Another call (this time from Japan, by way of Auburn, Alabama) for killing Amerian soldiers: Beneath pictures of two burned out U.S. tanks is this caption:
A toast to the defeat of the evil empire – A prayer for the poor fallen souls.
Tanks contain soldiers, who very well may have been killed when the Iraqi “insurgents” (read terrorists who oppose establishment of any sort of constitutional government in Iraq) attacked them. The writer may pray for their poor fallen souls, but he celebrates their deaths. Words fail me.
Update: My description has been corrected by an antiwar.com writer: “The tank on the left is a German Tiger.”
Technically, it’s a call from Japan. Mike Rogers lives in Japan. Mises Institute may be in Alabama, but give credit where credit is due. It’s a call to kill American Soldiers from Japan.
….A toast to the defeat of the evil empire…
The tank on the left is a German Tiger.
Are you going to mourn the fallen German soldiers?
“Are you going to mourn the fallen German soldiers?” In short, yes. It seems to me that you should mourn any loss of life. Death–specifically killing–is a harsh and grim necessity of fallen human nature, not a reason for joy. Should there be joy that the Germans were defeated (in this photo and elsehwhere)? Yes. Should there be joy that so many human beings succombed to the hate of the Nazis and were led by nationalism and racial arrogance to destroy so many innocent lives? I think the situation with Germany, while joyous because of an allied victory, was a somber reminder of the depths to which human beings can occassionally sink.
Should Lew Rockwell post a picture comparing U.S. troops to German troops in WWII? What a vile and nihilistic thing. One group was fighting for hatred; another is fighting (whether you like the justification or not) for peace. One group was fighting for tyranny; another is seeking to liberate a group that has suffered under despotism for most of history. To equate the men and women giving their lives in Iraq with Nazis or to equate the U.S. operation in Iraq with Nazi operations (or communist operations) in the last century is to abandon any distinction between just and unjust uses of force and the gradations thereof. There are a number of resons to oppose this war. There are a number of reasons to think it was handled poorly. There is no reason to believe that U.S. and international soldiers in Iraq (the majority of them at least–not the few perpetrators of inhumanities in that country) have anything but the best interest of Iraqies in mind. There is a huge difference between fighting for those you see as your brothers and fighting to conquer and cleanse the world.
“Do no harm” is a convenient model for those living under the protections of those who stand in harm’s way every day. Yes we should pray for the lost souls. No we should not defame their memory by equating them and their cause with the barrel scrapings of human barbarity.
Pardon the foolish spelling errors or any unecessary harshness of tone. My comment was written in haste.
Do you people pay attention at all?
1.) Mike Rogers posted the pictures, not Lew Rockwell. And if you haven’t noticed, Lew pretty much lets the writers on the site speak their minds, whether or not he agrees. It’s on LRC, yes, but Lew did not post the picture. Criticize Mike Rogers. When Lew Rockwell posts something you don’t like, criticize Lew Rockwell. LRC is a big site with diverse writers. When you want to criticize someone, then criticize them instead of making Lew your eternal target.
2. Tom, you can drop your snide comment towards Auburn. I’m glad to see you rectified your post so that you realize where Mike lives, but attack him, not LewRockwell.Com since your post here is about a particular post. If you want to make a general post attacking LRC, then do so. However, you made this post to attack a specific post and a specific writer. Keep your attacks focused, otherwise the work is just sloppy (and it shows). Whenever I have a gripe with a particular Catoite, I don’t attack all of Cato, I attack the writer. This is just poor form, even for you.
You are right. I apologize for misdirecting my comments when they should apply to the author. However, I think some culpability for those sentiments does rest with the operator of the site if they are more than unregulated comments. If this is something over which Lew has no control and with which he disagrees then I, of course, only direct my own commentary to the author.
Tex makes an important point, because it makes the posting from Mr. Rogers all the more disgusting, since he equates defeating the United States with defeating the Third Reich. (Sorry for my lack of instant tank identification; when I ran my cursor over the photos, both said “tigerabrams” and I simply focused on “abrams.” Silly me not to have known that Rogers was making an even more despicable point, which is a direct equation of the Nazis overrunning Europe with the foolish and stupid and unwarranted American invasion of Iraq to overturn a genocidal dictator.)
