There's Never a Good Time...

Months ago, I had the idea for starting a blog with this title, when I was arguing with some ignorant asshat on the Internet who believed that America had killed more people than any other country in the world. Even if you add up all of America's history, of course that's not true. People like this seem oblivious to the crimes against humanity of dictators like Bashir of Sudan, and seem completely unaware of the fact that their favourite site to pull out during these sorts of arguments -- Iraq War Body Count -- in fact proves my point, that the overwhelming number of people killed in Iraq are civilians killed by terrorists. These terrorists are supported by Iran and Syria and Al Qaeda. The facile claim that "they wouldn't be there unless we were" lets these war criminals off the hook -- how long do you really think we can go on claiming that it was "necessary" to kill, say, more than 50 Catholics praying at Mass, in order to combat American troops in Iraq?

The profound problem of terrorism and extremism and militarism remains, regardless if you find this or that way to "blame America first" in a surrogate effort, targeting a proxy for concerns about the killing of people merely because you don't have the terrorists' address -- and you can't influence them.

When I thought of putting this blog up, there was some atrocity du jour in which once again, it wasn't U.S. doing the killing, and then soon after, in fact it *was* American troops found guilty and on trial for appalling outrages against Afghan civilians shown in lurid pictures by Der Spiegel. Not a good day for a blog with this title, eh? Except, there's the still small voice: but why are you liberal Europeans publicizing this,even publishing pictures, but not writing more about all the terrorist killings, that become mere statistics? What, no pictures of those victims? What, no moving stories of lives of ordinary people interrupted? And then there's this fact: we as a country are trying and sentencing soldiers that go wrong and kill civilians in wars. Who's trying the Taliban or the terrorists in Iraq who kill way more civilians?

Speaking of the figures doesn't seem to do any good. There's a curious myopia and a wilful blindness that is like the opposite of "take the log out of your own eye" and involves putting the log most resolutely in.  I've noted in many a debate that according to the UN, 70 percent of the civilians killed in Afghanistan are killed by the Taliban. The other 30 percent are killed "by Karzai and allies" -- and of course we're an ally, and of course, we have killed civilians by mistake, and our apologies don't put that right. But we're in the minority of that 30 percent. And that has to be said.

I write as someone who immediately set out for the anti-war march in New York City when the announcement came that we were invading Iraq. Regardless of what reasons were being cited, it seemed appropriate to oppose the war. I took my young daughter with me so she could say she was there later in life, and so I could answer the question of what I did on the day the war was announced.

When we got there, the crowd was none too appetizing. We do not have a good or effective anti-war movement in this country for lots of reasons. I saw the marchers and the signs of the International Action Committee and their anti-Israel hate signs which are indeed emblematic of their over-obsessiveness on Israel and hatred of the Jews as a people. I sure didn't want to fall in behind them.

Then I saw the Wrong Rev. Al Sharpton and bunches of "million man march" types. No, can't say I want to join these manipulative hustlers, either. Group after group passed by -- one-sided posters, hate banners, stupid slogans, sorry, but I want to oppose war, not capitalism. I don't believe war is spawned by some sort of exigency of capitalism, and I think the "blood for oil" crap is just facile, juvenile nonsense.

Finally, I saw a group with a name like "Soldiers' Moms Against the War" or something like that, some of them pushing strollers. So I fell in beside them as they seemed not to be carrying a lot of lefty and progressive political baggage. That's why we don't have a broad-based anti-war movement in this country: because of the insistence of sectarian groups on their propagandistic specifics, and their constant disingenuous and dishonest smuggling in of entire agendas that most people don't support, even if they question Americans wars.

