From: Barry Paschal (Opinions Editor, Columbia County News-Times,
Martinez, Georgia)
cnt@groupz.net
To: FFF
Subject: FFF Op-Ed: “What about the Children?” by Jacob G. Hornberger
Date: October 10, 2001
Please direct this to the terribly misguided Mr. Hornberger:
Only someone who is hopelessly obtuse, or patently stupid, would equate legal international sanctions against a government with murder of children. It is evident, from nothing more than your ability to write subject-verb-object sentences, that you have enough spark of intelligence to know that the idea of sanctions is to force the citizenry of a country to make tough decisions about their own future: Starve, or turn out the tyrant. That is a far more humane than simply bombing the tyrant into submission, with the direct result of the deaths of innocents. In that scenario, the innocents are given no choice: They simply die as “collateral damage.” However, with sanctions, the citizens are given the opportunity to decide collectively whether they wish to sacrifice themselves for their own well-fed misruler.
Your simplistic argument reminds me of that used by teen-agers: They blame the sudden downturn in their social life on their parents, who placed them on restriction for violating house rules. The reality is that their misbehavior resulted in their restriction; the parents were simply the enforcers of their punishment. America is the instrument by which the Iraqi people (and the North Koreans, and Cubans) are deprived of certain trade goods. But it is the rulers of those countries who perpetuate the conditions under which those sanctions continue. Any time the Iraqis, and the North Koreans, and the Cubans, want to play by the rules and yes, the rules are OUR rules they will be able to enjoy sanction-free lives. Until such time, they, and you, should direct all indignation toward the criminals who run their countries.
Just curious, but where is the rock under which you blame-America-first people hide when you are not spreading verbal manure?
Barry L. Paschal cnt@groupz.net
Opinions Editor
The Columbia County News-Times
Martinez, Georgia
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To: Barry L. Paschal, Opinions Editor, Columbia County News-Times, Martinez, Georgia
cnt@groupz.net
From: Jacob G. Hornberger
Subject: Response to Your Email regarding “What about the Children?” by Jacob G. Hornberger
Date: October 11, 2001
Dear Mr. Paschal:
Thank you for your email and your feedback with respect to my op-ed “What about the Children?”
Unfortunately, you make a mistake in your analysis that is commonly made by people all over the world — confusing the citizenry of a country with the government that rules over them.
For example, you say, “Where is the rock under which you blame-America-first people hide when you are not spreading verbal manure?” If you will carefully re-read my op-ed, you will discover that I don’t blame “America” for anything. Instead, I blame the U.S. government for the immoral killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children.
That might not be an important distinction in your mind, but I can assure you that it is a critically important distinction for individualists and libertarians.
Despite the fact that I am a citizen of the United States, I am certainly not responsible, politically or morally or religiously, for the deaths of those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who have been killed by the U.S. government over the last 10 years, if for no other reason than that I was consistently opposing and speaking out against the killings long before the attacks on September 11. (See, for example, my essay “Terrorism or War?” June 2000: https://www.fff.org/comment/ed0600f.asp.)
Would it be morally right for the parents, friends, or relatives of any of those Iraqi children to come over to the United States and kill me for what my government has done to those children? Absolutely not, I am not the U.S. government and, again, I am not responsible, morally, politically, or religiously, for the wrongdoing of my government, especially when I have done my best both to disassociate myself from such wrongdoing and to ardently oppose it.
That is one reason that we individualists and libertarians are so horrified at the terrorists’ crashing of planes filled with (innocent) civilian passengers into the World Trade Center, causing the deaths of thousands of (innocent) civilians.
The terrorists and their co-conspirators were (and are) obviously filled with hatred and anger over what the U.S. government has done to people overseas. Was it morally right for them to target people for death because of wrongful acts committed by their government against people overseas? Perish the thought, for it is a moral abomination!
