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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Finally! The long delayed assault on Fallujah is underway. Our troops have spent many months supplying the enemy with a target rich environment and it is about time we ended it.
There is some silver lining to the cloud. The months gave the new Iraqi government a chance to build its image within Iraq. It bought time for civilians in the town to get out or hunker down. It gave loads of time for every fruitcake from the Atlantic to the Pacific to make their way to Iraq and infiltrate Fallujah. They think they can win a great battle there, and I hope they keep believing it all the way until their very last breath.
You know these people are insane: noone but the terminally mentally deficient would want to be a part of an amateur effort to hold ground against the Marines.
I wonder if there might be a bit of Darwinian selection at work here.
PS: If we have any of the troops from that part of the world dropping by… good luck and good hunting.
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Thankfully it looks like they’re not screwing around this time, judging from evidence of them using Spectre gunships earlier this weekend.
Populated, urban area and they’re using Spooky? Oh, yeah, the gloves are most definitely off.
Amen
Semper Fi Leathernecks!
Semper Fi, Leathernecks
wouldn’t it be nice if most of the bastards were stuck in one place?
My thoughts entirely.
I suppose it’s too late to hope some of the more annoying press slapheads will accept the Islamonazis’ offer to “embed” with the rebels during this operation…
What do you all think of reporters all liesurely snapping pics of the insurgents?
Also, as I mentioned before, this month could provide a much anticipated geopolitical trifecta:
– Kerry/’elites’/moonbats lose
– Arafat officially declared brain dead (what tookem so long?)
– Falluja smitten
Anyone looking for that extra something, making a quadrafecta?
John Howard being re-elected in Australia (another Coalition of the Willing partner).
You know these people are insane: noone but the terminally mentally deficient would want to be a part of an amateur effort to hold ground against the Marines.
They aren’t “insane” in the usual sense. They have very strong religious beliefs. If they die fighting the enemy, they’ll get the 72 virgins (and the usually not mentioned 28 “servant boys”).
So, if you assume that many of them would welcome the chance to be martyrs, you see that things like this current effort aren’t going to be as effective as they could be if we were fighting, say, Germans.
See this for some similar ideas. In a way this “state actors” thing does somewhat approach the idea of going after those who want to live rather than those who want to die, but it still doesn’t address the underlying ideology. For that, we’d need to crack down on the Saudis. When abouts do you think we’ll get around to that?
Hmm.
How I’d have dealt wih this Fallujah business, if it were me: as soon as it became an intractable rebel holdout, I’d have surrounded the city several miles out, then issued an ultimatum thus:
1) Everyone in Fallujah has precisely one week from now to exit the city in an orderly manner and surrender yourself, unarmed, to our forces for temporary detention.
2) At the end of the week, we are going to thermonuke the city. If you’re still inside, too bad.
3) Do not do this again, or we will do this again.
Well I’ll certainly be firing off a snotty letter to Rupert Murdoch if Sky News fails to put out with some quality, extended coverage of the Jihadis being packed off to Paradise. Let’s hope that in the process the wonderful C130 Gunship is racking up the airmiles above Fallujah too. You can view video footage here of one taking out a camp in Afghanistan by cannon fire. Just the thing to warm the cockles during those winter evenings.
It is a good job then that Julian Morrison is not dealing with this Fallujah business.
Apart from the gross immorality of this scheme, the threat would not be believed and if you carried through and exploded a nucler bomb you would initiate a devastating world war which would result in countless millions of innocent deaths. Very peculiar policies for a ‘libertarian’ to be advocating.
Well said Paul; the idea of killing many innocents, destroying thousands of homes & furthermore poisoning an entire city & it’s surroundings for years to come, just because some fanatics decided to stay there, is disgusting. Utterly repugnant. Cowardly as all hell to boot, & on top of it all, a fantastically effective way of ensuring that a majority of Iraqis hate the US.
Paul does indeed voice my confusion about this being a libertarian blog, considering the significant warmongering sentiments. The whole idea of trying to kill all the terrorists is just absurd. The more destruction our armies deal out results in more innocent deaths and more sympathy for the insurgents’ cause.
It should be obvious to those who despise government force that this kind of method for “freeing” people can never work. It never has.
