Problem: War in Iraq is fueling terrorism and Islamic radicalism.

Solution: Stay the course.

Translation: We started this fire and, by God, we are going to keep throwing gasoline on it 'til it goes out.

BBC says "Hometowns mourn slain US troops":

Family and friends of two US soldiers taken captive and killed in Iraq have been paying tribute to them.

"Our son... died for the freedom of everybody in the United States," Thomas Tucker's father Wes told NBC.

No, your son died for NOTHING. He was in Iraq taking my freedoms and Iraqis' freedoms, and he paid for this with his life. Deal with it.

This week, there has been a piece of news that has captured the imaginations of media outlets the world over. Of course, I speak of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

From salivating pundits on the various cable news stations to the gleeful heads of state, the death of this villain has united popular opinion in a way that we don't often see. President Bush, for his part, declared this a decisive victory in the war on terrorism.

Not decisive in the traditional sense of the term, it would seem. No sooner had the news hit the wire when various government officials began to temper the optimism with the fact that al-Zarqawi was just one man, and that in the grand scheme of things his death probably wasn't going to lead to a decline in violence in Iraq.

Brushing aside such a decided down note, we watched as the news outlets eagerly ran story after story about the elaborate planning that lead to this death. Oh, sure, it probably never would have happened without the apparent betrayal of al-Zarqawi by others within al-Qaeda, but even still, it required one of those stunning demonstrations of military might that make such great fodder for the evening news. At least many hundreds of personnel were involved, though if the CNN Headline News story is to be believed, it could well be considerably greater. Missiles ain't cheap, nor are umpteen planes and the unknown quantity of soldiers, I think we're safe in assuming this singular operation cost many millions of dollars, at a bare minimum.

That leaves me wondering, personally, what the point of all this was. Was it worth millions to kill a single man, especially when that death isn't going to bring an end to the war?

My fellow pacifist Michael Berg doesn't think so. Having lost his own son at the hands of al-Zarqawi, he still sees no cause for celebration in this death. This has led, rather predictably to some very public castigations of Mr. Berg for not being sufficiently happy.

But why should he be? Al-Zarqawi's death will not bring back his son. The death does not bring the war any closer to a conclusion, indeed the zeal that has sprung forth after finally managing to kill somebody, anybody, of import in the insurgency is if anything going to hurt the chances of an early withdrawal.

I would propose, instead, that perhaps the rest of you are a little too happy about this whole thing. One murderer is dead, killed by others, and thousands upon thousands yet remain to ply their trades upon their respective segments of the Iraqi populace. Is this truly cause for celebration?

Underscoring this, mourners in al-Zarqawi's hometown are hoping for a thousand more like him, to kill the enemies who kill them. Judging from the joy so many feel in one meaningless death of one high profile enemy, it's hard to imagine them not getting their wish, many times over in the future.

A couple of weeks ago, in a rather insignificant exchange on Anti-State.Com, the world famous Joe relayed a little anecdote that he picked up from his cousin whose husband is in Iraq. Apparently, or so the story goes, Iraqis are now throwing their babies in front of humvees so that the kind and gentle Americans will stop and make themselves vulnerable to roadside explosives. Stopping is obviously too dangerous and thus, the orders are in: run those babies over.

Now assuming they are true, though I am skeptical, it seems to me that most reasonable people would find such tales to be alarming and outrageous. I would. A parent has no right, at least that I know of, to choose to lay their young ones upon the sacrificial alter of a cause that their children are incapable of comprehending and much less capable of embracing. If a parent wants to give their own life for an ideal then fine but a child's life is not a parent's to give. This seems like a fair explanation of why most rational and sane people would find it offensive to throw babies in front of trucks.

But then I had a conversation with one of those self-proclaimed liberty lovers who insist that the war in Iraq is, or at one time was, a good thing on account of it being a so-called war of liberation. That got me thinking. Maybe these parents aren't murderous degenerates after all. Maybe they should be honored as heroic freedom fighters. Many do, at last, believe that they are fighting for freedom and isn't freedom worth dying for? Isn't it worth a life or two?

Such is the common justification given by war supporters when confronted with images, accounts or statistics of deaths and casualties among innocents. Aren't a few (hundred thousand) lives a fair price to be paid for freedom? I mean, live free or die! Right? Those innocents died for a good cause. They died for liberty.

So, can't those throwing their babies in the road make the same claim? After their baby's skull has been crushed by a humvee and their young brains splattered in the gutter, can't those parents pump their fists in the air and quote Patrick Henry, "give me liberty or give me death?" Can't they claim that it is worth it to lose one's life in the fight for freedom and, therefore, their baby's death is acceptable? Can't they just call it collateral damage and thereby grant themselves immunity from receiving the title of murderer?

Well, according to those good supporters of liberating wars, the answer to all of the above questions is "NO!"