Another reason we don't have an anti-war movement is the "Support Our Troops" gunk that the Democrats cooked up as a kind of play-pretend patriotism to counter what they saw as gung-ho Republican patriotism that they could only conceive as chauvinism (and some of it was). There was something awfully sappy about this Dems' stuff -- it was so contrived. It was treacly and stupid. It involved sending packages or taking part in book drives or signing cards (all good things in themselves) and saying we supported our brave men in uniform, but refused to question why, if we loved them so much, we were sending them to unjust wars. Yes, I've joined the book drives in my parish for our troops and I'm happy to look at the problem as a very local one -- this particular family with this particular kid we all knew overseas in the war. But there's something inherently irresponsible about that ground-level view of boots on the ground...

Wouldn't it be far better support to make sure the boys from the parish didn't die or become maimed needlessly fighting an unwinnable battle started for the wrong reasons?  It was mushy Dem politics that was a placebo for real politics, and it came about for the reasons I just explained: that after 9/11, it became impossible to get people not to want justice for that crime against humanity in which 3,000 innocent civilians were killed and more traumatized. My neighbours and fellow parishioners, the parents of my children's fellow students, our local firemen and policemen were killed in 9/11, and I lost one of my jobs. This remains for me not a problem solved by war, but not a problem solved by silly notions of "root causes," either. No, if you're poor, you don't get to blow up a building.

I see now Michelle Obama has started up a formalized White House version of the "Support Our Troops" meme called "Joining Forces". It's the usual push-media Obama website that doesn't even let you install its widget on your website, and doesn't even have a "like". You just follow, friend, link, passively. It's the same mushy boosterism of "Support Our Troops," from the wife of a dubious Nobel Prize laureate given a prize just as he started a dramatic surge of troops and assaults in Afghanistan, in which many more of our people were killed and  many more Afghans, too, of course. Peace?

There is the Catholic notion of a just war that is just if it ends war. That is a position of a lot of Catholics -- not pacifism, that ends up rewarding tyrants like the Soviets, such as held by the Quakers, and not God Box church groups that are selective in their campaigning against Israel, but not Palestinian violence, and indifferent to massacres in say, Chechnya. But...You can't say after 10 years that it has been a war that ends wars, right?

So people like me end up being only half an anti-war advocate -- it's easy to say that the Iraq war was a bad idea, or that the Afghanistan war isn't winnable and we should pull out -- but then we don't have a good idea of what to do about the Taliban and the terrorists who remain to kill civilians in large numbers, as they have always been doing. It's not like they'll magically stop. In fact, leaving people to such a fate is immoral. At least I ask the question -- "what's your plan for terrorism?" but many people never answer that question. I want to stop wars *and* terrorism, and I don't think that's possible while people still have a terrible muddle in their head, believing America is the worst thing in the world and foolishly imagining it kills the most people. It isn't; it doesn't.

A key reason we don't have a mature and effective anti-war movement is the infantilism with which people on blogs and forums and tweets -- where it is effortless and often anonymous -- merely recite all their memes about "Bush lied, people died" and "yellowcake" and "no WWDs" -- and never advance beyond those comfortable, well-worn exposures that continue to give people endless malicious glee if they can point them out to other people they think are still mired in illusion. The problem is that it doesn't matter now, those bad reasons, so easily exposed -- because of the massive, massive, MASSIVE numbers of civilians killed not by American troops.

Hence this blog. And then another day goes by, and I'm about to start it -- and then that day, the US kills Bin Laden. Imagine that! Terrorist Number One himself. Could we be done now? Of course not, as it's not over, but likely only beginning. It would seem like gloating to start a blog on the day that in fact this evil figure was indeed killed by American troops -- and I myself don't have a good feeling about that. I will chalk it up to the fact that I'm too liberal, too indoctrinated, and belong to a civilization that will likely make itself extinct. It's not like you can calmly put cuffs on Bin Laden and read him his Miranda rights and carefully exit the scene. So what was your plan? The problem for all the anti-Americans is that war is legal, and that most people fighting it are using unlawful methods far more than the US, which does police its own crimes. That the Germans couldn't arrest Rumsfeld on charges of war crimes and torture is as much a function of the political nature of the prosecutor's role as the original case was -- beginning the question ultimately of impartiality of justice.