James acknowledges that Mr. Rogers was calling for the killing of American soldiers. To his credit he didn’t try to gloss it by the usual technique of the crowd “based” (no, they don’t all live there, and not all the people who live there agree with them) in Auburn, Alabama, which is that “he didn’t explicitly say that you should go out and kill American soldiers, so he couldn’t have meant that.” If a character such as Mr. Rogers were to publish crackpot views on the op-ed pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, one wouldn’t assume that the essay represents the views of the owners or editors of those publications, which publish a wide variety of contrary views (in favor of the war, against the war; in favor of Social Security choice, against Social Security choice; in favor of drug legalization, against drug legalization; etc.). But “LewRockwell.com” does not have the wide array of views of those publications; it represents the bizarre set of Southern revisionist, anti-American, zany, crackpot ideas with which Lew Rockwell has tried to poison discourse about matters ethical, political, and economic in the U.S. To set the context more clearly, it’s worth pointing out that the posting mocking the death by friendly fire of Pat Tillman did carry Lew Rockwell’s name, not that of some obscure anti-American writer based in Japan (http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/006778.html ).
So let me then take up James’s challenge. I do think that people who associate with Lew Rockwell and his coterie should be aware of all the really — really — weird and objectionable baggage that they’re they’re taking on board, from calls for killing Americans to praise of southern racist institutions (the slave-based Confederate States of America) and on and on and on. I believe that there are too many people who don’t know what’s in the Koolaid being served at Lew Rockwell’s little roadside stand.
Tom,
I’m surprised at your patronising tone at the end…”little roadside stand.” LRC.com gets quite a bit of traffic. After all, if it were just a “little roadside stand” why would you be getting worked up about it? In fact, this undermines your case.
Evidently the mental image didn’t work for LB. Sorry. I wasn’t stressing the “littleness,” but the selling of koolaid. So if it works better as “roadside stand,” that’s fine with me. Think of it as a speakeasy selling bathtub gin, if you prefer. My point was that they’re mixing poison in with their product, and I think that if more people were aware of the sick(ening) people lurking at Lew Rockwell (or, to use another metaphor, the moths flying around the Lew Rockwell flame), they’d be less likely to be sucked into their cult.
Furthermore, let me add that people who truly advocate peace and withdrawal of American and coalition forces don’t advocate killing more American and coalition troops and don’t denounce Iraqi police and troops as “quislings” and “traitors.” The terrorist are clearly not interested in peace; what they want is maximum chaos, mass murder, an endless war against the United States, and the chance to establish one or another form of horrifying tyranny. And the writers at antiwar.com and at lewrockwell.com who call for killing Americans or who denounce those who are working for security and for elections show that they are complete phonies. They aren’t advocates for peace. They want the other side to win.
Finally, there is no way that the scenario of dead Americans to which Mr. Rogers is looking forward would lead to an earlier peace. If that’s what he thinks, he’s not very bright. The best road to peace is for the elections to establish a government with legitimacy that can defeat the insurgents militarily and make peace among rival armed factions. Those are the conditions under which the U.S. is most likely to withdraw. If you want peace, you should support that process, not call — as Mr. Rogers has — for killing Americans. If he wants my nephew and my numerous friends in Iraq to be killed, he’s free to say that. But he can’t at the same time credibly claim to be either a decent human being or a friend of peace and liberty.
Ah. I was thinking of a little roadside stand in SE Asia selling cigarettes and dodgy drinks and not kool-aid in South America.
I find it pretty alarming that Mr. Palmer is outraged at the idea of American soldiers being killed, while at the same time blithely calling for Iraqi soldiers to be killed. Does it make it okay because you call them “insurgents”? What if American soldiers are termed “conquerors”? Or are American lives just worth more than Iraqi ones?
