, were seized by Army investigators and are a crucial part of the case against five soldiers accused of killing three Afghan civilians earlier this year.

UPDATE II: Cyber Warfare: Is It Libertarian?

Individual Rights, Iran, Israel, libertarianism, Natural Law, Technology, War

“There is a pithy aphorism from a Tractate of the Jewish Law regarding the right of self-defense. The Talmud, as the law is called, is a veritable minefield of complexities and interpretations. The rabbis would have prefaced their edict with extended discussion. They would have argued about the threshold that must be met before a pre-emptive strike can be carried out, what constitutes imminent danger, and whether defensive actions apply only to individuals or to collective action as well. These scholars belonged to a people that spent a good part of their history perfecting the Christian art of turning the other cheek. Yet ironically, and doubtless after careful consideration, the rabbis recommended that, ‘He who rises to kill thee, ye rise earlier to kill him.'” (See “Facing the Onslaught of Jihad”)

Likewise, I am not a pacifist, although I am a libertarian.

There is no doubt in my mind that Iran would evaporate Israel if it could. Yet mention to Iran’s apologists that Israel is being considered by Ahmadinejad as The Bomb’s designated test site, and the reply one invariably gets is, “Oh, c’mon; are you referring to all that ‘wipe Israel off the map’ stuff? Haven’t you heard of ‘Scheherazade of the Thousand and One [Arabian] Nights? Ahmadi’s excitable. That’s his style. Chill, man.”

[READ “That Persian Pussycat.”]

There is a strong suspicion that Israel is behind “The Stuxnet worm, ‘the most sophisticated malware ever’ … [it] has been discovered infesting Iran’s nuclear installations. There’s growing speculation that these were indeed the intended targets of what the mainstream continues to call a ‘virus’ — it only infects certain Siemens SCADA systems in specific configurations. There’s also speculation that it’s state-sponsored malware, with fingers pointing at either Israel or the U.S.”

Reuters reports that “Cyber warfare has quietly grown into a central pillar of Israel’s strategic planning, with a new military intelligence unit set up to incorporate high-tech hacking tactics, Israeli security sources said on Tuesday.”

To be sure, hacking is a violation of property rights. That is as clear as crystal. Why, spam is trespass. But this alleged Israeli property trespass is also non-violent (I doubt very much that Israel is messing with systems that sustain life).

It would seem to me, then, that if indeed Israel is under a real existential threat from Iran—and not everyone believes this—the Jewish State has found the quintessential libertarian method to begin to combat some of the Iranian menace.

What do you think?

UPDATE I: TokyoTom: An act either does or does not comport with the libertarian non-aggression axiom. I spoke about your logical error in “LIBERTARIAN WRANGLING”:

“From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who, while fleeing the law, happens on a scene of a rape, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because a murderer has performed it?”

Iran’s leaders have threatened to annihilate Israel. They could easily do so, given Israel’s size. The act jibes with their beliefs. The more senior leader, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, right-hand man to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, once explained with lethal logical that “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.”

They know Israel would never launch a nuclear strike first. Iran’s top dogs have clearly done the math.

The men and women of the Israeli military, with their families in mind, have come up with a peaceful way to mess with this program of mass destruction threatening their community. And libertarians protest this? Don’t you just love the way so many libertarians inveigh against the evil of nuclear weapons, except when they are pointed at Israel?!

UPDATE II (Sept. 29): With respect to “contemplationist’s” comment here, I thought it was obvious to all libertarians who regularly weigh in on BAB, that the debate about the proper purview of the state is limited to its enforcement of natural rights only. That’s the mandate of the state in classical liberal thinking. As I have said often, to the extent that the American Constitution respects the natural law, to that extent only is it legitimate. It should be obvious to the same folks, for example, that, unlike Glenn Beck or other “Constitutionalists,” this writer views a great deal of the constitution as an affront to man’s natural rights. The 16th Amendment, for example.

“Sometimes the law of the state coincides with the natural law. More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute,” I wrote in a March 20, 2002 column.

“Contemplationist” has broadened the nightwatchman role of the state in classical liberal theory—confined as it is to the protection negative rights only—to include a plethora of positive duties, including intervention into the economy.

That’s statism, not classical liberalism. The debate in this post, in particular, is as to whether the Israelis, in disabling Iran’s nuclear-related cyber-operation, are defending their natural, negative rights.

“A War He Can Call His Own” Revisited By Woodward

Barack Obama, Military, Neoconservatism, Politics, Republicans, Terrorism, War

Distilled, the Big Idea behind Bob Woodward’s new book, “Obama’s Wars,” was outlined over these pixelated pages on July 18, 2008, in “A War He Can Call His Own”:

Obama needs a “good” war. Electability in fin de siècle America hinges on projecting strength around the world—an American leader has to aspire to protect borders and people not his own. In other words, Obama needs a war he can call his own. In Afghanistan, Obama has found such a war.
By promising to broaden the scope of operations in Afghanistan, Obama has found a “good” war to make him look the part. By staking out Afghanistan as his preferred theater of war—and pledging an uptick in operations against the Taliban—Obama achieves two things: He can cleave to the Iraq policy that excited his base. While winding down one war, he can ratchet up another, thereby demonstrating his commander-in-chief credentials.

Okay, so Woodward has framed as dovish “the president’s decision to order a surge of 30,000 additional troops late last year — 10,000 fewer than what top military leaders had been strongly pushing — with a withdrawal date of July 2011.”

The bottom line is that the president pushed for enough of a commitment, in blood and treasure in Afghanistan, to make him the presidential pick of a blood-lusting public.

That commitment was slightly less than the one the military had in mind—“to keep the troop commitment more open-ended.”

Talk about triangulation—BHO was able to shed just enough blood to give the left a foot in the door, while pacifying the murderous neoconservatives (Repbulicans in all permutations).

Calibration: that was the genius of the cunning Obama.

"A War He Can Call His Own" Revisited By Woodward

Barack Obama, Military, Neoconservatism, Politics, Republicans, Terrorism, War

Distilled, the Big Idea behind Bob Woodward’s new book, “Obama’s Wars,” was outlined over these pixelated pages on July 18, 2008, in “A War He Can Call His Own”:

Obama needs a “good” war. Electability in fin de siècle America hinges on projecting strength around the world—an American leader has to aspire to protect borders and people not his own. In other words, Obama needs a war he can call his own. In Afghanistan, Obama has found such a war.
By promising to broaden the scope of operations in Afghanistan, Obama has found a “good” war to make him look the part. By staking out Afghanistan as his preferred theater of war—and pledging an uptick in operations against the Taliban—Obama achieves two things: He can cleave to the Iraq policy that excited his base. While winding down one war, he can ratchet up another, thereby demonstrating his commander-in-chief credentials.

Okay, so Woodward has framed as dovish “the president’s decision to order a surge of 30,000 additional troops late last year — 10,000 fewer than what top military leaders had been strongly pushing — with a withdrawal date of July 2011.”

The bottom line is that the president pushed for enough of a commitment, in blood and treasure in Afghanistan, to make him the presidential pick of a blood-lusting public.

That commitment was slightly less than the one the military had in mind—“to keep the troop commitment more open-ended.”

Talk about triangulation—BHO was able to shed just enough blood to give the left a foot in the door, while pacifying the murderous neoconservatives (Repbulicans in all permutations).

Calibration: that was the genius of the cunning Obama.