Our Bloody Cultural Psychosis

Imagine someone who did not know the difference between right and wrong and felt that he could, and should, take anything he wanted from anyone he wanted because, as far as he could see, there was no reason not to. If he wanted to buy something but was low on funds, he would not hesitate to kill someone in order to access his wallet. If he became hungry, he would be willing to slay a randomly selected human being for the contents of his lunch box. People like this are sometimes referred to as “criminally insane,” because they genuinely do not appear to understand why they should not do whatever they happen to feel like doing, even when it harms someone else, and even when it destroys that person’s life. Such creatures do exist, and when they are finally apprehended, they are locked away in psychiatric hospitals or maximum security prisons to prevent them from harming anyone else.

Now consider the comportment of modern political leaders, who kill the inhabitants of other lands, and sometimes also their own, because they believe that their political goals are more important than the victims’ lives. Leaders who perpetrate mass homicide in the name of a country, or in some cases humanity, claim that they are acting nobly, with honor, even as piles of dead children amass. When an enemy leader conducts himself in a manner deemed unacceptable, then the “proper” response is thought by foreign policy elites to be to rain bombs upon the offending leader’s land, no matter how densely populated it happens to be. All of this would be laughable, if it were not in fact the widely accepted, albeit pathological, first premise of contemporary foreign policy.

Once upon a time, leaders fought alongside their troops. Bellicose presidents and prime ministers continue to this day to pose as courageous, even though they themselves are nearly never at any risk of personal harm when they order their troops to deploy or drop bombs abroad. When Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait in 1991, President George H.W. Bush stated in a letter to the leader: “There can be no reward for aggression. Nor will there be any negotiation. Principle cannot be compromised.” Bush Sr was heralded at the time as a strong leader by pundits, whose words were then parroted by the populace. Later, Bush bragged about having “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” that is, what had become the reluctance of Americans to become embroiled in foreign wars, and the rest is history. The entire twenty-first century has been one long, continuous bombing campaign abroad.

In reality, Bush Sr’s refusal to engage in dialogue was not the mark of a great man but of someone entirely unconcerned with the consequences of unleashing massive military might against untold numbers of people in response to what was decried as a criminal act by the dictator of their land. The innocent persons who died as a direct result of Bush Sr’s decision to target civilian structures, including water treatment facilities, were blithely labelled “collateral damage” and swiftly swept from the collective memory of the citizenry which funded their ruin. President Bill Clinton effectively extended his predecessor’s assault on the people of Iraq, not only with further bombing, but also by implementing severe sanctions which made it impossible either to purify the contaminated water or to access medicines needed to treat the diseases caused by it.

A decade after Operation Desert Storm, on September 11, 2001, a group of angry jihadists killed about 3,000 persons on U.S. soil. People all over the world, including the United States, were shocked and appalled. Most everyone in the West had been successfully indoctrinated to believe that the 1991 Gulf War was just, and they never heard about the thousands of innocent Iraqis who died as a result of Bush Sr’s insistence on dropping massively destructive bombs in response to a minor border dispute which could, and should, have been resolved by sending knowledgeable persons to investigate whether or not Saddam Hussein’s claim that Kuwait was siphoning off Iraqi oil was true.

President George W. Bush, having already refused to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, continued his father’s assault on the Iraqi people when he ordered the reinvasion of their country in 2003. Before invading, in an ersatz show of diplomacy, Bush Jr announced that Saddam Hussein could forestall the invasion if, and only if, he proved that he had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A negative existential proof being impossible, Bush moved ahead with his war, ignoring reports by (non-U.S.) experts, including U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, that there was no evidence for the existence of any biological, chemical or nuclear arsenals, or programs for their production, in Iraq.

The crimes of September 11, 2001, thus served as a rallying call to let slip the dogs of war once again, and the War on Terror wrecked or degraded the lives of millions of persons in Afghanistan and Iraq who had absolutely nothing to do with what happened on that day, the perpetrators themselves having hailed mostly from Saudi Arabia. The United States has been engaged in nonstop bombing ever since, continually combating an ever-expanding array of enemies, such as ISIS, created by its very own interventions.

Every war is supported by outspoken figures such as Senator Lindsey Graham and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who persist in posturing as though the United States of America is the benevolent beacon on the hill, shining the light of freedom and democracy all over the globe. Meanwhile, the U.S. government undertakes assiduously to destroy persons, such as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who attempt to illuminate the criminal comportment of the U.S. regime and thus pose a threat to the maintenance of the delusional image of the United States as “the indispensable nation.” Whistleblowers such as Daniel Hale and Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning are thrown into federal prison, while the crimes they expose continue on unabated, under cover of “state secrets privilege,” essentially the modern-day equivalent of the Ring of Gyges (Plato’s Republic).