Perhaps we have a different understanding of what an “Iraqi soldier” is. People who drop mortar rounds on religious pilgrims or who explode car bombs in pedestrian areas to create massive loss of civilian life are not “Iraqi soldiers,” they are criminals who are attempting to spread terror, hence “terrorists.” They must be captured or killed.
Are American lives worth more than Iraqi lives? No, each life counts for one and only for one. And given that, Iraqi lives should be defended from insurgents who have shown no restraint whatsoever when it comes to loss of civilian life, who saw off the heads of truck drivers and election workers, and who blow up school children at school openings.
It seems that Mr. Kerner doesn’t read the news or pay much attention to it. The insurgents/terrorists are truly evil. They are not, pace Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo, heroic defenders of Iraqi independence. They are malicious killers who torture, murder, and assassinate their way to chaos, disorder, and the opportunity to institute a regime of perpetual terror.
I repeat one simple point. If someone wants the Americans and other foreign troops to leave, he or she should hope for the Iraqi government to create a stable framework for constitutionalism and the rule of law. The very last thing that such a person should want would be more attacks on Iraqi or coalition troops.
The writers I’ve criticized at antiwar.com and lewrockwell.com don’t want peace. They want the U.S. to be hurt. Those aren’t the same thing.
Contrary to Mr. Rogers, U.S. soldiers fighting to overthrow the Third Reich were not the same as German soldiers fighting to extend it. There are relevant moral differences in the world. People who don’t see that reveal their own blindness and nothing else.
Dr. Palmer–what’s your answer for the fact that, for large numbers of people these Doughface Libertarians are what comes to mind when they hear the word “libertarian”? How do we counteract their influence within libertarianism?
Timothy,
One thing we can do is to alert well meaning people that Lew Rockwell and his little empire have a very, very ugly side. Another is to do a better job of saving libertarianism from such strange and creepy claimants. Spooky fringe elements are always attracted to intellectual or political movements, and God knows we have ours. The rest of us need to redouble our efforts to undo the damage done by the fringe, i.e., the crackpots who care more about building their little cadres and getting thrills by shocking people with their bizarre views than about creating a freer and more just world. They increase our burden — to free the legacy of a great and seminal thinker such as Ludwig von Mises (who was brave and insightful, but not a suitable figure for a cult) from association with knuckle-dragging Confederate Revivalists, to disassociate the idea of being for peace from the desire for our enemy’s victory, to disassociate belief in limited government from the belief that any other government is always and everywhere to be preferred to our government. Lew Rockwell and his supporters make it harder to advance liberty, but it is our responsibility to shoulder that burden. We have no other option.
I share Mr. Palmer’s intolerance of people who would attack civilians and bystanders, of course, and I doubt that anyone at LRC or antiwar.com would differ. Moreover, I am a little nonplussed at having to point this out. And yet, whatever one thinks of their actions, the people who attacked that American tank did not “drop mortar rounds on religious pilgrims or who explode car bombs in pedestrian areas to create massive loss of civilian life”; they attacked a military target. Why the context shift?
“The insurgents/terrorists are truly evil.” This is what everyone says about their enemies. Terrorists are perforce evil (or, at least, they engage in evil actions). So are people who torture prisoners at military prisons. Does the statement “The American troops/torturers are truly evil” follow logically?
And what makes someone think that the Iraqi public wants Americans there to defend them? Most likely almost everyone saw this from today’s news:
“There was little apparent sympathy for the dead Americans on Mosul’s deserted streets, where hundreds of U.S. troops, backed up by armored vehicles and helicopters, blocked bridges and cordoned off Sunni Muslim areas of Iraq’s third-largest city.
“‘I wish that 2,000 U.S. soldiers were killed,’ declared Jamal Mahmoud, a trade union official.”
Good thing we’re there to defend this guy.
It’s true, as Mr. Palmer repeats, that the simplest way to have peace is always to cooperate with whatever force is in power at any given moment. And, yet suppose that one wishes for peace, yes, but also that the U.S. government should not be able to successfully go into another country and set up a government of its choosing. That’s what I want — and I don’t wish for anyone to be killed — so, what should I hope for?