Paul, A-t, scumble, mumble, bumble, grumble.
Julian is indeed mistaken in advocating taking out Fallujah with a thermonuke. A thermonuke is a pretty expensive bit of kit. Half a dozen MOABs would be far more cost effective.
Of course we could all have just bent over, touched our toes and asked for more on 10/11. You’ll find that many here are of a libertarian bent, me included. However when others declare it their life’s work to harm me and mine then I want our forces to show me some of what my taxes have been spent on.
I’ll be sure to leave some flowers at the entrance to the Guardian building in remembrance of Fallujah for you.
The whole idea of trying to kill all the terrorists is just absurd.
And the alternative is?
he more destruction our armies deal out results in more innocent deaths and more sympathy for the insurgents’ cause.
And the evidence for this in Iraq is? The insurgency there is made up primarily of foreigners, and their local support has been drying up.
Also, in the nature of historical counterexamples, I would point out that what results in support for insurgents is restraint in dealing with them. Wars where there was little real support for insurgent movements – Germany, Japan, WWII in general, hell, even the Civil War, where we showed little mercy or restraint. Wars where insurgents throve – Vietnam, and Iraq to date, where we have shown much restraint.
Examples and counterexamples can be multiplied, I am sure. My point is that the easy equation of beating the living crap out of your enemies with creating an insurgent movement doesn’t always, or even generally, hold true.
Does being a libertarian then entail letting scumbags shoot at you without fighting back. Makes sense to me to shoot to kill, though got to agree a nuke is a bit over the top. Got to re consider my thoughts as I have always believed that the wait was a mistake, but hey if more of the scumbags are there now then all the better.
Got to agree about arafat the sooner he’s with his virgins and servent boys in hell the better.
scumble,
I think that the editor’s of this blog no longer claim that it is, strictly speaking, a ‘libertarian’ blog. Though many of the principle contributors are officers of the Libertarian Alliance. Nevertheless, if you can overlook the eyewatering war sentiments of some of the commenters, the are many things of interest to libertarians discussed here.
I didn’t mean to rake up the argument about whether libertarians can or cannot legitimately support the war, rather I was surprized by Julian’s statement since he is normally a very consistent anarcho-libertarian commenter who seems to have temporarily taken leave of his senses.
Anyway very few websites are consistently ‘libertarian’, Lew Rockwell.com make equivalent editorial errors on immigration policy.
“Wars where there was little real support for insurgent movements – Germany, Japan, WWII in general, hell, even the Civil War, where we showed little mercy or restraint.”
Who were the ‘insurgents’ in WWII in Japan or Germany? What are you talking about? The French resistance against the Germans? Yes, there was no real guerrilla action in Germany, & we never really set foot in Japan, so who knows… but the big, big difference between these & the other cases you state was that both these countries had been swept along on a militaristic/nationalist tide, had *started* wars of aggression on the basis of these beliefs, & were dramatically losing those wars, which their ideologies of strength predicted they would win.
This whole thing is somewhat trickier imho, & is certainly not down to “well, we were more ruthless in x case”… how much more ruthless would you have liked the vietman war to be? Should the US perhaps have defoliated the entire jungle & burnt *all* the villages to the ground just to make sure that the few who remained alive were ‘free’?
WW2 and the subsequent peace demonstrated one important fact of war; that is, enter it only if you are willing to utterly crush your opponent, humiliate the cause and strip the movement of any credibility. The Allies knew that to stop at the borders Germany and Japan was not enough. Nazism and militant Japan may well have survived in power or even simply as an influence if those countries rose and rebelled against their masters. One of the aims of going to Berlin itself and of destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to demonstrate the ruin those regimes had brought onto their own countries and to demonstrate the futility of resisting. I.e. not only must they be defeated but they must be seen to be defeated. This destroyed any chanceof resistance movements building in those countries.
I’ve a couple minutes in between tasks, so I’ll comment on a few comments.
First off, I am pretty sure Julian is blowing off a bit of steam and having the fun of winding some of you up and getting a good discussion going in the process. Nukes actually have very little use in modern warfare because they are too indiscriminate and there just aren’t that many real targets big enough for one to be of use. In a world where we are not 15 minutes from Armageddon every day of our lives (a change I much approve of), you just don’t have much to point them at. No masses of tanks in the Fulda; no bands of missile silos; no hostage cities.