From the perspective of rationality, what is most disturbing about recent history is the degree to which there is nearly never any attempt to assess the value or outcome of the many lethal rampages inflicted on the world by the U.S. military state in the name of democracy and peace. A recently released a report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, one of the Pentagon’s own research institutions, has concluded that deaths from terrorism in Africa increased 100,000 percent during the U.S. War on Terror.  But even such sobering news serves as no cause for pause to the cheerleaders for mass homicide. They have altogether lost touch with reality by now and have managed at the same time to hypnotize most of the populace to the point where they regularly recycle pro-war incantations in what has become a form of catechism to this religion of bellicosity, even as the nation marches steadily toward insolvency.

The chasm between reality and image has grown so vast by now that it seems fair to say that our culture is in decline primarily as a result of the inability of persons in positions of power to recognize that their campaigns of mass homicide have not only ruined the lives of millions of persons abroad, and created an unsustainable amount of national debt, but are also tearing away at the very fiber of the nation itself. The government officials ostensibly in a position to alter policy, such as President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appear to be trapped in a world of their own propagandistic device. While arguing so enthusiastically for bombing and the provision of weapons on the slightest pretext, anywhere and everywhere, they find themselves enmeshed in a web of deception any extrication from which would require them to own up to their decisive role in ending the lives of far more human beings than any serial killer or hitman ever destroyed.

Nearly everyone recoils at the thought of the serial killer who strikes randomly to end the lives of his innocent victims, or the hitman who eliminates people in exchange for a small bundle of cash. Yet war profiteers such as Secretary of State Lloyd Austin, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and many others, are taken seriously when they insist that every conflict everywhere must be addressed through the use of deadly force. They simply do not care that the people who actually suffer as a result of bombing are nearly never the allegedly evil leaders whose actions are said to demand a response.

Following the unsavory examples of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, the Biden administration refuses to engage in dialogue with leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, even while knowing, on some level, that the conflict in Ukraine can only end either at the negotiation table or in a disastrous nuclear war. Putin himself stated in the recent interview by Tucker Carlson (the closest thing we have to a diplomat at this tragic moment in U.S. history) that Russia and Ukraine were on the brink of resolving their dispute when Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to block any possible détente because the U.S. government in fact wanted Ukraine to go to war.

In drumming up support for a massive infusion of weapons into both Ukraine and Israel, President Biden proclaims that every nation has a right to self-defense. Meanwhile, record numbers of persons have been entering the United States illegally, with the Biden administration suing the State of Texas for attempting to enforce the southern border. It might be tempting to write off Biden’s incoherent policy positions as the kaleidoscopic ephemera of a rapidly degenerating brain. But how are we to understand the acquiescence of the majority of the U.S. Senate to a bill which funds not only the meatgrinder war in Ukraine but also the ongoing slaughter of the Palestinian people in Gaza, including many thousands of obviously innocent children, in response to the crimes of radical dissident members of Hamas?

The answer is that the moral consciousness of the entire body politic differs from Biden’s own sorry state in degree, not in kind. U.S. political elites have achieved the rare distinction of being able to promote, in all sincerity, policies the consequences of which are indistinguishable from those of the psychopathic serial killers found in high security federal prisons today. The mindset required to fund the continuous massacre of large numbers of entirely innocent human beings on the pretext of facilely affixed and entirely mendacious labels such as “humanitarian intervention” and “peace and democracy,” erasing the victims from existence and then moving on to the next group to be extinguished, is psychologically equivalent to the poisonous cogitations of a psychopath who believes that whatever he desires is the only relevant consideration in deciding whom to kill in order to achieve his aims.

It is stunning that so many U.S. citizens have acquiesced to a quasi-psychotic worldview which permits them to pay for and enthusiastically support the annihilation of entirely innocent persons in response to what have been decreed the unacceptable behaviors of foreign leaders and small factions. Rather than looking at a pile of dead corpses and recoiling in horror, vowing to stop the madness, many citizens interpret this mayhem as the well-intentioned outcome of their leaders’ just wars. That such carnage is not only self-defeating, guaranteed to produce yet more retaliatory violence in what has been diagnosed even by military intelligence itself as blowback, is ignored each time the possibility for a new intervention is proposed. There is no more apt word to describe this categorical refusal to acknowledge the basic contours of reality than psychosis.

Moral Equivalence in War (Both Sides are Wrong)

It has become fashionable once again for regime apologists to denounce as “simpleminded,” even immoral, any assertion or intimation of moral equivalence between government killers and the factional fighters who undertake violent retaliation against them. Throughout the emotionally fraught dispute engendered by the events of October 7, 2023, and its aftermath, there has been a reigning confusion regarding what “moral equivalence” actually means.

