TGIF: Spooner versus bin Laden

In his 2002 letter to America justifying the savage 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (himself killed in 2011) wrote after listing his grievances against the U.S. government:

You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:

(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.

(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates....

It's a flawed and evil argument, to say the least, but it is clever. He threw the grandiose claims about democratic rule right back in the faces of hypocritical U.S. leaders. (Remember the panic last  year when young TikTok users read the letter for the first time and as a result news sites took it down?)

There's nothing easier than criticizing bin Laden's crackpot theory of popular responsibility for the U.S. government's crimes. What needs to be better understood, however, is that bin Ladenism was not unique to bin Laden. Look at what's happening in Gaza. Look what happened in Vietnam Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the many other places I'm forgetting just now. The American and Israeli war planners are bin Ladenists! Those officials routinely kill noncombatants, regarding them as active or tacit guilty parties for not rebelling against their rulers. It's cruel to infer consent and approval from acquiescence. Overthrowing a government is no piece of cake, especially when the government has most of the guns.

But there is a difference between bin Laden and the others. The U.S. and Israeli governments devastate populations that don't even get to go through the motions of voting. Those leaders criticize bin Laden, but they should see him when they look in the mirror.

Bin Laden, like the American and Israeli rulers, never read Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), the libertarian anarchist and political/legal scholar who wrote in his short-lived periodical No Treason (nos. 2 and 6) that voting is no indication that the voters support the government. (If that's true of voters who picked the winners, it's surely true of voters who picked the losers and nonvoters.) Voters can have many reasons for voting that don't entail acceptance of the government's many impositions. Since the government will tax and regiment them whether they vote or not, they might vote to try to lessen the tyranny. It's self-defense. It does not imply acceptance of a candidate's plan for foreign intervention.

As Spooner put in No Treason: The Constitution, no. 2, and repeated in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, no. 6 (1870):

In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot—which is a mere substitute for a bullet—because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or ever consented to....

So lay off the noncombatants, war-makers of all parties. That means no more massacres of essentially powerless people. Even the unintended consequences are foreseeably horrific. You claim you're smart, so find another way.

TGIF: Arms Sales and Democracy

The U.S. government's role as the world's premier arms donor and dealer is now under renewed scrutiny. I can't imagine why.

But seriously...

We may legitimately ask if this role fulfills democracy's promise of, in Lincoln's words, "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Or are we justified in concluding that with the government's arms distribution, democracy falls short of its promise even more so than it does in its other functions?

This is something Chris Coyne of George Mason University and its Mercatus Center F. A. Hayek program spends a lot of time studying. In this video and published work, Coyne closely examines the international arms trade, which the U.S. government dominates. Things look bad both for the arms trade and for democracy.

David Friedman, the author of The Machinery of Freedom, has pointed out that Winston Churchill's observation about democracy -- "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms" -- is not praise democracy but actually a put-down of government per se: if democracy is the best we can do, then we've got problems. 

The intrinsic flaws of democracy have been much discussed. (Here's an unappreciated example.) The problems start with the impotence of a single vote. If by your own actions you can't affect the outcome of an election, what incentive do you, a busy person, have to invest time, money, and effort to become an educated voter? In selecting a candidate you'll use criteria other than the kind you use when buying a car, a carp, or a carpet because in contrast to the marketplace, in politics your choice is not decisive.

Most people don't like to hear that their one vote does not count. They evade the simple probability. I would ask the skeptic this: if it were legal to buy another person's vote, how much would you pay? 

Related to the problem of the impotent vote is the problem of costs and benefits. When you pick out a car, carp, or a carpet, you know you will pay the price and get (virtually all of) the benefit. So you choose accordingly. Contrast that with politics, where any one voter will pay only a tiny fraction of the full social cost and get only a tiny fraction of the total benefit, say, from a tax cut. Incentives matter. In politics, spill-over effects abound, and no one, unlike in the market, has a profit incentive to "internalize the externalities." Political operatives actually benefit from that problem because they can exploit it to justify wielding more power. That's a perverse incentive.

Democracy's other flaws relate to the politicians' and bureaucrats' limited knowledge and limited ability to create social order and to their desire to advance their own careers. These are the well-documented Austrian and Public Choice critiques of government. Some political operatives may be sincere, but if so, they are sincerely deluded in thinking their method -- coercion -- works for the rest of us.

Finally, we have the problems of asymmetrical information and lack of accountability. Voters will always be ignorant about much of the bureaucracy's operations and full consequences. Closely monitoring the state is impossible. Moreover, should voters learn about the harm the government does, the costs of really changing things are likely to be prohibitive. Forget about suing the state. All of this adds up to virtually zero accountability.

Coyne builds on this critique by taking a concept -- "noxious market" -- that is used against the free market and applying it to government arms sales. "Noxious market" is a term a philosopher coined to condemn certain alleged morally offensive private exchanges. The markets for kidneys, drugs, sexual services, and other things are said to involve sellers or buyers who are so vulnerable and ignorant that the government ought to step in to protect them and society at large.

