Are We Gods?

This holiday season, as you walk through a public area (any mall, grocery, or restaurant will do), start counting the people you see. Look in their faces, listen to their conversations, and try to appreciate each of them not just as strangers, but as fellow human beings. When you get to 40 (making sure to include at least 29 women and children), consider that this is the minimum number of civilians whose lives were brought to violent ends by U.S./NATO bombs during the recent military intervention in Libya, according to The New York Times. Keep counting until you get to “perhaps more than 70” and consider that these 30-plus people represent the margin of error in the Times analysis; this uncertainty about even the number of completely innocent people we have killed is a reality of “humanitarian” war, in which we drop hundreds of thousands of pounds of high explosives from the skies upon the people we are “helping” below.

Of course, this estimated civilian death toll doesn’t take into account the innocent people killed by other forces in the Libyan conflict, which was an inevitable result of turning an entire country into a war zone. Nor does it reflect the deaths of the actual combatants, who should be neither ignored nor forgotten; just ask the parents of any American soldier killed in one of our many wars. In fact, ask any parent, period. When you think about the volume of love, sweat, and tears that go into raising a child, it is almost unfathomable to think that any life can just be snuffed out. Even more astonishing is the fact that each human life is quite literally the product of the entire history of the human race. When any person is killed, a direct line going back to the very first human that walked the earth is erased from our future. We will never know the artists, poets, and peacemakers who have never lived because their parents were killed in senseless wars.

Libya: Military Success Doesn’t Erase Moral Questions

Shortly after the first U.S. cruise missiles fell in Libya on March 19, 2011, signaling the start of the seven-month NATO campaign to “protect civilians” by dropping bombs on that country, I wrote that even if we reduced our moral standards to those of Osama bin Laden, the murder of even one Libyan in the name of “human rights” must still be considered immoral. With the declared end of NATO’s “Operation Unified Protector” on Oct. 31, 2011, it is worth revisiting the morality of the so-called humanitarian intervention in Libya.

There are those who might argue that morality really had nothing to do with the U.S. involvement in the bombing of Libya, that the real reason for war was to gain access to Libyan resources and lucrative business contracts for Western companies, or even that it was a simple propaganda ploy to help make it seem that the U.S. really is on the “right” side of the Arab Spring after propping up Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and other dictators for so long. However, because the official justification for war given by the U.S., U.N., and NATO was primarily based on the protection of civilians (at its heart, an issue of morality), rather than national interests or even so-called “security” issues, it is worthwhile to take the warmongers at their word.

Supporting Torturers Against Torturers

I have authorized a small number of combat-equipped U.S. forces to deploy to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces… 

On Oct. 12, the initial team of U.S. military personnel with appropriate combat equipment deployed to Uganda. During the next month, additional forces will deploy…. These forces will act as advisers to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA [Lord's Resistance Army]... 

Subject to the approval of each respective host nation, elements of these U.S. forces will deploy into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

So stated Barack Obama, the elected representative of the American people and the leader of our empire, in a short note to the leaders of Congress. Thus began yet another immoral military adventure into foreign lands at a time when America itself is crumbling to such an extent that its own citizens have (finally) begun long-term occupations of its cities and towns.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the Lord’s Resistance Army is a brutal scourge on the African people. Its members have indeed “murdered, raped, and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women, and children in central Africa” as Obama has stated. For example,according to Human Rights Watch, over the course of just four days in 2009, the LRA viciously killed at least 321 civilians and abducted more than 250 others (likely for use as child soldiers, sex slaves, and other horrible purposes). Most of those killed (including a 3-year-old girl and a 72-year-old man) were tied up then hacked or beaten to death with machetes, axes, or clubs. We should all hope for the end of this organization and on an individual level do whatever we can to speed its demise.

Murdering Some to Save Others

In a recent New York Times op-ed titled “Is It Better to Save No One?,” liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof implicitly attacks the critics of the U.S. intervention in Libya as being heartless and/or immoral. Though he acknowledges the hypocrisy and inconsistency of U.S. foreign policy and the potential for the intervention to damage U.S. national security, Kristof calls the bombing of Libya “truly extraordinary, wonderful, and rare.” He then comes to his central point and asks the following questions: “[J]ust because we allowed Rwandans or Darfuris to be massacred, does it really follow that to be consistent we should allow Libyans to be massacred as well? Isn’t it better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none?”

The message underlying these questions and the entire article is that “we” (by which Kristof means the U.S. military) should indeed have intervened in Rwanda on behalf of Tutsis and in Sudan on behalf of Darfuris, just as we should intervene in Libya on behalf of some Libyans against other Libyans. “Intervening,” in the context of the tactics, capabilities, and political realities governing U.S. military actions, means killing Hutus, Sudanese Arabs, pro-Gadhafi Libyans, and anyone else who gets in the way of bombs, cruise missiles, and economic sanctions. Kristof and his like-minded contemporaries in the political elite appear to believe that their argument is a moral one. Even some non-interventionists and realists opposed to the Libyan intervention have fallen into this trap by arguing that the Libyan civil war simply isn’t “our” business, which to me implies that if it were “our” business, it may in fact be moral to intervene in the manner “we” have. Likewise, some have argued that even if it would be “good” to bomb Libya, the United States simply doesn’t have the resources to violently enforce human rights everywhere. Just as liberals opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq trapped themselves into arguing that “sanctions can work” (thereby conceding the war proponents’ claims that Iraq was developing WMDs and could not be allowed to do so), some opponents of the U.S. bombing of Libya yield far too much to the interventionist view of the world.

The Immorality of ‘Humanitarian’ Military Intervention

I am sorry to report that I must add to my already considerable moral burden yet another set of murders committed by the U.S. government, funded by my taxes, and allowed by my complacency. As of March 19, 2011, I have fresh Libyan blood on my hands and on my soul. The U.S. (and U.K.) bombing of Libyan targets with at least 112 U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles was a fundamentally immoral act, and I fear it marks only the beginning of the murders that are to come.

According to initial reports, 48 people were killed and more were wounded in these opening air strikes. This has usually been reported in the Western media with the disclaimer that this is only “according to Libyan officials” and “cannot be independently verified.” While reporters may have some legitimate cause to question whether the so-called Libyan officials have inflated the true number of casualties of foreign military action, I find it telling that the same standard of journalism is rarely applied to the statements of U.S. government officials. Regardless of this implicit hypocrisy, the implication beneath these disclaimers is that less than 48 Libyans were probably killed in this particular assault and most or all of these Libyans were not the “civilians” they were reported to be by the Libyan state-run media. Instead, it is implied, those killed were likely “combatants” who were working at (or happened to be in close proximity to) military targets such as anti-aircraft weapons.