The classical concept of “invincible ignorance,” which derives from the “just war” tradition, is closely related to the question of moral equivalence in killing because the soldiers on both sides of every conflict have been told by their commanders that they are acting in the name of justice. What’s more, the soldiers of formal military states are dutybound to obey what they themselves take to be lawful orders. They may of course be mistaken, but the question of objective justice is not the appropriate measure to use in analyzing what is happening during wartime, because the intentions acted upon inhere in individual actors, not the collective groups or institutions to which they belong. The truth is that in every war, whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, a number of strict moral equivalences obtain between the participants, whether killers or their material and moral supporters, on both sides:

1. Both sides believe that they are right, and their adversaries are wrong.
2. Both sides believe that their coveted end justifies the means which they choose to deploy in achieving that end.
3. Both sides claim to be aiming for justice and assume that violence must be met with more violence in order to avenge the wrongs already done.
4. Both sides have already decided, in advance of deploying any weapons, that they are willing to sacrifice innocent civilians, should that become necessary.
5. Both sides tend to regard the adult inhabitants of the enemy group as responsible for the crimes committed in virtue of the material and moral support which they have provided. This is true even in cases where one side is governed by a ruthless despot who makes it impossible to resist without risking severe consequences, up to and including death.
6. The fighters on both sides are willing to kill for their cause. (When the soldiers are coerced to fight under penalty of death for failure to comply, it is unclear that are freely choosing to do so, but they are still acting as they do in order to achieve a more modest aim: to avoid military execution.)
7. Because they believe that their cause is righteous and just, both sides act in good conscience and stigmatize their enemy as evil, even while knowing, on some level, that their adversaries, too, embrace the very same Manichean dichotomy: “We are good, and they are evil.”

If moral absolutism is true, then both sides to a dispute cannot be right, because it cannot be the case that both p and not-p. But there is nonetheless a profound sense in which it is possible for both sides to be wrong. The ugly truth about war is that both sides invariably accept the rules of a game which prioritizes the fighters at the expense of people who happen to “stand in their way.” When the military drops enormously destructive bombs on a densely populated area, everyone knows, including the officers who order the actions and the soldiers who execute them, that innocent civilians will be killed. This is not a matter of mere chance, but as certain as anything can be. Yet the military corps of formal nations continue to do this, even when their historical tally of corpses dwarfs that of the factional fighters whom they oppose.

Viewed from the perspective of the victims themselves—a perspective routinely ignored by those who develop and execute policy for both formal military institutions and factional killers—it is silly, even nonsensical, to quibble over numbers. Were 1,400 or 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7, 2023? For each individual victim stripped of his life, the loss is infinite in value. For each survivor left bereft, the loss is incalculable. The warriors on both sides publicly lament, in apparent sincerity, that they had no choice but to perpetrate death and destruction wherever they did. It was a “last resort,” they say.

In view of all of these terms of agreement, if the two sides ever bothered to listen to the grievances of the other, they would recognize why they fight with such vigor. In order to lessen the incidence of war in the world, what is needed is not to bellow out from the hilltops that we side with “the good guys,” and that anyone who opposes them is evil. For both sides believe this very same schema, with equal fervor, about themselves.

The point here is Socratic: No one knowingly does evil. Setting aside politics, and reflecting upon human action as it occurs in the moment, the unassailable truth of Socrates’ insight is that people are motivated to act based upon what they take to be the facts and according to their values. When two groups of killers agree to settle their disputes through the use of deadly force, with all of the innocent, noncombatant victims brushed aside and swiftly fictionalized as “collateral damage,” then they are both laboring under the delusion that somehow they are morally superior to their adversaries and anyone associated with them has less moral value than they and their fellow tribe members possess.

The supporters of formal military institutions will protest, “But of course it is worse to behead someone than it is to incinerate him using a missile launched from a drone! Who cannot recognize this truth?” The answer is that the victims themselves do not, for they are no longer in the position to be able to assess the allegedly “good intentions” of the killers who stole their lives away. The soldiers and the terrorists are all willing to sacrifice other people in achieving their aims, and in this sense they are indeed morally equivalent. The choice of the particular implement of homicide does not make one act of murder somehow more humane than another. Murder is murder, at the end of the day. Using a missile to carry out an act of assassination does not magically make it morally okay.

Other less obvious cases than the use of knives and missiles illustrate the very same point: that political killers evince a complete insouciance toward the people on the ground who “stand in the way.” Consider the children who died of dysentery and other treatable diseases in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton certainly did not behead those children, nor did they incinerate them using missiles launched from drones, a fate inflicted upon many people by the U.S. government in the twenty-first century throughout the Middle East. And yet, Presidents Bush and Clinton nonetheless physically caused the deaths of those children through their chosen and implemented foreign policies.