Coyne thinks entrepreneurship can provide remedies in the private market, but then asks a good question in the interview: "What happens if we extend the logic of noxious markets to the government realm?"

So one area where we focus our research is on the international arms trade. Our conclusion is that it is a highly noxious market. It takes advantage of the vulnerable [such as the powerless taxpayers]. There are massive asymmetries [of knowledge], both domestically and internationally. And there's reason to believe it leads to really significant harms for societies where the arms go, but also the broader world as well.

In other words, he says, if the objection to noxious markets is "weak agency" in some of the participants, there is no realm in which agency is weaker than in government arms dealing and foreign policy in general. In that realm, the ruled populations on all sides can hardly know what is going really on, and catastrophic unintended consequences usually result. Where do those arms end up and who are they used against?

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is a chimera. The only alternative is a framework based on individual rights, including property and contractual rights.

 

TGIF: Shimon Peres and 9/11

The death of former Israeli prime minister and president Shimon Peres (age 93), the last major figure of Israel's founding generation, has brought an outpouring of tributes for a man who reputedly had, as President Obama put it in his eulogy, "the capacity to see all people as deserving of dignity and respect."

Unfortunately, the Polish-born Peres's life did not display such a capacity. Many Palestinians and Lebanese suffered and died because of him. Considering his prominent role in the founding of the self-declared State of the Jewish People, this should go without saying. Israel was established largely by Europeans on land from which three-quarters of a million Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arabs were expelled. Others were massacred by Zionist paramilitary forces, one of which Peres worked for. The year before Israel declared independence (1948) largely on Palestinian-owned land, Peres was put in charge of personnel and weapons acquisition for the paramilitary force called Haganah. This systematic ethnic cleansing is known as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Hundreds of former Arab villages were destroyed to make room for Jewish villages. Zionist and Israeli leaders were not shy about acknowledging this. In their view Jewish land had to be redeemed and restored to its rightful owner -- the Jewish People -- and the "exiled" had to be in-gathered, no matter the cost to others. This was the Zionist project.

As a member of the Labor Party, Peres also played important roles in creating Israel's Mideast monopoly nuclear-weapons arsenal (unlike Iran it has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and does not permit international inspections) and in building illegal Jewish-only settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank after the June 1967 war against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Before that war, he helped administer military rule over the remaining Palestinian Arabs inside Israel. He also forged Israel's military and nuclear alliance with apartheid South Africa.

In 1995 Peres, who maintained that the Palestinians had victimized themselves, became prime minister after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic for entering into the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization. (Rabin, like some other Israeli leaders, feared a loss of a Jewish majority in Israel and so favored a rump Palestinian state in parts of the West Bank. Rabin, Peres, and Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize for this dubious agreement.) In his campaign for prime minister a year later against Benjamin Netanyahu, Peres (who was also defense minister) sought to establish his hawkish credentials by launching a war against Lebanon (which Israel had devastated and occupied for nearly 20 years beginning in 1982). Peres named his war Operation Grapes of Wrath. According to veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk:

"The joint Nobel Peace Prize holder used as an excuse the firing of Katyusha rockets over the Lebanese border by the Hezbollah. In fact, their rockets were retaliation for the killing of a small Lebanese boy by a booby-trap bomb they suspected had been left by an Israeli patrol. It mattered not.

"A few days later, Israeli troops inside Lebanon came under attack close to Qana and retaliated by opening fire into the village. Their first shells hit a cemetery used by Hezbollah; the rest flew directly into the UN Fijian army camp where hundreds of civilians were sheltering. Peres announced that 'we did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise.'

"It was a lie. The Israelis had occupied Qana for years after their 1982 invasion, they had video film of the camp, they were even flying a drone over the camp during the 1996 massacre – a fact they denied until a UN soldier gave me his video of the drone, frames from which we published in The Independent. The UN had repeatedly told Israel that the camp was packed with refugees.

"This was Peres’s contribution to Lebanese peace. He lost the election and probably never thought much more about Qana."

Fisk was an eye-witness to the atrocity. "When I reached the UN gates, blood was pouring through them in torrents. I could smell it. It washed over our shoes and stuck to them like glue. There were legs and arms, babies without heads, old men’s heads without bodies. A man’s body was hanging in two pieces in a burning tree. What was left of him was on fire."

Over 100 civilians were killed. Fisk continued:

"There was a UN enquiry which stated in its bland way that it did not believe the slaughter was an accident. The UN report was accused of being anti-Semitic. Much later, a brave Israeli magazine published an interview with the artillery soldiers who fired at Qana. An officer had referred to the villagers as 'just a bunch of Arabs' ("arabushim" in Hebrew). 'A few Arabushim die, there is no harm in that,' he was quoted as saying. Peres’s chief of staff was almost equally carefree: 'I don’t know any other rules of the game, either for the [Israeli] army or for civilians….'"