You see, it is only the state, particularly the global hegemon, who can make such claims. It is not ok for a parent to throw their own babies under a truck but it is ok for Americans to throw someone else's babies underneath bombs, tanks, bullets and maybe a few boot heels. Hell, Americans don't have to stop at babies either. Oh no, we get to make the choice between liberty and death for men and women as well as children. By god, we Americans love liberty so damn much that we won't hesitate to kill you in order to set you free. You may not be willing to lay down your life for freedom but don't worry, we'll make you.

Wow, what an honor, what a responsibility. I'm so glad I'm an American.

But seriously, I don't think I can stand to hear one more person claim that the war in Iraq is, or was, one of liberation. That may have been a charming and almost believable bromide in 2003 but 3 years into this catastrophe can we please call it what it is? Throwing babies in front of trucks.

I know I should really expose the bloodthirsty dirtbags who populate our state's military wing more often, but sometimes it takes an extraordinary piece of outrage (plus the fact that it's Fleet Week here in New York, and the place is swarming with killers) to help me get my thoughts together. The Haditha Massacre that is just being exposed now is awful, but I just assume, despite a Joint Chief's assurances, that this is par for the course in Iraq.

But today I came across a nasty piece of filth from (where else?) Texas, a story about one of the Marines whose death sparked the slaughter of innocent people in Haditha.

The father of a U.S. Marine killed by a roadside bomb in western Iraq in November believes his son's comrades did nothing wrong despite a criminal investigation into events that left more than 20 Iraqi civilians dead, including women and children.

"It's very hard for me, I don't even listen to the news," Martin Terrazas said of reports of the mass killings in Haditha, in Iraq's Anbar province. "The insurgents were hiding in there with the kids."

He doesn't listen to the news, but he knows the insurgents were hiding with the kids. That's because he thinks anything America or its agents do is by definition good. Nuking Japan was good because WE did it. Belgrade's 9/11 was good because WE did it. Butchering a house full of people minding their own business is good because this guy's son's friends did it.

These are the kind of people we are dealing with. You can't reason with them; the only way to neutralize their credibility is to demonstrate to the rest of the rational world that the military is made up of, and backed up by, monsters.

As the news emerges that the past week's death toll is actually three times what the US and so-called Iraqi government originally claimed -- that's over 1300 people -- another 41 people and 3 US troops are blown to smithereens today. I have noticed a trend. As time goes on, I see more articles citing "experts" who bemoan Iraq's slide in "anarchy."

Doomsayers long have warned that Iraq was turning into a failed state like Somalia or Taliban-era Afghanistan, a regional black hole. It's far too early to write Iraq off as a quagmire, but the threat of contagious instability looms large.

Mark Sedra, a researcher specializing in rebuilding post-conflict countries at the Bonn International Center for Conversion, a German think tank[, says] "Now the main goal is just creating a state that controls instability and contains the high levels of violence that prevail at the moment and prevents that violence from spilling over into neighboring states or destabilizing the region."

[Just a note to mention that Afghanistan wasn't a failed state until the US made it fail -- ask any woman forced to put on a burqa any time she needed to buy a chicken.]

"All of this is creating great, great decentralization and a failure to provide services," said Phebe Marr, an Iraq specialist at the United States Institute for Peace, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Will Iraq's increasing violence, fed by obviously intentional acts of sabotage, spread into the more rural areas of iraq and then into neighboring Syria and Iran? I guess Dick and Condi might hope so, but to me it doesn't seem likely, since this violence is based on some very local rivalries that go beyond mere Sunni and Shi'ite. But the interesting part of the analyses is that they all seem to fix on an expectation that current trends will bring Iraq into anarchy -- or that Iraq already is in anarchy.

Look in the pockets of Iraqis whose jobs take them around Baghdad every day and you are likely to find a clutch of passes and identity cards, one for every police, military or militia checkpoint they may run into.

"This one is says I'm Badr, this one I show to police, and I have the American press pass and my ordinary ID. I applied for a Mehdi Army pass on Friday but it hasn't arrived yet," said one Iraqi driver working for a foreign media organisation.

Anyone notice anything rather...Hoppean about this situation?

The sheer proliferation of armed groups -- some official, some unofficial and some that operate in the murky middle ground -- underscores the lawlessness of Iraq, where neither U.S. forces who invaded in 2003 nor the Iraqi armed forces they trained have been able to impose their authority on the whole country.

I think it rather underscores an overdose of law in Iraq. Even so, it is obvious that the people who are supposed to be the state in Iraq -- the US forces and their Iraqi quislings -- are simply not. They have no authority except where they actually outnumber everyone else, like in Baghdad's Green Zone. That's less control than the mob has in New York. Iraqis see them as just another militia/ministate for which they need to carry just another ID. The curfew put in place after the first day of attacks, despite reports saying they kept violence down, had nearly no effect.