Bush Sr’s troops obliterated water treatment facilities, and Clinton imposed severe economic sanctions which made it impossible for Iraqi civilians to obtain either clean water or the medication needed to treat the diseases caused by the dirty water. In what sense, then, were the children who died of treatable, water-borne illnesses during the 1990s not killed by Bush and Clinton? Had the U.S. government not regarded the people of Iraq as expendable—“standing in the way” of what the presidents took to be important geopolitical aims—then they would have treated them as human beings. Instead, thousands of Iraqi children were destroyed through means in some ways more inhumane than swift and direct and more obvious cases of murder.

Pointing out these sorts of facts always leads to stentorian outcries of apparently righteous indignation (judging by the emotive force alone) because modern people have been trained to believe, through centuries of indoctrination, in the just war paradigm. According to the self-styled “just warriors,” there are certain “rules” of war, and those who follow the rules are by definition just warriors, and those who do not are perpetrating murder. The problem is that in any individual case where a group of people have been destroyed, the mindset of the killers themselves is precisely the same. They claim that they had no choice, that the actions leading to the deaths were a “last resort,” even in cases where it is obvious that they were not.

It is difficult to imagine the profound state of self-deception among people such as President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney whose Global War on Terror effected the deaths of millions of human beings in response to the murders of about 3,000 U.S. citizens. Ironically, through the use of a veritable drone-killing machine, the U.S. government deployed means nearly empirically indistinguishable from those of their adversaries, the members of Al Qaeda who targeted the Twin Towers in a surprise attack on September 11, 2001. Osama Bin Laden succeeded spectacularly in provoking a gross overreaction, which served to support his own cause, for the self-proclaimed “smart warriors,” too, adopted as their primary modus operandi the ambush of unwitting victims. Most notoriously, lethal drones were used analogously to the repurposing of airplanes by the jihadists against their targets. No warning, no possibility of self-defense, not even the possibility of denying that the person extrajudicially “convicted” through execution was guilty of a capital crime. The structure of the acts of September 11, 2001, and the retaliatory “take [nearly] no prisoners” approach of the U.S. military in the two decades to follow illustrate that the terrorists ultimately succeeded in creating their enemy in their own image.

Likewise, in Israel, the campaign to wipe out Hamas, though they are embedded in Gaza among millions of people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the crimes of October 7, 2023, reflects the very same cavalier attitude about the sacrifice of innocent life. From the perspective of both Al Qaeda and Hamas, the civilians killed were supporters of the enemy, which made them in fact guilty by association in the minds of those who killed them. The Israeli government has been conducting itself as though it, too, believes that because the Palestinian people elected Hamas as their leaders, they are therefore responsible for everything they do. But even if all of the adults supported Hamas, no one can coherently claim that the children being killed do so. They are merely inconveniently “standing in the way” of what the Israeli government wishes to achieve.

Another possibility is that the Israelis are in fact emulating the U.S. government’s own sanguinary quest to “mow down” emerging potential terrorists before they have the chance to act on their anger and seek revenge against the occupiers of their land and the murderers (as they view them) of their brethren. The Obama administration went so far as to summarily execute Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was claimed to be an operational terrorist, although his influence may have been to offer intellectual and moral support to factional jihadists. In any case, even if the elder al-Awlaki was guilty of aiding and abetting terrorists (which was never documented by his killers), there was never any sense in which his son was. We still do not know, more than twelve years later, what happened, because the U.S. government refused to comment on the case (whipping out the usual get-out-of-jail free card: state secrets privilege). Since no one in the U.S. government has bothered to deny this possibility, it may well be the case that Abdulrahman was killed because the government feared that he would be transformed into a terrorist by the anger generated through the assassination of his father.

If that is indeed what happened in the case of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, then it would seem to be very similar to the current modus operandi of Israel’s military as it wipes out children who might possibly, one day, have grown up to be members of Hamas. What, after all, the strategists may acknowledge behind closed doors, was it that motivated factional fighters throughout Iraq and Afghanistan to go so far as to commit suicide in their efforts to oust the invaders of their lands? In many cases, it was their personal witness of atrocities, such as the specter of drones hovering above the sky and targeting suspected militants in surprise attacks, under the assumption that the killers possessed the right to end the life of anyone whom they regarded as suspicious. As evidence of this possibility, nearly every jihadi terrorist suspect who made it to trial in the United States (most were summarily whacked abroad) explicitly claimed to have been motivated by personal outrage at what the U.S. military was doing to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fast forward to Gaza in 2023. Israel has been razing neighborhoods, bombing hospitals, mosques, refugee camps, etc., all the while claiming that these are acts of self-defense. Setting aside the conceptual confusion involved in a state claiming that the obliteration of a subset of the persons who comprise the state is somehow an act of “self-defense,” the fact is that the images of thousands of dead children who obviously have nothing whatsoever to do with Hamas can have no more tangible effect than to inspire young men and women to join the battle with the terrorists to destroy their oppressors. No one should be surprised in the least when this happens, for they will be acting in emulation of the Israeli government currently in the process of slaying their neighbors and rendering Gaza uninhabitable.

