Monday, June 14, 2004

Falluja in Baghdad and "just wars"

Iraqis were opening their shops, walking to their offices and queuing up to try to find casual work in a central Baghdad street on Monday when a suicide car bomber blew an ordinary morning apart.
  Reuters article

What in hell is an "ordinary morning" in Baghdad? I don't think this is so out of the ordinary for them these days. Corporate news has really gotten stupid. Where do these people learn to report like they do in pat phrases? Maybe we need fewer journalism schools and more investigative reporters.

The car exploded just as a convoy of four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles used by foreign contractors drove though the busy area, killing at least 13 people and enraging locals who battered the wrecked vehicles and set them ablaze.

...Dozens of people gathered around two of the vehicles targeted in the blast, jumping up and down on their roofs, hammering them with bits of debris and chanting: "There is no God but Allah. America is the enemy of Allah."

The cheering crowd set the vehicles on fire, sending thick black smoke into the sky as U.S. forces looked on.



Charlie Reese (Veteran) on war

Wars do not arise spontaneously, nor are they instigated by the soldiers who have to fight them. All wars begin in the minds of political leaders in times of peace. They decide they want something, and eventually they decide that the only way to get it is by the use of force.

...There is only one just war, and that is war in self-defense. The unjust wars that the United States has been involved in since 1945 are all rationalized as "in defense of freedom." That is a lie used so often that today people say it automatically.

Iraq did not threaten our freedom, nor did it have the means to do so. North Vietnam did not threaten our freedom, nor did it have the means to do so. Ditto for Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia, North Korea and Afghanistan. Those were all imperial wars, either deliberately started or blundered into by the idiots we put in office. Remember, the only freedom the American armed forces are justified in defending is the freedom of America and Americans.

...While few wars are just wars, all are profitable...to the military-industrial complex....If there were any sense of decency in the corporate world — which is to say, if frogs could sing opera — the corporations would all cut checks to the families of those young men and women who have been killed or maimed to provide them with their profitable contracts. The corporate world doesn't see it that way, though, and they are cutting checks for the people they consider their true benefactors — the politicians in Washington who made the war profits possible.

...Every political system has the same flaw. The human race consists mostly of idiots, with a scattering of wise people. The problem with political systems is that most make it difficult to put the wise few in the positions of power. Thus, for the most part, in every generation the world is ruled by idiots, some of whom have criminal minds.
  Reese post

Boy, I feel encouraged.

The truth kinda hurts.

After the recent celebration of D-Day in Europe and the passing of Memorial Day, I know it is commonly held by people who denounce all these wars Charlie mentions that WWII was a "just" war, and for the reason that Charlie proposes - America was defending America after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It's not at all clear to me, however, that Pearl Harbor was not an incited incident, or at least a permitted one. In fact, I might have to go back as far as the Civil War to find an American war that could be called just on the basis of defending Americans, when the Confederate Army was forced to defend the Confederacy against a Northern invasion. (Quibble over the rights of states to declare independence if you will.)

I agree with Charlie that the world is ruled by idiots, but I don't think wars would stop even if it were ruled by the few wise folk. They would simply be crucified by the mobs or assassinated by those who desired the power. I think we have war because people just cannot "get along", to quote Rodney King, and many of them are incredibly greedy. Some for material wealth, some for power.

And that is never going to change.

"Power doesn't corrupt -- power attracts the corruptible." -- Frank Herbert