Tag: war

Hearts and minds of hate

Nicholas Kristof underlines the intrinsic absurdity of the current line of neocon justification for the Afghan Occupation:

[I]t seems to me a historic mistake to justify our huge military presence in Afghanistan as a bulwark to protect the women. In fact, most women I interviewed favored making a deal with the Taliban — simply because it would bring peace. For them, the Taliban regime was awful, but a perpetual war may be worse. Take Pari Gol, a woman from Helmand Province whom I met here in Kabul. She despises the Taliban and told me on this trip that back in 2001, “I prayed that the Taliban would be defeated, and God listened to my prayers.”

Yet in the fighting since then, she said, her home was destroyed and her husband and daughter were both killed by American airstrikes. She is now living in a mud hut here — fuming at the Taliban, the Americans and the Afghan government. “I hate all of them,” she told me.

It is a huge mistake. The occupation of Afghanistan cannot be justified under any reasonable measure anymore. It should be obvious that the neocons are not going to win many of the required hearts and minds when their “liberation” of Afghan women comes via the deaths of their husbands and children. No doubt there are a few pro-abortion, anti-marriage feminists who would see this as a perfectly viable strategy, but should come as no surprise to sane observers that the violent military occupation of a country very seldom causes the occupiers to be loved.

Given that the latest Wikileaks documents prove that America’s occupation of Iraq has killed nearly three times more innocent and uninvolved civilians than all enemy “insurgents”, “terrorists”, or “violent extremists” combined, it is eminently clear that the Bush-Rumsfeld strategery has completely failed. And the Obama administration has been making a classic strategic mistake in stubbornly reinforcing failure; we are fortunate that it has not been successful in expanding the war to include Iran and Pakistan as well.

“The Iraq War Logs released by WikiLeaks on 23 October 2010, contain 54,910 records compiled by the United States military whose numerical fields register 109,032 violent deaths between January 2004 and December 2009. These casualty records contain four categories of casualties, ‘Civilian’ (66,081 deaths), ‘Host Nation’ (15,196 deaths), ‘Enemy’ (23,984 deaths), and ‘Friendly’ (3,771 deaths).”

Perceptive observers will note the way in which the views of the Afghan women are consistent with the theory of Game. The relative security of the Taliban are preferred to the risks of war and the nominal “freedom” it promises. The fact that they are almost certainly right in this case does not alter the fact that the inherent female preference exists.

Et tu, Jonah

Mr. Golberg takes an astonishing position on the Obama administration’s assertion of a right to assassinate American citizens without trial:

Some civil libertarians seem to think we can never, ever kill an American citizen without a trial by jury (and perhaps not even then). That argument would have been silly during the days of conventional warfare. Now it’s plain crazy. And the Obama administration is right. This is no job for courts. Wars and how we fight them are political decisions, properly left to Congress and the president.

Jonah should know better. He is, after all, the one who built the case against the pragmatic, “it’s just this one brick” approach of progressive totalitarianism in his very good Liberal Fascism. He further compounds his error when, after being correctly called on his erroneous reasoning by a reader, he attempts to justify his position by bringing up the example of World War II.

“Surely, “the battlefield” is a very amorphous term these days. An American fighting in Nazi uniform in 1943 could be killed and even singled out for killing without a trial by jury, or at least I think that’s the case. Awlaki — like all of al Qaeda — refuses to play by the rules even the Nazis agreed to. I’m at a loss as to why they should be rewarded for it.”

Of course, the only reason that an American fighting in Nazi uniform – more likely Wehrmacht, but never mind that – could be killed on the battlefield was because no one knew he was an American. The Constitution clearly and explicitly deals with the question of treason in time of war, which makes since because it was written by men who had recently fought in the Revolutionary War, so it is ludicrous to appeal to some pragmatic sense of sobriety and sanity and claim that it supersedes the Constitution.

Article III
[Section 3.] Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Jonah isn’t one of National Review’s Trotskyites, so it is a little disappointing to see him toeing the anti-constitutional neocon line on this issue.

NRO endorses assassinating Americans

I am not a conservative. I am a Christian libertarian technodemocrat. But if this is what is actually supposed to pass for conservative opinion leadership at a leading conservative publication, it’s no wonder that the Tea Partiers are abandoning both the Republican Party and the conservative media:

The Obama administration is not, by authorizing Awlaki’s assassination, green-lighting his killing under all conceivable circumstances. The administration, I suspect, is just making sure that if he’s found congregating in a sanctuary with other terrorists, we can bomb the sanctuary — we don’t have to forfeit a worthy military operation just because one of the terrorists happens to be an American citizen. But if he’s found under other circumstances, where there is no demonstrable military value in killing him, he will be captured, held, interrogated (one hopes), and tried — either by a civilian or (I would hope) a military court.