Rage at what happened on October 7, 2023, has blinded the Israelis from the truth, that their current actions can only exacerbate their own situation. The bombing of civilian gatherings such as weddings and funerals during the Global War on Terror, in pursuit of individuals possibly in attendance, bore striking similarities to the intentional, premeditated obliteration of refugee camps in pursuit of Hamas members allegedly present. We should expect to see, and we have seen, under these horrific circumstances, an outpouring of support for Hamas and an increase of the number of young people willing to join forces with them.

What the Israeli government, through its actions, has told the world and its people is that they do not care how many innocent people they kill, so long as they get “the bad guys.” Everyone else is just “standing in the way.” But the group of “bad guys” will continue to enlarge so long as the government shows such an utter disregard for the value of Palestinians’ lives. The direct consequences of what is being done to Gaza are entirely predictable, given what we witnessed throughout the Global War on Terror. Through a program of indiscriminate killing, Israel’s leaders are simultaneously expressing contempt for not only the Palestinian people but also Jewish citizens, by essentially ensuring that they will never, ever live in peace and security—at least not in Israel. More terrorists will perpetrate more terrorist acts, which will lead the government to kill more innocent people casually written off, fictionalized and forgotten, as “collateral damage.” This in turn will lead more young persons to join the jihadists calling for Israel’s annihilation.

The savage murders of October 7, 2023, and the brutal bombing of densely populated civilian areas are two sides of the same coin, given the moral equivalences inherent to every war, indeed every violent conflict in which the adversarial parties are willing to commit homicide to avenge themselves or to achieve a desired aim. The Israel First crowd may loudly denounce such assertions as false moral equivalency, but in reality, when all of the rhetoric is shaved away, and the actions in question are examined from a purely physical viewpoint, there is no sense in which dropping bombs is somehow less murderous than cutting off people’s heads, because bombs, too, annihilate conscious, sentient human beings.

The lesson to be learned from Israeli’s completely over-the-top assault on the Palestinian people might have been gleaned by onlookers throughout the Global War on Terror, when the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, Syria and Libya, were also brutally assaulted in response to crimes committed by a small group of miscreants. Instead, the warriors blunder ahead in a state of myopia and amnesia, as though “We are good, and they are evil,” is the only justification they need for doing anything they please.

The terrorists commit murder, which leads the government to commit murder, which leads more people to sympathize with, if not join the ranks of, the terrorists, some of whom will commit further murder. In effect, this is a depraved race to the bottom, with neither side taking the time to understand the gross overreaction of the other, nor to acknowledge how the very same outrage which they feel has been experienced by their enemy as well. The reason why institutionalized, codified murder, as carried out by governments is regarded by some people (see the writings of Frantz Fanon) as even worse than terrorist attacks is because governments have vast means at their disposal for settling disputes. They have court systems and economic power, none of which are possessed by the members of radical factions who rise up to oppose their government oppressors.

Even if, as I have suggested, acts of intentional, premeditated homicide are morally equivalent, the comportment of the U.S. government and the Israeli government should be criticized as strategically inept. Given the stakes, the very future of democratic states, what should have been undertaken, not only post-9/11 but also post-10/7, was a criminal investigation and pursuit of the perpetrators. When people commit apolitical murders, the procedure followed is to locate the murderers and hold them accountable. Instead of doing that in the case of factional terrorists, the U.S. government and the Israeli government decided to fight murder with murder, expressing their utter disdain for humanity by killing multiple times more innocent people and thereby ensuring that enemy factions will grow, spread, and retaliate in kind. The problem is not just that the Israelis have overreacted or gone mad. They have undermined the future prospects of their own people ever to live in security and peace.

*This essay first appeared at LibertarianInstitute.org on November 21, 2023. Unfortunately, nothing has changed since.

E-book GiveAway: Act Now!

Enter the contest currently underway at Goodreads for a free copy of my new ebook, Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times–it’s a page turner!

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Revisiting The Bourne Legacy: Lessons for Our World

Sin-eaters or Sociopaths? Thoughts on watching The Bourne Legacy again

Stone Cold Dead Republic: When Everything is Cast as a War

Several politicians have vaunted a muscular but myopic plan for dealing with the fentanyl crisis: to eliminate sources of the drug near the U.S.-Mexico border through the use of military force. The fentanyl crisis is being portrayed as an international conflict, not a failure of domestic policy, but a problem entirely caused by the evil members of Mexican cartels who, it is being claimed, deserve to die, along with, apparently, anyone who happens to be at their side. But even assuming, against an abundance of evidence from history, that the deployment of military force would have any effect beyond persuading traffickers to move their operations elsewhere, the proposal to whack anyone at the border who appears to be involved in the illegal drug trade threatens the most basic principles at the heart of what remains of the U.S. republic.

