1. ““Why war?” is a question worth pondering, especially given Israel’s current invasion of Gaza. Even though I write for Antiwar.com, I’m not antiwar in the strictest sense of the term – meaning I don’t believe that war should never be waged or should always be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately and tragically, war is sometimes necessary – for example, in defense against unprovoked aggression. But even when war is necessary, we must also be cognizant of the consequences of war and its limitations as a tool. So, as House points out, “Regardless of whether someone endorses or opposes war, no one can deny the importance of understanding why peoples or nations fight.”
House argues that “nations and groups of people fight in order to enhance their power.” But why do they seek power? “The answer is freedom – not the concept so cherished by people who yearn for the ability to live their lives as they desire. No, this freedom is more like control. It is the freedom to do as one wishes without interference from others, to control one’s actions, and the actions of others.”
House thus speaks a truth that no president would dare utter.
Imagine if President Bush made the argument for invading Iraq by saying, “We must invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein to install a pro-U.S. government whose actions and decisions we can control.” If he did, it is highly doubtful that he would have enjoyed the relatively high level of public support he had for taking military action against Iraq.
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Ultimately, that is the reason to ponder the question “Why war?” Professional soldiers such as House must think about it in terms of how to fight and win war from a military perspective. That is their duty and obligation, for which they should not be faulted. But the rest of us – and especially our president and other policymakers – need to remember that war is simply a means to an end. So “why war?” should always lead to two more questions:
If the answer to both is not “yes,” then not only is war unnecessary but likely to make America less safe and secure.“
http://www.antiwar.com/pena/?articleid=14047
2. “Barack Obama is implying that he isn’t likely to pursue criminal investigations and prosecutions of President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and other high U.S. officials for purported violations of criminal laws as part of their “war on terrorism.” Presumably, that includes federal crimes against torture, wiretaps, kidnapping, and even murder.
Apparently Obama’s rationale is that since Bush and his associates were supposedly trying to keep America safe when the crimes were purportedly committed, they should be let off the hook.
However, since when are good intentions a defense to a criminal prosecution?
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If a person has a good reason for committing a crime, that doesn’t constitute a defense to the crime but rather something to consider in mitigation of punishment.
Thus, no matter how sincere Bush and Cheney and their associates might have been in violating the criminal law, assuming they did, that should not preclude them from being charged and prosecuted. Why should they be treated differently than private citizens? Isn’t the criminal law supposed to apply to everyone, regardless of status in society? Or are the rich and the political elite to be accorded one system of justice and the poor and powerless another?
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The American people are now facing the same issue that the Chilean and Argentine people faced: Should public officials who purportedly broke laws against torture, sex abuse, kidnapping, and murder be charged with those offenses or should they be permitted to escape justice because of supposedly good intentions?
The correct answer is reflected in the words of British judge Lord Mansfield, who stated in Somersett’s Case in 1772: “Let Justice be done, though the Heavens may fall.”
http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-01-13.asp
3. Shooting surrendering civilians. How many different war crimes does that include?
“At least three Palestinians in Gaza were shot dead yesterday after Israeli soldiers fired on a group of residents leaving their homes on orders from the military and waving white flags”
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/gaza-residents-waving-white-flags-shot-dead-as-they-flee-their-homes-14138998.html
4. “The National Portrait Gallery has taken the unusual step of amending a caption for a portrait of President George W. Bush at the request of a U.S. senator.
The caption describes the Bush administration and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In a letter to the gallery, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) objected to the language that said “the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq . . .”
Sanders wrote: “When President Bush and Vice President Cheney misled our nation into the war in Iraq, they certainly cited the attacks on September 11, along with the equally specious claim that Iraq possessed vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The notion, however, that 9/11 and Iraq were linked, or that one ‘led to’ the other, has been widely and authoritatively debunked.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR2009011303299_pf.html
5. “Indeed, the experts are almost unanimous in their conclusion that torture makes America less safe. For example, a 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, says:
The old hands … know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.”
Of course, the experts agree that torture does not even produce reliable information or actionable intelligence, and actually prevents the chance of gaining such info. See this, this, this, and this.
So why does anyone still support torture?
Well, some may be “psychotic”, as the former gitmo guard says.
Or they may be wimpy chickenhawks trying to act tough. As a former Navy Judge Advocate General said “torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough“.
A lot of them, though, are simple bootlickers desperately trying to cover up the war crimes committed by Bush, Cheney, Rummie, Gonzales and the boys. Under the theory that “the best defense is a strong offense”, they figure that if they keep on repeating the lie that “we need torture to keep us safe” enough times, people will get distracted from the insanity of their heinous crimes, and the boys will be able to escape a war crimes tribunal. These types may be crazy like a fox.“
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/01/insanity-of-torture.html
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/01/bernanke-admits-that-us-financial.html
7. “The war strategy which Friedman is heralding — what he explicitly describes with euphemism-free candor as “exacting enough pain on civilians” in order to teach them a lesson — is about as definitive of a war crime as it gets. It also happens to be the classic, textbook definition of “terrorism.”
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I doubt anyone can. Isn’t Friedman’s “logic” exactly the rationale used by Al Qaeda: we’re going to inflict “civilian pain” on Americans so that they stop supporting their government’s domination of our land and so their government thinks twice about bombing more Muslim countries? It’s also exactly the same “logic” that fuels the rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas into Israel.
It should be emphasized that the mere fact that Tom Friedman claims that this is Israel’s motivation isn’t proof that it is. The sociopathic lust of a single war cheerleader can’t fairly be projected onto those who are actually prosecuting the war. But one can’t help noticing that this “teach-them-a-lesson” justification for civilian deaths in Gaza appears with some frequency among its advocates, at least among a certain strain of super-warrior, Israel-centric Americans — e.g.: Marty “do not fuck with the Jews” Peretz and Michael “to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause” Goldfarb — who love to cheer on Middle East wars from a safe and sheltered distance.
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It’s far easier to imagine a population subjected to this treatment becoming increasingly radicalized and belligerent rather than submissive and compliant, as Friedman intends. But while the efficacy of The Friedman Strategy is unclear, the fact that it is a perfect distillation of a “war crime” and “terrorism” is not unclear at all.
One might ordinarily find it surprising that our elite opinion-makers are so openly and explicitly advocating war crimes and terrorism (“inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large” and “‘educate’ Hamas by inflicting heavy pain on the Gaza population”). But when one considers that most of this, in the U.S., is coming from the very people who applied the same “suck-on-this” reasoning to justify the destruction of Iraq, and even more so, when one considers that our highest political officials are now so openly — even proudly — acknowledging their own war crimes, while our political and media elites desperately (and almost unanimously) engage in every possible maneuver to protect them from any consequences from that, Friedman’s explicit advocacy of these sorts of things is a perfectly natural thing to see.
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One final note: the fact that all sorts of prior wars, including ones waged by Western powers, contain events that could comfortably fit the definition of “terrorism” isn’t a refutation of the point I’m making. If anything, it bolsters the point. “Terrorism” is probably the single most elastic and easily manipulated term in our political lexicon. Who the perpetrators and victims are of “terrorism” is almost always a function of who is wielding the term rather than some objective assessment. Aimlessly shooting rockets towards civilians (as Hamas and Hezbollah do) and dropping bombs from 35,000 feet that you know will slaughter many civilians while viewing that slaughter as a strategic benefit (as Friedman advocates) are acts that have far more in common with each other than differences.“
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