While I nuke does not fit the bill, that still doesn’t change the basic issue: You fight or you don’t fight at all. You go into win, and winning means destroying the enemies will and desire to fight. You take whatever action is necessary to achieve that goal. If you do not know what that implies or are not willing to carry through, then war is not an option. Half wars kill more people than full wars.
As to the libertarianess of Samizdata… well, as a famous Presidential philosopher once not quite said, “It depends on what you mean by libertarian.” I’ve often thought that for a lot of us the title “Hienlein Libertarians” might be the best description, but like any other it is imperfect, besides being a bit tongue in cheek. Jacksonians with a libertarian meme might be a similar way to look at it.
My preference though is to point out that each human being is an individual with a set of unique views and beliefs and weightings of importance of those. Ideologies imply things are or are not; real people simply coalesce around those who happen to fall nearest them at a given time on a given issue. We would fall within most of the major libertarian schools most of the time; at least one of them nearly all of the time; but on some issues we would, within this existing, current world, suggest pragmatic solutions to problems which have to be solved now, with the tools available now.
We like the dream world; we would like to see the real future become as much like it as possible; but we are realists who know we have to deal with each day as it comes.
Dunno,
The marines have been telegraphing this move so long, you know the tactically clever Jihadis found pressing business somewhere else about 2 week ago. Leaving the blindly fanatic, the utter slapheads, and the slow or ignorant, to fight and get killed.
Somehow, I’m not terribly warmed by this, I’ve nothing against the fanatics and dopes getting what’s surely coming to them.
But, giving enough warning to let the clever ones out, now THAT is unfortunate. You can imagine that they’ll soon be up to their murderous mischief everywhere else.
As far as the buisness of wether or not it’s “libertarian” to support a war goes, I feel this is simply a mass case of “you violate the rights of others you forfiet your own.” Which is a strong belief of mine.
I have to wonder how many of the insurgents are still Baathist loyalists and how many are fighters who seized on an excuse to kill some infidels. That shouldn’t alter our response however, they are seeking to either re-establish Saddam’s regieme or worse, create a new hardline Islamic state like Afganistan under the Taliban. They seek to oppress, we should, at least, allow the targets of their oppression an opportunity at freedom.
if a liberated Iraq were to turn communist, I would not shed a tear.
Andrew Robb November 2nd 2004
we should, at least, allow the targets of their oppression an opportunity at freedom.
Andrew Robb November 9th 2004
Andrew, you really should spend some time to get your thoughts in order on this issue.
I never said nuke it when full of innocents. It wouldn’t be, I’d have given them a week’s warning, remember? It would have caused property damage and the death of those who think that prayer trumps physics. And the expense would have been worth the example…
Paul Coulam says: I was surprized by Julian’s statement since he is normally a very consistent anarcho-libertarian commenter who seems to have temporarily taken leave of his senses.
Heh, I’m an ancap but I can take other positions on a what-if. As far as war’s concerned, I think it’s unavoidably immoral – but if you’re going to do it, get it right!
Paul,
My thoughts are this.
Saddam’s use of violence and coersion is the deciding factor for me. He needed to removed from power just as the insurgents need to be brought to justice. After that task is completed the Iraqi people should be free to decide what form of government they wish to live under.
Communism was a hypothetical choice used to try to prove a point in anoither disscussion. Apperantly I didn’t prove it well. I’ll try again.
We finish the war, or at the least, bring a reasonable level of security to the region. At that time we should let the Iraqi’s decide on their form government. If they choose communism, as long as any opposed are allowed to come and go as they please, it’s their hell and I’ll leave them to it. I won’t support their choice, but I’m not going to say that we should go back to war with them to get them to change their minds.
I did not say, in my last post, that we should ensure that Iraq take the form of government we like best. All I ask is that they be given an opportunity at freedom. If they don’t seize it, it’s their loss.
Now that everything is back in contex it seems a little more clear to me.
Or to put it bluntly,
We give them one chance and if they are f***king stupid enough to blow it, it’s no longer our problem so long as they don’t do any harm to us.