[Peace-discuss] the mome raths outgrabe

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Tom Woods is a nice guy.  Here he writes about how he
went from being a war spectator to a principled opponent of war.

Read the full text " I Was Fooled by the War-Makers"
at http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1206e.asp

excerpt:

The Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the first U.S. conflict of my college 
career. During the months-long U.S. military buildup in the Gulf known 
as Operation Desert Shield I eagerly promoted the mission to anyone 
foolish enough to listen.

When war came, it was swift and decisive. Very few American casualties 
were suffered, while the Iraqi forces were destroyed. Some 100,000 were 
burned alive by a chemical agent or buried alive in the desert while 
making a retreat.

Believe it or not, that actually bothered me, in spite of how voracious 
a consumer of war propaganda I was. No one defended Saddam Hussein's 
invasion of Kuwait, which he launched in response to that country's 
slant oil drilling, but was the outcome of the Persian Gulf War not a 
terrible tragedy for the Iraqi people --- virtually none of whom had had 
anything to do with Saddam Hussein's fateful decision --- all the same? 
A far poorer country than ours suddenly had a lot more widows and 
orphans, not to mention a great many civilian deaths to grieve over and 
much destruction to repair.


*Lopsided counts*

Mothers and fathers were crying themselves to exhaustion over children 
they had lost, or who, worse still, were dying agonizing deaths before 
their very eyes. There is no worse anguish for parents than to watch 
their children suffer and to be helpless to do anything about it.

Was it really right that we Americans should meanwhile be celebrating 
with a Bob Hope special, and --- on cue --- flattered by the ceaseless 
reminders that ours was the awesomest country ever?

It later transpired that the Kuwaiti government had hired a 
public-relations firm in the United States to sell the idea of military 
invasion to the American people. We later learned that the major 
atrocity story --- that Iraqi troops had removed Kuwaiti babies from 
incubators and thrown them onto hospital floors --- had been a fraud: 
the emotional young woman who testified to that effect in Washington 
turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United 
States.

Although I had strongly favored military action by the U.S. government 
from the start, in the wake of George H.W. Bush's declaration of victory 
I could not stop thinking about the lopsided casualty counts, the waves 
of killing rained down on a ramshackle army facing the greatest military 
machine in the world. Now these were soldiers, not civilians, so by the 
logic of war I was supposed to hate them or at least not care about 
them, their deaths being cause for celebration rather than regret.

I was having trouble doing that.

I went to see my European history professor, Charles Maier, to discuss 
my misgivings about the war. Maier, a liberal in the /New Republic/ 
mold, suggested I read a recent article in that magazine making the case 
for the war. I did, and (believe it or not) that helped to suppress any 
contrary thoughts for a while.

I was already beginning to read libertarian literature by the early 
1990s because of my support for the market economy. My reading of the 
economic works of Murray Rothbard led inevitably to his philosophical 
works. The Rothbard essay "War, Peace, and the State" leaves an 
impression on the mind one can never quite shake.

Rothbard famously observed that one could uncover the libertarian 
position on X by imagining a gang of thugs carrying out the state action 
in question. If thugs can't just grab your money, for instance, neither 
can a well-dressed group of thugs calling itself "the state."

"War, Peace, and the State" takes that analysis and applies it to war. 
If you steal my TV, I can take it back from you. But I may not walk down 
the street firing a gun every which way and harming third parties in 
order to make you surrender my TV. Likewise, even assuming a warmaking 
state to be absolutely in the right, it has no greater moral entitlement 
to harm third parties in pursuit of its ends than a private individual 
does.

Simply because some politician utters the word "war," we have been 
conditioned to believe it just and good that the rights of everyone 
within the confines of an arbitrary border are abruptly cancelled. What 
would in any other circumstance be murder and atrocity becomes an 
antiseptic matter of public policy.

The lingering effects of war can inspire callousness even after the guns 
have fallen silent. Many of us have seen the notorious clip from /60 
Minutes/ in which Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United 
Nations and soon-to-be U.S. secretary of State, declared that the price 
of half a million dead children as a result of the sanctions against 
Iraq during the 1990s had been "worth it." Note that she did not dispute 
the figure. She looked the interviewer in the eye and said that the 
deaths of half a million kids were worth it in pursuit of one man she 
and her colleagues didn't like.
...

One of the great triumphs of the government propaganda machine in 
self-described democracies is the "we are the government" line. It makes 
the subject population somewhat more compliant than it might be if a 
particular family passed down the power to govern from one generation to 
another, with no chance (short of outright revolution) that anyone else 
will ever hold the reins of power. More important, criticisms of their 
government's foreign policy now come to be seen as personal affronts. We 
are the government, after all, so how dare you criticize "our" foreign 
policy!

For that reason, opponents of American foreign policy should, when 
speaking on this topic, eliminate the pronoun "we" from their 
vocabulary. "We" did not kill those Iraqi kids. In 2002 and 2003 "we" 
did not repeat transparent untruths about the alleged threat posed by a 
devastated Iraq. "We" did not lay waste to an already-suffering country, 
killing hundreds of thousands and displacing four million others.

They did this. The American political class. We did not.

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