This seems like common sense to me. The unfortunate thing is that the assassination authorization should never have been made public. Clearly, the administration leaked it to underscore the president’s willingness to fight al-Qaeda aggressively. All the leak has done, though, is cause unnecessary legal headaches. If the administration had handled this top-secret authorization appropriately, chances are: Awlaki would, at some point, have been either killed or captured; the attendant circumstances would have made it obvious why the option chosen (kill or capture) was chosen; and no one would ever have thought to ask whether Obama had authorized his assassination.

In other words, McCarthy is just fine with passing laws that authorize the government murder of its own citizens because it happens to be politically unviable at the moment. This is deeply, profoundly, and abysmally stupid. It is insane. And there is literally nothing conservative, in the American political sense of the word, about it.

If I were the editor of NRO, I would fire McCarthy on the spot for this defense of legalizing government murder.

His argument is risibly incompetent and not only depends entirely upon the transient nature of temporal politics but also upon what he imagines Obama’s reasoning behind the assassination authorization to be. McCarthy writes: “We are a political society, not a legal one. The executive branch typically has vast legal authority, but its exercise of that authority is hemmed in — thank goodness — by politics.”

Ergo, under his reasoning, once it becomes politically popular to murder certain American citizens en masse, it will be legal to do so. This isn’t merely madness, it is the familiar route to the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber. To make this argument while simultaneously claiming to wear the mantle of Edmund Burke, among others, is a grotesque offense to reason, history, and conservatism itself.

If Awlaki is genuinely a traitor, the correct Constitutional thing to do is to arrest him, put him on trial for treason, and then execute him. The fact that the Obama administration is openly attempting to omit the first two steps with the support of the conservative and mainstream media alike is an indication of how completely lawless both the United States government and its lapdog media have become.

UPDATE: McCarthy isn’t the only NROcon to cheer on Obama’s American citizen assassination policy. David French writes: “We need to stop incentivizing enemy violations of the laws of war, and one way to do that is to find them and capture or kill them no matter their location, no matter their clothing, and no matter their nationality.”

He also attempts to claim that it’s not “assassination” so long as the person assassinated is an enemy. Which, no doubt, would be news to Abraham Lincoln, among others. And William F. Buckley wept.

Hearts and minds

At least they’re not burning Korans. Because, you know, that might upset someone a lot more than merely slaughtering innocent civilians:

A dozen U.S. soldiers are facing trial accused of being part of a ‘kill team’ that allegedly killed Afghan civilians in an arbitrary fashion – and they even collected their victims fingers as trophies of war. Five soldiers have been charged with killing three Afghan men ‘for sport’. And seven more are accused of covering up the murders.

I’m a little surprised the federal appeals court that legalized torture the other day hasn’t weighed in to declare that it is illegal for federal employees to be put on trial for murder on national security grounds. By the way, that decision was even worse than you probably thought, as it barred torture victims the chance to prove that they were tortured even if they only presented evidence that was not classified information.

That didn’t take long

“Post-occupation” Iraq gets down to business:

Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting. The attack also made plain the kind of lapses in security that have left Iraqis wary of the U.S. drawdown and distrustful of the ability of Iraqi forces now taking up ultimate responsibility for protecting the country.

Sunday’s hour-long assault was the second in as many weeks on the facility, the headquarters for the Iraqi Army’s 11th Division, pointing to the failure of Iraqi forces to plug even the most obvious holes in their security.

If “heavily-armed militants” are already attacking a divisional Army HQ, I think it is reasonable conclude that there is a long and nasty period of civil war ahead. The problem with “the Surge” was never that American forces didn’t have the ability to impose a temporary reduction in the internecine violence, but that it was merely a short-term measure that would stop working when the necessary forces were withdrawn.

That will fool everyone

The Pentagon manages to pull out all “combat brigades” from Iraq by cleverly renaming them “Advise and Assist brigades”.

Soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division are deployed in Iraq as members of an Advise and Assist Brigade, the Army’s designation for brigades selected to conduct security force assistance. So while the “last full U.S. combat brigade” have left Iraq, just under 50,000 soldiers from specially trained heavy, infantry and Stryker brigades will stay, as well as two combat aviation brigades.