It seems to me that Mr. Kerner should hope for the success of the Iraqi elections and for the Iraqi police and military to be able to capture or kill the insurgents. The exit of the U.S. is made more likely with each step toward security and a stable constitutional order. Then he should hope that American politicians learn a lesson from this. But he should not hope, as Mr. Rogers and Mr. Raimondo do, that more Americans be killed or that more Iraqi “traitors” be killed.
Furthermore, I would recommend anyone with a lick of sense to do their best to stay away from the vortex of bitter anti-Americanism that Lew Rockwell has created.
It is intellectually weak of Palmer to associate a wish for the defeat of an evil empire that preemptively invades a defenseless country and makes us less free and safe in the process with a call for loss of American life. I never read that into Rogers’ post because he never argued it. The defeat can come simply by pulling up the tents and by sending the troops home.
Palmer in particular and Cato in general can revere Mises and Rothbard all they want, but they have to come to terms with what Mises and Rothbard wrote about the relationship between war and the growth of the centralized state. Until then, they will be judged as the DC shills that they are.
The American government and American soldiers are in the wrong, that’s all. Many of them are trying not to believe that, but also many do know it and just take the line as German soldiers did that they are just following orders. In other words to avoid court marshall or official harrassment, they are willing to use violence against innocent people.
Very little of the force used is against actual wrongdoers – the only Biblically permitted use of government force. It is used as a threat to enforce roadside checkpoints (stop or be shot) or against ‘suspects’ against which there is no proper standard of evidence. And all of it is in the context of barging into someone else’s country.
If you really care about American soldiers, you won’t want to use them like pawns in a game of global domination.
I am a Lew Rockwell reader and generally a supporter, who is also quite willing to criticize LRC writers when due. The charge of LRC supporting the confederacy for racist reasons is false and there was no worse or more open a racist than Lincoln. It is the issue of decentralization, secession and states rights that I and LRC support and, to some degree, that the confederacy stood for.
Ha Tom!
I love how in your post you deny the existence of any natural born Iraqi guerilla fighters. They couldn’t possibly exist, since all Iraqi’s must implicitly understand that we are there for their freedom! “Never mind your dead family members,” we say, “felled by a daisy cutter meant to strike accross the street but sadly wasn’t quite accurate. Try not to think of them as people you loved with all your heart and soul! Instead, remember them only as one of many mathematical costs on the great road to freedom!”
Great, realistic framework, Tom! Absolutely fantastic. Takes class and style to ignore the obvious, and you’ve got it in spades.
I think the comparison of US soldiers in Iraq to the average German soldier in WWII is spot on. Both armies were filled with average decent men who were brainwashed and then betrayed by their leaders. Palmer is the one passing out the kool-aid and he sounds desperate to keep the congregation with their eyes closed and heads down. Don’t question the government or the president. This must be the newest set of talking points handed out by the neo-cons spin-masters who had to have this war. Since the embarrassing and devastating blast in Mosul, all I hear (including the neo-con stooge Neal Boortz who claims to be a libertarian) is that now its the anti-war crowd in the US who is to blame for these deaths. If they didn’t question the war or the President we wouldn’t be having these problems!! They’re encouraging the “insurgents”. What?? This is sad and sick to hear these people try to shut down the opposing voices like this. These Iraqis are fighting in their own country, facing down Abrams tanks with AK-47s. Its a video game to us, to them its their country, their blood and their souls they are fighting for. You can’t force democracy at gunpoint. You can only occupy a country and then use it as a staging ground to launch the next leg of this war for the world’s natural resources. I reserve most of my sympathy for the poor US soldiers dying and being maimed who believed the bunk sold to them about what this war was about. They are going to be pretty freaking angry when its all said and done. If any of them are left.
Tom,
You’re a moron. All the folks at LewRockwell wish the vast, US empire to spiral back to its republican roots. This global hegemony for the god “democracy” is killing us all, and causing this country and it’s allies to be targeted by millions across thep planet.
BTW Tom, it is you Lincoln loving fascists who are the knuckle-draggers. I fight for the Constitution, not big government phonies trying to take over the world one sand dune at a time!
