War Crime

A government that uses air power on a civilian population that it controls has gone beyond the limit and needs to be abolished.

-- macgupta

Juan Cole... This issue has taken on importance because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds is often given as one ground for the U.S. to go to war to effect regime change...

http://hnn.us/articles/1242.html

The US doesn't leave a country we've attacked until either (a) they capitulate totally and unconditionally to what we want or (b) we are effectively or actually defeated.

The Army is still pissed about Vietnam. Just a few more hundred thousand troops and unrestricted bombing campaigns.....

What Hiatt is talking about is taking up the White Man's Burden because brown people are inherently savage and uncivilized. They need us to come into their countries and manage them and their resources, especially their oil if they have any. This time though we will not use any of those colonial clichés. We will call it nation building. Sounds so much better, doesn't it? It will be an enlightened policy, humanitarian in nature and improve the lot of those it does not kill and displace.

Hiatt, of course, will never have to bear this "burden". That will be borne by ordinary Americans and be paid for by them. And most importantly of all, it will mean that Hiatt and all his Beltway colleagues will never have to admit they were wrong, thoroughly, disastrously, completely wrong. So by all means let us take up the White Man's Burden. Sometimes you have to destroy a country in order to save it. The brown peoples of the world when they have been properly pacified and civilized will really thank us for all this. They really will.

I couldn't agree more. Just this week I saw footage on Goodman's news broadcast of an Iraqi infant being pulled, dead and bloody, from the rubble of another american air strike on Sadr City. The simple fact that the US military is calling in airstrikes on cities--major urban centers packed with civilians--after 5 years of occupation simply speaks for itself.

And the imagery also speaks for itself. At the Winter Soldier event earlier this year, Goodman stated her belief that if one week's-worth of Iraqi imagery was shown on our national news outlets, the American occupation of Iraq would end. The American people would simply not stand for it.

It is sometimes difficult to grasp the nearly-complete mastery over our media that has been achieved. The recent NYT story on Pentagon propaganda displays but one aspect of it

I'm all for it, provided we take all the people that think like that, put them in a uniform and stick them on the ground at the front of the troops. If I remember my history, great leaders and generals like George Washington were on the ground at the FRONT of the lines, not hiding like a bunch of cowards several thousand miles away.

Talk is cheap. All the hawks should put their ass on the line. That includes our Commander in Chief and half the US Congress that have been supporting this huge obscenity for the last 5 years. It's easy to talk big and send other people to do your dirty work. I wonder how fast this would all come to an end if we put these big-mouthed idiots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan?

I'm surprised there is no word in Salon yet about McCain's speech to a group of supporters in Denver on Friday where he said that under a McCain presidency we would have an energy policy that would rid us of ever having to go into the Middle East. Therefore, he is implying that the only reason we are in the Middle East is for oil.

Although an obvious conclusion, this is a huge concession coming from a man running for the US presidency. What will the world say to this man when he commits more US forces to the effort to subdue Iraq after he has made his reasons for wanting to do so clear: OIL.

It's seems that in Hiatt's moral calculus, the difference between "nation building" and air borne terrorism is the amount of oil in the ground.

Hiatt once again demonstrates the phenomenal capacity of the human to justify the most heinous behavior by feigning concern for the very thing it is destroying; in this case, human beings.

I would argue that there is no hypocrisy in writing on a site that takes advertising dollars from the military.

The military is not a subset of the warmongerers. Before BushCo purged the military there were many who were opposed to the current Iraq War and future unnecessary wars (Fallon and Iran), and from what I understand there still are. Military personnel are donating to Dems, to Ron Paul, to others against the war - is this hypocritical?

Moreover, I would argue that at some point those who would change the world must assume something of a superman mentality, where the ends justify the means. This is of course dangerous and oddly similar to the justifications given by those who still believe in the president, but an overly strict moral code can leave one hamstrung and impotent.

The Hiatts of the world accept the premise that rules do not apply to the United States. We are exceptional. We have the right to do whatever we want to whomever we want to do it, at any time and in any place.

The only limit is one of practicality. Hiatt bizarrely thinks it is more practical to occupy other countries rather than just carpet-bomb them.

Nevertheless, all we have to do is say we are afraid that another country (or a small group of terrorists who base themselves in another country) might think about doing something against American interests. If we say that, we can kill them all.

Do you think I exaggerate? Read this:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/sectionV.html

That is the 2006 National Security Strategy.

A relevant passage:

To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively in exercising our inherent right of self-defense. The United States will not resort to force in all cases to preempt emerging threats. Our preference is that nonmilitary actions succeed. And no country should ever use preemption as a pretext for aggression.

Note the astonishing statement, made three years after the invasion of Iraq, about not using preemption as a pretext for agression.

Not everyone accepts the premise that the rules do not apply to the United States.

But that is the great divide of American foreign policy arguments. We either have to obey the law or we do not.

I am not sure that Obama favors abandoning American exceptionalism, but he may feel there are at least some moral limits on what we can do. Time will tell.