It is perfectly clear that no bunch of former exiles posing as a state is going to rein in the violence that beseiges Iraqis daily. Iraqis will have to realize this and finally begin to do something more about it than merely carrying a weapon. Lone guns can't hold back an army of fanatics who are trying to ignite a civil war. Iraqis are going to have to create their own associations and organizations to provide security and services and banish the warlords and militants. They will have to create anarchy to banish the chaos. We'll see if the market will push them along the way.

"As democracy takes hold in Iraq, the enemies of freedom will do all in their power to spread violence and fear. They are trying to shake the will of our country and our friends, but the United States of America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins. The killers will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom." -George W. Bush, 2004 State of the Union Address

"Freedom" has long been a word frequently employed by the American politician to memetically infiltrate the brains of their victims. This proud tradition of bullshitting has been continued by our current Caesar, who applies the word as liberally as Michael Moore shovels a buffet on to his plate. Now, normally I probably wouldn't mind that much, but "freedom" happens to be a word quite dear to my heart. Secondly, even the words that politicians speak can occasionally contain meaning, or at least indicative of the beliefs of their writers. What are Bush's speech writers and their neo-conservative paymasters trying to say here?

Their conception of "freedom" is this: if you live in a country with a democracy, you are free. It doesn't matter what laws the democracy ends up passing. If the Iraqi government passes a law banning Jews from the country, George Bush will just give the world is his best smarmy smile and tell us "that's democracy" (and Hans Hermann Hoppe will applaud). The glorification of democracy is a far cry from the opinions of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who supposedly set the values upon which the United States government is based. They saw democracy as a tool to insure liberty, and were smart enough to come up with restrictions on it. Though the Bush administration has gotten some kind of Bill of Rights included in the Iraqi constitution, they hardly emphasize it. What's important is not actual freedom, but its appearance, which is created by the ritual of voting.

Some libertarians, like Tom Palmer and John T. Kennedy, get confused by all this freedom talk. This confusion is so great that it leads them to believe they live under the Badnarik administration, and the Iraq invasion will result in liberty of the Iraqi people. Unfortunately, they are wrong. The ideological motivation of the Iraq invasion, if there is any, is not about freedom, but about democracy, and that's what it will result in (unless they simply return to dictatorship). Democracy is not freedom, but freedom to, in this case the freedom to put a piece of paper in a ballot box while homicidal Sunnis try to blow you up. Poor confused Tom Palmer, he'll never be a full fledged member of the conservative club. When he turns his back at the Washington parties, the conservatives will always whisper over their fine wines and plates full of freedom fries: "there's the libertarian."

As much as some libertarians need to realize all this, the neo-conservatives of the Republican party need to stop talking about "freedom" and acknowledge what they really are: democrats.

This was too important to let it be buried in the back of a comments thread of another post.

From the Liberty Belles blog, Kris, in response to someone from ASC, said:

"The Baathist regime averaged 60,000 Iraqi murders a year. During the past 3 years, 60,000 Iraqi civillians have died. Even if the majority of those civillians were killed by American troops (and Joe, I dare you to claim they are, really, I do), by my grim math that’s 40,000 civillians/year x 3 years = 120,000 civillians we’ve directly saved due to our invasion of Iraq."

Dearest Kris--

(Stats -- scroll down to Iraq)

Human Rights Watch estimates that 290K Iraqis were killed by Saddam's regime -- EVER. That's 24 years from 1979 to 2003. That's 12,083 a year. The US Govt says 300K. That's 12,500 a year. Keep in mind that this includes 1991, right after the US told the Shi'ítes and the Kurds "Go ahead and rebel, we'll back you up." They rebelled, they didn't get backed up, and they were crushed. 60K Shi'ites were killed. That'll teach them to trust the US. We also have no idea how many Ba'athist aparatchiks this includes -- dictators routinely purge their ranks.

There is also some questioning of the 290K number -- the Red Cross wouldn't even back it up. From John Laughland: "Their report speaks of an estimated 290,000 missing, 'many of whom are believed to have been killed.' In other words, their deaths have not been established..."

Even current Iraqi politicians, who have an incentive to lie and exaggerate, say that Saddam killed a million people. That's still 41,666 per year.

HRW even says "by the time of the March 2003 invasion, Saddam Hussein's killing had ebbed." By the time of the invasion, Saddam likely wasn't killing much of anyone but major rivals and outspoken opponents, like Muqtada al-Sadr's father. Certainly nothing like crushing rebellions. So in reality, the US has greatly accelerated the killing.

Pretty much all you had to do in Saddam's Iraq was shut the hell up and mind your own business. Before sanctions, the economy was one of the best in the Arab world, women's rights were lightyears ahead. That was before the US and UK bombed and sanctioned Iraq for 12 years, decimating the economy and causing at least a million to die due to malnutrition and limited access to basic drugs for easily-curable diseases. The US killed a million Iraqis before they ever stepped foot on that patch of dirt.

