Last Friday’s FFF Email Update linked to my September 2008 Freedom Daily article entitled “Seven Years of Darkness, Tyranny, and Oppression.” On that same day, my daily blog post was entitled “Afghanistan and Big Government.”
The point of both articles was to show how U.S. foreign policy is at the root of foreign anger and hatred against the United States, manifesting itself in the form of terrorist blowback. That blowback threat has been used as the excuse to infringe on civil liberties, to expand the size and scope of federal power, and to spend ever-increasing sums of taxpayer money.
Yesterday’s Washington Post provided an example of how this process works:
“U.S. troops stormed the house of a former army officer Saturday in northern Iraq, killing the man and his wife, wounding their 8-year-old daughter and unleashing anger among residents at tactics they deemed excessive, police said.”
What was the U.S. military’s rationale for this deadly raid? It was the standard one. The army officer killed was, they said, a terrorist. During the raid, they said, the man’s wife reached under a mattress and refused orders in Arabic to show her hands, at which point she was killed along with her husband. The little girl was injured by a bullet that passed through her mother.
The U.S. government sees all of this as perfectly normal. The government becomes convinced that the Iraqi man is a terrorist. They raid his home in the middle of the night and end up killing him and his wife and injure his daughter. The wife’s death and child’s injury might be unfortunate collateral damage but the damage is worth it. After all, the world now has one or two less terrorists in it.
Except….
We don’t really know whether the dead man and woman were guilty of anything because they were never put on trial. All we have is the word of the U.S. military that he was, in fact, a terrorist, and, therefore, it’s really no big deal that he was killed.
Equally important has been the reaction among Iraqis to the raid. According to the Post, “In the angry aftermath, 40 cars carrying hundreds of people converged on the family’s funeral later in the day, said Fadhil Najim, a neighbor. He said the mourners shouted, ‘Death to America! Death to killers of women!’ as they buried the bodies.”
So, according to U.S. officials, the raid has removed one or perhaps two terrorists from the world. At the same, however, it has added hundreds of people to the ranks of potential terrorists.
Do the math. One terrorist gone and hundreds of potential terrorists produced.
Do you see the problem?
Don’t forget that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. government invaded a country that had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. Yet, thanks to the U.S. invasion, we’re told that Iraq has now become a central front in the war on terrorism.
Do the math. No terrorists at all and then, after the invasion, countless terrorists produced.
As I pointed out in my articles, the federal government, owing to its invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, has succeeded in establishing and running one of the biggest terrorist-producing operations in history, one that is perpetual as long as the occupations continue, along with big government, big spending, and ever-growing infringements on liberty.
Meanwhile, the situation isn’t any different in Afghanistan. There, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is criticizing the killing of 16 people in a recent U.S. military operation. According to yesterday’s BBC, “Mr. Karzai said that most of those killed were civilians, adding that such deadly incidents strengthened Taleban rebels and weakened Afghanistan’s government.”
At first U.S. officials maintained that all of the dead were terrorists who had opened fire on U.S. troops. The U.S. government is now promising to investigate the incident.
At this juncture of history, the United States is badly in need of political leaders who exercise wisdom rather than foolishness. Americans who cherish freedom, peace, and prosperity should hope that President Obama wisely withdraws all U.S. troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan and brings them home immediately.
Don’t hold your breath, however. Three days after Obama was inaugurated, two drone missile attacks conducted by the CIA in Pakistan, a country that is not at war with the United States, killed 17 people.