Then, if perhaps after a decent interval from the victory over OBL, it was prudent to start again -- no, that was the day a US general is apologizing for killing a 12-year-old Afghan girl by mistake. Truly sad and the apology doesn't fix it. A few more days go by, however, and 80 people -- 80 people!!! -- are killed in Pakistan as retaliation for the killing of bin Laden. The Western press lavished attention on the tragedy of the little girl. It had a paragraph for the 80 Pakistanis, and promptly forgot them.

So again, hence this blog. I want to gather in one place the stories that keep going by, and keep getting forgotten, and keep making the point: yes, American troops have killed some civilians and that is wrong. But the overwhelming numbers in the world are killed by militants, terrorists, war lords, and Not Killed by American Troops.

Comments

[Anthony Abbott]

Fitzpatrick the clearly inaccurately self-described "... human rights activist, and long-time student of international affairs. Particularly interested in human rights, civil society, and liberal democracy." neglects to mention the fact an American newspaper columnist and Sarah Palin have both called for the hunting down and killing of the Australian civilian Julian Assange who still is NOT CHARGED BY AMERICAN AUTHORITIES.

Thankfully due to Julian's efforts with Wikileaks the world did get to see and hear the American Troops in a helicopter gunship killing innocent children, civilians and Reuters reporter and cameraman.

As a "long-time student of international affairs" and a "human rights activist" who is "Particularly interested in human rights, civil society, and liberal democracy." please tell us your human rights activist, and long-time student of international affairs on this Catherine?

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

Why would the fact that a non-elected political figure, and another elected political figure (Huckabee)have spouted inappropriate extremities take away from my points here? It wouldn't at all. It doesn't matter what some official or civic figure says about the solution to the problem of the enormous challenge to the US posed by WikiLeaks' assault on a democratically-elected state.

Indeed, it's right of these officials to espouse any philosophy they like in a free society with a free press and free association. Their statements, while extreme, don' t rise to the test of "incitement of imminent violence" under the Supreme Court interpretation, so they can't be arrested.

Um, what, we're supposed to jail *them* for free speech yet not jail Assange?!

Assange is not only a thorough jerk; he's a cultic loon. I've trashed his lame ideology on my other blog 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state I don't know if his offenses rise to the test of qualifying as crimes, but that's not my problem, it's the FBI's problem. My job is to point out the immorality of his views, and their rabid nihilism -- far from actually "opening up governments" as he claims, he admits that his goal is to bring the US to its knees by deliberately forcibly opening classified information to harm the US and confuse it and make it close and be rendered ineffective.

I like and appreciate my free democratic country and I see no reason why WikiLeaks, which targets primarily the US, whatever its claims to occasionally caring about some African dictator, should succeed in its destructive and untenable mission. It attacks the freest country in the world with the most liberal press...because it can. Not because it deserves to be attacked. And has no plan at all for dealing with terrorism.

(I'm not aware of who the "newspaper columnist is," but so what).

The American troops did not deliberately kill innocent children. They couldn't even see there were children in the van. The question *I* ask about that disgraceful tendentious propaganda is: what kind of adult driving around with children stops in the middle of a combat scene to pick up a wounded person being shot at?! Good Samaritan, or combatant himself? Good Samaritan, or somebody who doesn't value his own children's safety?! Regardless of the story, there's no way that American troops could see that that van had kids in it, and they are not responsible for shooting *kids*. They shot at *armed persons wandering around with guns clearly on their shoulders*. End of story.

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/02/the-unaccountable-jacob-appelbaum.html

So I unabashedly and fearlessly push right back at your tendentious bullshit here. I'm a perceptive long-time student of international affairs and a good human rights activist. Precisely because I want the real facts to be told, and not tendentious nonsense concocted by snivelling kids who have only a completely outrageous and myopic and infantile rewarmed Leninist ideology to guide them, and not universal human rights and truth.

[Sublimeoblivion]

This is lame even by your standards, which is no mean achievement. LOL.