Add all this to the fact that the war is crushing the Iraqi economy, the fact that the insurgents are attacking precisely because the US is there, and you have a veritable holocaust -- triggered by the United States of America. Furthermore, the insurgency is widely backed by the general population (or else it couldn't exist). Journalists report civilians helping out, too. For example, a man who has lost a son to a trigger-happy hick will, after a long day of tending his date palms, plant a roadside bomb for US troops, and then head home to the rest of his devastated family.

And that's just how the war is fucking up IRAQ.

-----------

The reason this is so important is because there are all kinds of people spouting off many different numbers, plenty of which, like Kris', seem to have come right out of their asses in an attempt to further demonize Saddam and make the US look like angels simply because they have killed less people. There are other factors to take into account, like the fact that the people who were killed by Saddam knew how to avoid it. They knew it was coming at some point (and just to preempt some of the simpleminded out there who think I'm praising Saddam -- no, this did not make it okay). Saddam was the hurricane to the US earthquake.

The people killed by US troops and the insurgents attacking because of the former's presence have absolutely no idea how or when or where they will be killed. The news is filled with stories about Baghdadis who never leave their house, and go out once a month on a militarily-planned run for food. I mean, this is great for concrete barrier and razor wire manufacturers, but I think most people familiar with the most basic econ know this puts the Iraqi economy squarely in the gutter -- along with Iraqi life. Life under Saddam's regime was immeasurably more enjoyable and normal than the complete disaster Iraqis are forced to suffer post-Saddam. Couples went on dates, women could wear what they wanted, bookstores had poetry readings at 2am, fine restaurants served gourmet cuisine, kids ran around the streets eating ice cream in the hot summers, and went home to their fully-electrified, air-conditioned home. It wasn't London or Paris or New York by any stretch of the imagination, but it was infinitely more so than staunch US ally Riyadh. And that was WITH 12 years of sanctions that crushed Iraq's poorest underfoot but which left Saddam unscathed.

What is being created right now in Iraq is a government that will be some amount more socialist than Sweden or France but in the personal freedom sphere will be some amount better than Iran. And that's just in the short period of time before Iraq splits into 1000 clandoms, which, face it, is gonna happen. And then it's a short time before Iraq is the next Somalia -- but a richer, more important version. It will be the first big stick of dynamite the State will have planted in its own fat ass. There will be many more. It didn't have to be this violent. But nobody who isn't a moron ever said the State was intelligent.

Over the last few years, I have grown tired of arguing with friends and family who support the war. It is not the endless debating that bothers me nor is it hearing the same poor excuses and false justifications. What bothers me most is a realization that by speaking out against the war I am, in actuality, acting in the best interest of the United States.

I first made this realization when I suddenly noticed what strange bedfellows I have been keeping. I found myself reading, and loving, articles by such men as Pat Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts and William Lind. I now have a subscription to American Conservative Magazine and I frequently read articles from The John Birch Society’s publication, The New American. How could this be? Did I make a wrong turn somewhere or did they?

My friends and family have often attributed my anti-war stance to my “anti-Americanism” or to me being a “leftist.” However, it dawned on me that the aforementioned writers and publications are neither anti-American nor leftist and, in fact, they could not be any more pro-American or pro-right. And that is when I realized that these men are the real patriots and they oppose the war because it is destroying that which they love most, the United States of America.

After this epiphany, I became increasingly frustrated when arguing with America loving warmongers. I could not make them see that opposing the war was actually in their best interest. I began to question my own opposition and to voice my disappointment. This past August, I wrote this in a letter to a friend:

“As you know, ultimately I want the US to fail completely and for this, I am actually torn on the war. If I desire to see the demise of the US come as quickly as possible then I should become the greatest war cheerleader you have ever seen. I should call for the US to stay in Iraq for years and to begin drawing up and executing plans to invade other lands throughout the world.

I should want the US to lose and waste massive amounts of military resources that would be stretched way too thin and for them to spend trillions of dollars, bringing the state closer to bankruptcy. I should want the government to breed more and more enemies, at home and abroad who will oppose its tyranny and imperialism thereby helping to delegitimize the State.”

Unfortunately, my words, once again fell on deaf ears and I refuse to argue any longer for that which is best for the USA when those who claim to be patriots continue to schizophrenically argue for a policy of self-destruction.

A prolonged policy of war will weaken and bankrupt the state and serve to destroy its legitimacy. Through continued war the machinery of the US military will be used up and stretched thin while the lives of the most violent, primitive, and dangerously stupid element of society will be extinguished. Because of this I now support the Iraq war and any other military misadventure that the rocket scientists running the US government want to start. Why should I waste anymore time trying to save something that I want to see destroyed?