Thanks for the interesting comments.
“lbb” did not read a picture of a burned out tanks of the USA’s army next to a burned out tank of the Third Reich’s army with “A toast to the defeat of the evil empire – A prayer for the poor fallen souls” written under it as “a call for loss of American life.” I see. How would a reasonable person read that? He has offered a toast to the destruction of an American tank, which (maybe he didn’t know?) is manned by soldiers who actually sit inside the tank and who die when it is blown up and bursts into flames. Mr. Rogers’ next posting endorses the expressed wish of one Iraqi that “I wish that 2,000 U.S. soldiers were killed, not 20.” “lbb” thinks that I am “intellectually weak” for reading Mr. Rogers’ posts as calling for killing American soldiers.
Aaron states that I “deny the existence of any natural born Iraqi guerilla fighters.” I don’t recall having denied that, since it’s pretty clearly not true.
What if the U.S. had, say, intervened in World War II against the Third Reich. (We’re speaking hypothetically, of course.) And let’s say that just before defeating that evil (oops! there I go making moral judgments of a sovereign country) empire there had been an exodus of high NSDAP officials with several billion dollars into neighboring countries. And let’s say that they were financing suicide bombers and organizing a campaign of active resistance against the American and British occupying forces. Would some of the people who have posted above have applauded (as some of them do in the case of Iraq) attacks on the new de-Nazified German police forces and army (those quislings and traitors, to use Justin Raimondo’s term for the Iraqi police and army) and on American and British forces?
I’m going to have to find out how “marky mark” got a copy of the neo-con talking points memo from which I have shamelessly copied all of my remarks (and, of course, my substantive moral views and ideas). Someone is going to have to pay for the leak. I’ll be sure to mention it tonight with Dick and Condi at the neo-con cell meeting.
The views of those who call for killing Americans or who equate the U.S. armed forces with the armies of the Third Reich simply undermine the movement against military adventurism. They give ammunition to the war party. They drive away reasonable people who would embrace the cause of peace but who recoil from such calls and from such comparisons. (Obviously, any comparison between two otherwise dissimilar entities or cases will find some similarities — they carry weapons, they wear uniforms, etc., but there is no doubt in my mind that in the most important senses, such as respect for non-combatants, efforts to diminish loss of innocent life, respect for the rule of law, and so on, they are not at all similar. Some of the posters above will immediately shriek “Abu Ghraib!” and “Fallujah!,” but in fact all of those cases show that — given the foolish decision to topple Saddam’s regime by force — the U.S. military is completely unlike the jihadists, the Ba’athists, and the Nazis, who made torture a deliberate policy [rather than punishing it, as has happened in the Abu Ghraib case], who deliberately massacred civilian populations [unlike the U.S. Marines, who take casualties precisely in order to avoid harm to noncombatants], who attack electricity stations, hospitals, and water systems in order to harm the civilian population as much as possible, and who behead hostage truck drivers, humanitarian workers, and construction workers on television. To claim that the two sides are the same shows a complete lack of moral sensibility of any sort.)
“Lincoln loving fascists”? I’ve not said a word about Abraham Lincoln, who left quite a mixed legacy to the United States, including expansion of federal powers (mostly bad, but some good). One element of that was the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
I admit that I am a big fan of the 13th amendment. Some find it pretty weird for a libertarian to favor liberty. I don’t.
>>To claim that the two sides are the same shows a complete lack of moral sensibility of any sort.
One of the problems I’ve noticed in this discussion is the assumption that there are two sides to this conflict. Neither “the resistance” nor “the US military” are monolithic entities. Each is composed of a large number of people formed into different sub-groups.
Some of the insurgents are certainly crazed zealots. Others are nationalists of various levels of decency. Still others may have been driven mad with grief at the loss of loved ones. Some may be agents from Syria or Iran. Many may be working at cross-purposes to each other.
Similarly, each US soldier in Iraq has a different take on the whole situation. Some may actually be true Liberator Paladins, doing whatever is within their power to advance freedom wherever they are. Many more are probably just trying to keep themselves and their buddies alive. Many are in a “just following orders” mentality. And a few have been overcome by racism and sadism.