As in the U.S. drone program deployed so ruthlessly against thousands of tribesmen throughout the Middle East, the proposed plan to summarily execute suspected fentanyl dealers assumes that they are guilty and that the presumption of innocence is a “quaint” notion which can and should be inverted when it comes to matters of national defense. Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has observed that more than thirty times more Americans now die of overdose deaths each year than died on September 11, 2001. From this he infers, fallaciously, that the use of military force has become necessary in order to stem the tide of the crisis. Apparently unaware or unconcerned that the Global War on Terror culminated in the deaths of many thousands more innocent people than died on 9/11, Ramaswamy sophistically suggests that because the sheer magnitude of overdose victims within the United States is so high, this implies that it is time for yet another war.

For what should be obvious reasons, government leaders love to paint every new problem as necessitating a new war. Among other things, calling something a “war” opens up the possibility of endless emergency measures and executive powers permitting the president to circumvent the legislature altogether and enact whichever laws he prefers. At the same time, widespread propaganda campaigns are used during wartime to secure the support and the obedience of the populace under the assumption that “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Sound familiar? It should.

Such dynamics are fresh memories in the minds of many people because we only recently witnessed and survived the “War on COVID-19,” which, like every other recent U.S. war, left only a crime scene in its wake. No matter, politicians are calling for a new War on Drugs, a “War on Fentanyl,” which implies, among other things, that “collateral damage” will be unavoidable. This is taken by war supporters to follow from the platitudes that “What must be done must be done!” and, in wartime, “Stuff happens.” The tactical parallels with 9/11 and the COVID-19 crisis are telling as well. People were so traumatized by what happened on September 11, 2001, that they agreed to anything the government proposed in order to protect themselves and their loved ones from the possibility of further terrorist acts. Likewise, having been propagandized to believe that everyone was in serious danger of death by virus, much of the populace agreed to severe limitations on their liberty, and some went even so far as to call for the injection of an experimental substance into the bodies of people who declined voluntarily to roll up their sleeves.

Self-proclaimed “libertarian-leaning” Ramaswamy says, on the one hand, that, as president, he will eliminate the Deep State, deleting entire departments of an undeniably bloated federal government. Unfortunately, however, his disdain for the bureaucratic state does not extend to the minimalist form of government better known as tyranny, wherein a single leader, the only remaining office holder, replaces the legislative branch of government and asserts his own power to issue executive orders binding on the people of the land. Ramaswamy’s populist rhetoric notwithstanding, by asserting the right to kill persons designated by himself as enemies of the state who are guilty of capital crimes, he would be appointing himself the king.

Why draw the line at the persons who contribute to the overdose deaths caused by fentanyl? Applied consistently, Ramaswamy’s plan would seem to imply that the prime movers of the opioid crisis, members of the Sackler family, in addition to all employees of Purdue Pharma and, indeed, all of the many other pharmaceutical industry profiteers who helped to promote the use of narcotics deceptively labeled “nonaddictive” and “less subject to abuse” should be eliminated, too. To offer only one of many lesser-known examples, Johnson & Johnson cultivated massive poppy fields in Tasmania to be able to meet the growing demand of prescription opiates as the crisis developed and doctors all over the country were tutored, with the support of government agencies such as the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) that patients with “pseudo-addiction” and “breakthrough pain” needed even higher doses of narcotics. Off with their heads!

The reason why neither pharmaceutical industry fraud nor illegal drug dealing is, under current law, a capital offense in the United States of America is that the persons engaged in the practice are not intentionally and premeditatedly terminating the lives of human beings; they are attempting to enrich themselves through selling a product. Just as executives in the pharmaceutical industry profited handsomely by selling billions of narcotics pills without regard to the likely outcome of their unscrupulous marketing practices, the persons who now, in the aftermath of the Oxycontin fiasco, sell fentanyl to persons who may die from ingesting it do not intend to kill them. Indeed, killing a customer would serve only to diminish the dealer’s future profits. In other words, if such persons were indicted on capital charges of first-degree murder for what became the victims of fentanyl overdose, they could never be found guilty of that crime, given the clear absence of the required intention for conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. Negligent homicide and manslaughter could be demonstrated of drug dealers in a court of law when their customers overdosed, but never first-degree murder, for which the death penalty is in some, not all, states applied.

Ironically, however, the intentional and premeditated killing of human beings is precisely what Ramaswamy and others are claiming the authority to exact, all in the name of combating the new “evil enemy” in the “War on Fentanyl.” The reasoning behind this initiative is supposed to be that the circumstances are so dire that, in fact, everything has become permissible. Faced with this emergency, even the execution of suspects without trial, along with anyone who happens to be in their immediate vicinity, has become necessary. The tried-and-true propaganda line, used in drumming up support for every new war, is that because the very existence of our community is at stake, we must act swiftly and with great determination to vanquish the enemy whose actions will otherwise destroy us. If we do not take up arms, war supporters insist, then the outcome of the conflict will be intolerable.