For some reason, the old joke about military intelligence springs to mind. They might as reasonably have renamed them “penguins” for all the good it’s going to do. And regardless of what they are called, the only relevant point is that there are still 50,000 American combat troops in Iraq.

Kaiser on the war drums

An unexpected suggestion of Harvard as coal mine canary:

a few days ago, Harvard University divested themselves entirely out of all their Israeli investments. Why did they do that? In my view they anticipate that the United States will not be behind Israel when it will attack Iran. The United States will do to Israel what they did to South Vietnam, which is to say that they will abandon Israel. Nobody will support them. So the shekel and the Tel Aviv stock exchange are probably gonna be marked down by 80-90%. Harvard University obviously understands this. That’s why they dumped every shekel-based security they have in their portfolio, because that exchange is gonna go belly-up. Hold onto your matzahs, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

I have no idea if Israel actually will attack Iran over its newly operational nuclear reactor, but given the Obama administration’s proclivity to favor Islamic countries, it does appear increasingly likely that the present US government would be inclined to sit out any Israeli-Iranian conflict.

The crimson lining

There are few words sufficient to express the joy that one sees in the faces of the children and women in this video. But underlying that joy, one can also see an occasional glimpse of the stark terror of loss in which they have been living for months, if not years. The young woman who completely dissolves into tears after being surprised by the man in the wool hat is perhaps the most revealing example of this. It should be sobering to recall that there are 5,638 American soldiers, many more than were seen in this video, whose flag-draped return to their loved ones would be too painful to watch in a similar montage. The dream of a free and civilized Afghanistan and a free and peaceful Iraq is not an intrinsically bad thing. But even if it was a reasonably obtainable one, it is not in the American national interest and it is not worth the cost in American lives and American blood. It is not even worth tearing these fine men from their wives, children, and loved ones for a time. Bring them home. Bring them home now.

TIME beats the war drum

The cover picture of a woman with her nose cut off is captioned “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” This would appear to indicate that the Magic Negro isn’t even thinking about ending the occupation next year or his supporters in the media wouldn’t be reduced to banging the drums in an attempt to stir up some belated war fever in such an obvious way.

The ridiculous thing is the way in which TIME missed the obvious point, which is that the brutal punishment meted out to the young women for breaking a marital contract happened under the American military occupation. Saving the noses of Afghan women certainly isn’t a bad thing but there is no circumstance in which one can honestly claim that it is in the American national interest or concerns American national security in any way.

Talking out of both sides

Joe Lieberman on the Wikileaks document dump: “The disclosure of tens of thousands of classified documents on the Afghanistan war is profoundly irresponsible and harmful to our national security. The Obama administration is absolutely right to condemn these leaks. Most of these documents add nothing to the public understanding of the war in Afghanistan. The materials – which cover the period from 2004 to 2009 – reflect the reality, recognized by everyone, that the insurgency was gaining momentum during these years while our coalition was losing ground. That is precisely why President Obama carried out a policy review in late 2009 and subsequently ordered a surge of forces to Afghanistan as part of a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency strategy that is now under way under the command of General Petraeus.”

James Jay Carafano of NRO on the same: “For sure, the “Afghan Diary” will be used to trash the U.S.-led war effort, just as the Pentagon Papers were used to undermine the war in Vietnam. But we must remember that (1) selectively released documents lack context and don’t tell the whole story; and (2) these documents are about the past. Wars are won in the future. The U.S. has a new general and a new strategy and more forces. Past performance is no guarantee of future earnings. While the documents may be less useful for understanding where we go from here in Afghanistan, their release certainly speaks volumes about the timeless challenges faced by democracies trying to wage wars. That should be the real focus of public concern. It looks as if information that was released could well put lives at risk in the future.”

One Democrat + One Republican = One War Party. And note the incoherency of the message that they’re pushing with more unity than JournoList. The leaked documents don’t matter and add nothing to the understanding of the war because they are so ancient and from the past… but at the same time they harm national security and are putting lives at risk in the future! I’d be interested to hear a defense of the logic upon which that argument rests.

It’s interesting to see how the War Party, which is ostensibly fighting wars to bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the world, desperately wants to shut off the flow of relevant information to the free and democratic people who are theoretically supposed to be deciding if they wish to engage in war or not. It’s almost as if the War Party is really more dedicated to the “fighting wars” part of the equation than the “to bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the world” bit.