On Wednesday, November 26, 2003, at 08:00 PM, Ronald Getty wrote (in
part):
P.PS. The most shameful aspect of the Iraq War is not the 400 dead
GI's and the lack of coverage of their arrival and funerals. Or
the delibratively shameful lack of attendance or even a token
appearance by any Bush administration official at the funerals. It is
the total lack of coverage of the 1300 or so wounded.
Ron,
There were far more than 1300 people wounded during the war in Iraq
and its aftermath. You have noted only the American casualties. This is
of course in keeping with nationalist sentiments in the United States,
which place a higher value on the lives of Americans than on the lives
of other people, sometimes to the point of failing to acknowledge the
lives (or deaths) of non-Americans at all.
Not to come down on you personally, since I assume you did not
personally kill or authorize the killing of any innocent Iraqis, but
I'd say it is the practice of treating some human lives as worth less
than others simply on the basis of nationality that is the most
shameful part of the war in Iraq. People have no more say over where
they are born than they do over their ethnicity, so discriminating on
this basis is little better than racism.
It is this nationalist attitude that allows American commanders to
consider dropping bombs on civilian areas an acceptable way to minimize
the number of U.S. military personnel killed and wounded. It is a
nationalism which is the moral equivalent of racism that leads directly
to the practice that results in the bulk of lives lost and property
destroyed in war -- dealing death and destruction from afar rather than
directly targeting enemy combatants.
If one counts only American casualties, it's easy to see why the war
was bad. If one counts only American casualties, no one was being
killed and wounded in Iraq before the war.
It was only when the war started that the loss of life and limb began.
But of course this nationalist view is a distortion of reality. In
reality, the number of Iraqis murdered, gassed, drafted and killed on
the battlefield in the wars against Iran and the war over Kuwait, etc.,
by the Baathist regime numbers in at least the hundreds of thousands --
far more than the 1700 or so Americans killed and wounded. Saddam
Hussein and his thugs never to my knowledge showed any remorse for this
slaughter or gave any credible sign that they intended to do things
differently henceforward. Thus by getting rid of the agency responsible
for those deaths, the war arguably *saved* lives, however unlibertarian
it may have been in its methods and funding.
Again, don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying you deliberately devalued
the Iraqi lives that have been lost. Living in the United States, one
easily falls into these patterns of speech and the outlook that goes
with them. Even the Ron Paul essay which started this thread, despite
being written by a libertarian and presumably worldly member of
Congress, indiscriminately used personal pronouns such as "we" and
"our" to refer to both Americans and the U.S. government -- as if
people living in a country and the government ruling that country were
interchangeable.
I believe Libertarians in general ought to think more about
nationalism and its consequences, which is why I post messages like
this one.
Yours in liberty,
<<< Starchild >>>
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