(For the record, the same is true of the “neo-conservatives.” I find the viewpoints of Wolfowitz and Perle to be quite different in important ways.)
A fan of the 13th Amendment, the one that specifically permits slavery, where none was specifically permitted before? It ain’t even tricky like the 2nd amendment, it clearly permits slavery. Check that word “except,” anyone can drive a trainload of slaves thru it. Let’s see… convicted of disagreeing with the neocons…off to the slave labor camps!
“T. J. Madison” offers a set of nuanced distinctions, but it’s not clear to me how useful they are to deciding whether we should favor or oppose killing American soldiers. (I’m opposed.) There are suicide bombers who blow themselves up in order to get money from Ba’athist paymasters who absconded with billions of dollars; others do so in hopes of an eternity in paradise. Some jihadis kill school children and drop mortar rounds on religious pilgrims in order to create mayhem and chaos and to spark a civil war so that the entire region erupts in flames and a new Caliphate may be born; others simply seek to restore the privileges of the elites from the Sunni triangle who used to rule with an iron fist over the rest of the country. Similarly, some American soldiers are governed by respect for law and morality (such as the young man who did the right thing and turned over to his superior officers a CD of digital photos of abusive acts that he had found by accident); others flout law and morality and give in to their baser impulses (such as those who humiliated and tormented prisoners). All of that is true, but it’s not clear what it tells us, other than that we should be careful about lumping large groups of people together under simple categories. Fair enough.
On the other hand, John Spiers has shown the kind of regard for historical nuance that is worthy of the finest lawyers and historians. His interpretation of the 13th amendment as permitting slavery is, as the British say, “interesting.” Those who framed it and have interpreted it since focused on the issue of whether involuntary servitude, e.g., being forced to break rocks in a prison, make license plates, or work in a prison laundry would have been banned by a ban on slavery. They did not want to ban that kind of involuntary servitude, which they thought could be authorized only “as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” In any case, I’m sure that Mr. Spiers has a great future ahead of him as a lawyer.
The abolition of slavery was good, of course, though I don’t see why Lincoln gets credit for it.
Unfortunately, the 13th Amendment had no success at all in stopping the nationalized involuntary servitude during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, or the Vietnam War. Millions were enslaved to fight in those wars, and hundreds of thousands were killed.
Mr. Palmer-
You seem to equate an *understanding* of resistance to occupation with a support for the consequences of this resistence. I.e. some Iraqis don’t want Christians bringing them democracy at the point of the gun (understandable). Some Americans don’t want to finance such adventures to bring said democracy. (also understandable). The former group of dissatisfied Iraqis raise arms against the liberators/occupiers. The aforementioned group of Americans essentially respond to the actions of these Iraqis by saying “told you so” and “that’s blowback.”
Here you chime in “You anti-American pigs. You are celebrating the deaths of American troops.”
As a scholar, you should see how fallacious such a conclusion is.
Take a look at this (http://www.lewrockwell.com/callahan/callahan60.html) from the evil LRC.
As everyone makes catty remarks, the State continues to grow.
Oh well, ne’ermind that.
John has also failed to read the toast by Mr. Rogers that accompanied the burned out tank. He also seems to assume that I favored going to war, which I did not. The inference he draws would be a fallacy, but it is not an inference I have made. I showed that some people (Mr. Rogers notably) had called for killing Americans. I did not infer such a stance from some other statement by someone else.
Mr. Gregory mentions the shortcomings of American history. Yes, the 13th amendment failed to prevent all those things. I think that a reasonable interpretation of it would have prevented them. It did, however, make chattel slavery illegal. That counts as a good thing, as I know Mr. Gregory agrees. If the 1st amendment has been used to protect our freedoms most of the time, but it failed to protect some freedoms some of the time, it does not follow that it was simply a failure. It is still better to have had it than not to have had it. Regarding Mr. Lincoln’s role, I wrote that he “left quite a mixed legacy to the United States, including expansion of federal powers (mostly bad, but some good). One element of that was the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” I did not say that he was the author of the 13th amendment, merely that it is a part of the legacy he left, much as the Ptolemaic dynasty is a part of Alexander the Great’s legacy. That seems fairly unobjectionable. In any case, I don’t understand why the lewrockwellites keep bringing up Abraham Lincoln on virtually any occasion. That truly is an obsession, and a remarkably unhealthy one, at that.