A sober look at the annals of history impugns the pre-war rationalizations so successfully disseminated by the media to garner popular support for military intervention. With the benefit of hindsight, it eventually emerges that the so-called necessity of this or that objective never proved to have been truly necessary, for the originally stated objectives, used to rationalize the mobilization of the war machine, are nearly never achieved. Obviously, in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein had no WMD, and so none were ever wrested from his control. But other allegedly necessary wars illustrate the very same point.

In the case of Afghanistan, for example, it was continually drilled by the state-managed media into U.S. citizens’ minds that we needed to democratize Afghanistan—and support women’s rights, at the same time! Policymakers spent trillions of dollars and directly harmed millions of human beings throughout the Global War on Terror, and what, precisely, was achieved? Afghanistan is being run once again by the Taliban (who now refer to themselves as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan), armed to the teeth with the matériel left behind by the U.S. military and its tentacular web of mercenary contractors. Meanwhile, the women of the land are back to where they were before, regarded as lower-class members of their society and denied many of the rights enjoyed by men. All of this to say: it is not the case that the twenty-year war was necessary for the democratization of Afghanistan and the liberation of its women, for neither of these objectives was achieved.

The notorious War on Drugs perpetrated on the people of Colombia for years, in an effort to diminish the use of cocaine in the United States, had as its outcome that the cartels became far more violent—indeed, militarized—than they had been before. Rather than shutter their stores, the cartels simply relocated, spreading to other countries as well, in order to be able to continue to ply their trade. The initiative was an abject failure: the use of cocaine in the United States reached much higher levels than before, as a direct result of the “War on Drugs.”

Similarly, in 2001, the radical jihadists on this planet numbered in the dozens. In the two decades to follow, the U.S. invasions, and the use of torture, extraordinary rendition, and summary execution throughout the Middle East, created thousands more radical jihadists, in countries all over the world. The only persons who benefited from this proliferation of terrorism, through what is perhaps best characterized as a “hydra” effect, were war profiteers, including not only companies which produce missiles and drones, but also private military companies (PMCs) which help to analyze data and generate hit lists.

The proposal to characterize those working for and with Mexican drug cartels as “terrorists” to be dealt with as are persons identified as “jihadists” throughout the Middle East and Africa, opens up a whole new market niche for the technokillers. Consequently, everyone who profits from the remote-control killing industry—whether directly or indirectly, as subcontractors or stockholders—can be expected to support the new “War on Fentanyl.” Virtually endless numbers of names will be added to hit lists as the cell phone data of suspects is swept up and analyzed.

We already know how these slippery slopes work, because we witnessed what happened throughout the Global War on Terror. From “We must get Osama bin Laden and his associates!” to “We must get anyone who acts like Osama bin Laden and his associates!” to “We must get anyone who expresses sympathy with Osama bin Laden and his associates!” At some point, simply appearing to be possibly dangerous, even exhibiting hostile attitudes toward the U.S. military, and daring to object to the brutal “War on Terror,” came to be perversely decreed by the drone warriors as the grounds for summary execution of dissidents. People who never wielded violence were destroyed for having financial connections to factional terrorists or for seeming to support them in some way, for example, by agreeing with the jihadists’ overt denunciation of the comportment of the U.S. military state or even questioning whether the people being incinerated were in fact guilty of any crimes. “You oppose the illegal invasion of your land by the U.S. military? Clearly you’re a terrorist!”

The killing machine in the new “War on Fentanyl” would similarly be given the green light by the president to eliminate anyone who fits the latest edition of the “dispositional matrix” used as the basis for executing thousands of young men of color who resembled stereotypical jihadists. Barack Obama, the first black U.S. president, championed the use of lethal drones under the delusive belief that he was a “smart warrior.” Ironically, Obama himself ushered in an era of racial profiling, where people in lands far away were effectively subjected to the moral equivalent of lynching without warning, much less indictment or trial, for walking, talking, and above all, looking like terrorists.

Guilt by association was used as the pretext for killing thousands of people using lethal drones throughout the Middle East, and we can expect the same indiscriminate application of deadly force under a rationalization of supposed wartime necessity to be applied in pursuing the manufacturers and distributors of fentanyl. With people dying of drug overdoses at shocking rates in the United States, the not-so-smart warriors are preparing to launch missiles against everyone who appears to be fueling the crisis. But anyone who has been paying attention to what is happening at the southern border must be aware that smuggling fentanyl into the country is easier than ever before, particularly in view of the extreme potency of the drug. If fentanyl is fifty times stronger than heroin, then smuggling in a kilo of the former is like smuggling in fifty kilos of the latter. We have known for decades many of the ingenious ways in which drugs are transported into the country. The solution to this problem cannot simply be to summarily execute every hapless person attempting to ford the border with a stuffed animal in tow.