And it is also a moral abomination for anyone to suggest that the U.S. government should target foreign citizens, and especially children, for death because they haven’t had the audacity to overthrow their omnipotent dictator, especially a well-armed dictator who has disarmed the citizenry under the statist and collectivist rubric of “gun control.”
Moreover, whether a child dies as a result of starvation or a bomb dropped on his head, the result is the same for the child — he or she has been dispatched to Heaven sooner than would have been the case had the bomb or the embargo not done their dirty deed. But just so that you won’t have any misconceptions about how children are dying in Iraq, permit me to point out to you that according to the Washington Post, only a year or so ago a 13-year-old Iraqi boy named Omran Harbi Jawair was tending his sheep when an exploding U.S. government missile tore his head off. Who’s morally responsible for the death of that boy, sir?
You also attempt to excuse the U.S. embargo that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent children by claiming that it’s legal. Your reasoning and your analysis are both erroneous and fallacious.
First, do I need to remind you that there were other governments in the 20th century that killed multitudes of innocent people while claiming that their conduct was “lawful” under the laws of their murderous regimes?
Second, do I need to point out that “lawful” and “moral” are two completely separate and distinct concepts?
Third, you are wrong about the U.S. embargo’s being lawful. An embargo is an act of war, just as the continual 10-year bombing campaign against Iraq has been an act of war. Must I remind you that under our Constitution, the executive branch is precluded from waging war without an express declaration of war from Congress? (At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that’s why Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt each had to secure a constitutionally required declaration of war as a prerequisite to entering the two World Wars.)
The U.S. government’s continual 10-year war against Iraq, including the bombing and embargo, have been waged without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war and, therefore, the deaths of those hundreds of thousands of innocent children, contrary to your claim, have not been lawful under our system of laws, which includes the supreme law of the land, the Constitution — the law by which the U.S. citizenry (who are separate and distinct from the government) control the conduct of their government officials. And, please, spare me any citations of UN resolutions — they don’t appear in our Constitution and therefore don’t supersede the supreme law of our land.
I hope you’ll permit me to say something about the false notion of patriotism that many in the press are promoting to the American people. The true patriot does not blindly support his government even in the midst of war, no questions asked, as Americans so correctly pointed out to foreigners at various times during the 20th century. The true patriot, as the Founding Fathers of our country well understood, is the citizen who makes an independent appraisal of his government’s conduct; and if he concludes that it violates well-established principles of liberty and morality, he stands against it, even if the rest of the populace, including much of the press, are marching in nationalistic, martial lockstep with their government officials, not daring to question anything about their government’s conduct.
Ultimately, the people of this country are going to realize that the statist and collectivist vision that has guided them for more than 100 years, the vision of the socialistic welfare state and the regulated society — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, public (i.e., government) schooling, income taxation, the war on drugs, war on poverty, war on wealth, war on immigrants — have led them down the wrong road.
They’re also going to figure out that the statist and interventionist foreign-policy vision of Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Johnson, and Nixon has taken them down a road that will fundamentally alter their daily way of life, with National ID cards; homeland security police; cameras on every street corner; troops in airports, concerts, and sporting events; destruction of civil liberties, and sealed borders, not to mention the constant threat of chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks here at home.
Please rest assured, Mr. Paschal, that we libertarians (who are separate and distinct from the U.S. government) will continue to do our best to lead the American people (who are also separate and distinct from the U.S. government) back onto the right road, the vision of liberty and republic of our Founders — Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Adams — whose vision of liberty and republic, as you no doubt know, rejected the principles of statism and collectivism, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, public (i.e., government) schooling, income taxation, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on wealth, the war on immigrants, and of course foreign “aid,” foreign entanglements, foreign intervention, and foreign wars.
Best regards and thank you again for sharing your perspectives and vision with me.
Jacob G. Hornberger
President
The Future of Freedom Foundation
11350 Random Hills Road
Suite 800
Fairfax, VA 22030
jhornberger@fff.org
www.fff.org