This atrocious record -- hardly the record of a humanitarian -- has been cited in critical obituaries of Peres. (Besides Fisk's see critical obits here and here.) But much less noted was Peres's role in helping to pave the road to 9/11.

What possible role could Peres have played in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon? Recall Peres's cynical election-year onslaught against Lebanon and the massacre in Qana. It was his Operation Grapes of Wrath that radicalized key individuals who would plan and carry out those attacks.

As Middle East scholar Juan Cole wrote:

"In 1996, Israeli jets bombed a UN building where civilians had taken refuge at Cana/ Qana in south Lebanon, killing 102 persons; in the place where Jesus is said to have made water into wine, Israeli bombs wrought a different sort of transformation. In the distant, picturesque port of Hamburg, a young graduate student studying traditional architecture of Aleppo saw footage [of the destruction]. He was consumed with anguish and the desire for revenge. As soon as operation Grapes of Wrath had begun the week before, he had written out a martyrdom will, indicating his willingness to die avenging the victims, killed in that operation–with airplanes and bombs that were a free gift from the United States. His name was Muhammad Atta. Five years later he piloted American Airlines 11 into the World Trade Center."

Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, reported:

"On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque. It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response."

The Egyptian Atta was the leader of the cell in Hamburg and then in the United States without whom the hijacking of airplanes on 9/11 almost certainly could not have happened.

Atta was not the only one moved to action. Investigative reporter James Bamford told Scott Horton that Osama bin Laden "frequently mentioned Qana during those times. It was a very inflaming incident in terms of his own development of his hatred for the United States, and as well for other people throughout the Middle East.”

In his 1996 declaration of war against the United States, bin Laden wrote that among other crimes perpetrated against Muslims, "The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory.... All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn't respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its' [sic] allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves.... The youths hold you responsible for all of the killings and evictions of the Muslims and the violation of the sanctities, carried out by your Zionist brothers in Lebanon; you openly supplied them with arms and finance."

Lebanon and Qana, as we see were not the jihadis' only grievances against the United States, but Peres's war was one more count in a long bill of indictment against the United States, whose government has underwritten the Israeli military to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Peres would have had no way of knowing that five years later his war would produce such a dramatic act of revenge against the American people. But that should not lessen our condemnation of him. His mission in life -- Zionism -- required the degradation and destruction of the indigenous people who did not fit into his vision. It was inevitable that some kind of vengeful backlash would result. As usual, the victims were innocent bystanders. Perpetrators like Peres get to die of old age.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

Bush, 9/11, and Iraq: Trump Gets It Right

Donald Trump, for all his obnoxious demagoguery, is adding value to the presidential campaign by calling former President George W. Bush to account for 9/11 and the Iraq war, which set in motion the growth and spread of al-Qaeda and the rise of the Islamic State. Former U.S. rulers rarely face consequences for the horrible things they do in office. Condemnation is considered impolite.

The Emperor Lies

Four years ago the late great journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote, “Alas, the actual story of ‘our history’ is an unrelenting ability to lie about everything, while simultaneously claiming America’s superior moral worth.”

It so happens he wrote that sentence in closing a column on President Obama’s elaborate story about the Navy SEALs’ May 2, 2011, assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Op-ed: Obama, bin Laden, and Mitt

The partisan squabbling over the killing of Osama bin Laden is a typical election-year distraction, effectively squelching discussion of more important matters one year after the execution of the al-Qaeda chief executive.

Aided by cable-TV talking heads, Americans are spending too much time speculating over whether presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would have given the order to get bin Laden, and also issuing paeans to President Obama’s “courage.” (We have a strange notion of courage. Did Obama risk his own life? Of course not. He was safe in the White House Situation Room. Perhaps he “risked” his political career, but even that isn’t certain. A failed operation might have won him sympathy for a good try. On the other hand, the men under his command were ordered to risk their lives and the lives of others.)

While the commentators are engaged in trivialities, big foreign-policy questions are ignored.

Read “Obama, bin Laden, and Mitt.”

After bin Laden?

So it’s imperative that we not be fooled by appearances. The policymakers will not be using bin Laden’s death as grounds to dismantle the thousand U.S. military installations around the world, to stop supporting torture-loving dictators when they serve “American interests,” to end the violations of Americans’ civil liberties, or to defund the trillion-dollar-plus national security state. That gravy train, which gives prestige to “statesmen,” shapes the global order American-style, and lines the pockets of contractors, is not going to end merely because one man was shot by Navy SEALs.

Read the full op-ed here.

No Clean Hands

Even if one believes in capital punishment and thinks it the appropriate penalty for Osama bin Laden, consider who ordered it and what else he has authorized in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. That's more than enough to be disgusted by the news out of Pakistan the other night.

Ted Koppel Begins to See the Light

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned....

In a 2004 video message, [Osama bin Lalden] boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. "All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."...

Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald's. Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?

The rest is here.