As a lewrockwell.com columnist and supporter, I would be the first to admit there are some posts and articles that I strongly disagree with and I believe to be in bad taste. That doesn’t mean I have to use the ADL tactic of saying, well so and so from LRC.com said this therefore anyone who ever wrote for the site must be ignorant or evil.
I’m sure that no one at LRC.com supports the killing of civillians by Iraqi insurgents. That cannot be said of the neocons who have no problem of Americans killing Iraqi civillians.
I hope no one at LRC.com supports American troops getting killed, I certainly don’t.
But even if they do, anyone who thinks that Iraqis who are shooting occupying US troops are terrorists is an idiot. I have a few friends who signed up for ROTC or the National Guard under the pretense of getting money for college and working two days a month who are now in Iraq, and the last thing I would want would be for them or any other American soldiers to get hurt. That’s why I want them home now. In fact being one of those evil xenophobes, even though I don’t believe our cause in Iraq is particularly just, I’d much rather see Iraqi insurgents get killed than American soliders.
That being said, I can see why an Iraqi would not be thrilled with American troops occupying his country, and don’t think that all of those shooting at our troops are evil.
Also, it may take some more attacks before America gets some humility and refrains from its useless wars. I certainly hope that doesn’t happen, but we’ll see.
Mr. Epstein’s remarks are reasonable and show an appreciation of the importance of the issues involved. Mr. Epstein is surely right that enthusiastic and gung ho supporters of the war were quite willing to risk death and destruction for others. (Some argued that the liberated would be better off and that fewer would die than under a continued Saddam dictatorship; that would be harder to argue now, since the Saddam fanatics and the jihadists are murdering quite a few Iraqis every day and others are dying as “collateral damage” in the fighting.) I’m pleased that Mr. Epstein does not support killing American troops; but I suspect that he is aware that not all of his fellows (notably Mr. Rogers, who toasts such killing under a photo of a burned out U.S. tank) agree with him.
As to whether shooting at American troops is evil, I believe it to be so. The majority of Iraqis are well aware of what is happening, as the insurgents are trying desperately to start up a civil war by inflicting carnage on civilians. And yet — so far — the victims (or their families and friends) have not been provoked. That has shown remarkable restraint, much of it due to the moral authority of the Ayatollah al-Sistani. The people who are working to disrupt the elections, massacre police recruits, and kill Iraqi and U.S. soldiers are in the service of evil.
As to how much humility has been gained, that’s obviously not something that could be decided a priori. My sense is that there is little appetite for more conquests. I do think that a lesson has been learned. That is certainly my hope, too.
Tom Palmer wrote:
“In any case, I don’t understand why the lewrockwellites keep bringing up Abraham Lincoln on virtually any occasion. That truly is an obsession, and a remarkably unhealthy one, at that.”
Palmer’s (former?) friend Anthony obviously introduced Lincoln into the discussion for the same reason Mr. Palmer introduces racism whenever lewrockwell.com comes up.
Palmer obsesses about rascism and Rockwell because he thinks it will help him win the argument. Similarly the LRC crowd bring up Lincoln because they percieve it to be a weak point with Palmer et al, thus giving them an edge in the argument.
Well, with Andrew B’s remarks we’ve reached the point of negative returns. (He’s not a very careful reader, I’m afraid, but then, when the comments become so numerous, it’s hard to remember that the hated Abraham Lincoln was brought up by Paul G. and Little Sorrell, the latter having termed me a “Lincoln loving fascist.” Well, whatever.)
I just hope that people who sup with Lew Rockwell will remember to be veerryyy careful about what they imbibe. And stay away from the kool aid.