For if the flow of these drugs cannot be stopped because it is remarkably easy to slip them into legal shipments or to camouflage them as teddy bears and pillows, then how in the world can the solution to this problem be to whack the people who are attempting to transport drugs over the border? We know from the Global War on Terror the ghastly answer to this question: once the presumption of innocence has been inverted to a presumption of guilt, then everyone holding a teddy bear, indeed, every person with bodily cavities possibly filled with balloons of drugs, can be viewed as “fair game,” as the now dead targets of missile strikes were characterized throughout the Global War on Terror.

The presumption of innocence is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and is a principle essential to the court systems in all functioning democracies. Nevertheless, since 2001, all presidents of the United States have asserted their right to eliminate suspects without warning, indictment, or trial, because they viewed the “emergency” of terrorism as outweighing all other considerations. That the summary execution of unarmed soldiers also violates longstanding principles governing the proper conduct of a war has been altogether ignored by every president throughout the seemingly endless Global War on Terror.

President Obama opted to kill rather than capture suspected terrorists, and by radically expanding the use of lethal drones outside areas of active hostilities over his two terms in office, he succeeded in normalizing the practice of summary execution. He authorized the targeted killing of thousands of men in the prime of their lives, often in their own civil societies, because a small committee of analysts, including the president himself, had come to the conclusion, on the basis of purely circumstantial evidence, that the suspects might possibly, at some unspecified point in the future, attempt to harm the people of the United States. The fact that most of the targets were destitute tribesmen with no feasible means of ever making it to U.S. shores, even if they reviled the U.S. government, was not considered a mitigating factor before they were terminated with extreme prejudice and classified as terrorists post mortem. Even U.S. citizens were singled out for assassination by this killing machine.

We know from the revelations of drone program whistleblower Daniel Hale that the U.S. government characterizes every person successfully targeted by a missile as an “Enemy Killed in Action,” or EKIA, unless specific evidence is brought forth to demonstrate his innocence. Persons in the Middle East targeted as suspected terrorists were never provided with the opportunity to defend themselves against allegations that they deserved to die. By deploying what has become the U.S. military’s standard operating procedure, i.e., extrajudicial execution, to suspected fentanyl smugglers, the same denial of human rights would be expanded to include all targets labeled terrorists, on whatever basis the current inhabitant of the White House decrees.

Not only Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy but also Ron DeSantis (among others) has been drumming up support for the use of lethal drones very close to home. DeSantis, who takes pride in his military service in Fallujah, also delights in pronouncing that, if he is elected president, then persons involved in the fentanyl trade will be “stone cold dead.” It is a sad testament to the value of a Harvard Law School degree that neither Barack Obama nor Ron DeSantis (both HLS alumni) grasps what is arguably the most basic principle of jurisprudence: the presumption of innocence.

There is no denying that the zombies on display in many metropolitan areas of the United States are largely a result of the synthetic drug crisis, not only fentanyl, but also methamphetamine and “Spice,” an extraordinarily powerful synthetic drug being sold as marijuana to buyers, whether wittingly or not. In the face of this new crisis, the usual mob of frightened and angry, torch-waving people are rallying behind drastic, anti-republican initiatives without thinking through what they imply. Such policy proposals pander directly to the populace, understandably disturbed as they are by the spiraling addiction and overdose crisis, including the attendant degradation in the quality of urban life. But any candidate who claims that, as president, he will assume the authority to kill anyone he wants, anywhere he likes, on whatever evidential basis he happens to regard as sufficient, displays his open scorn for republican principles. Any leader who implements a policy of summary execution without indictment or trial of suspected drug traffickers would be appointing himself a monarch with the power singlehandedly to decree the laws of the land, in fact, of two lands: both the United States and Mexico.

The tactical problem here is not only a failure to recognize that demand created supply, which in turn has created more demand as the drugs have flooded U.S. streets, where even more addicts are created. The problem with the proposed whack-a-mole solution to the crisis is a fundamental problem of logic. First, if it were known who was smuggling the drugs in, then they could be stopped at the border. Ron DeSantis and others who exuberantly boast that those who contribute to the fentanyl crisis will be “stone cold dead” are assuming that somehow the identity of smugglers will be clarified by the smoldering emanations of their ashes upon incineration by a missile launched from a drone. Why should that be the case? Only because once a missile is launched, anyone killed by the government is effectively convicted through state execution of the crime of which he has been suspected by groups of analysts behind closed doors.

“Stone cold dead” is some pretty tough-sounding talk, but it is befitting of a mafia boss, not the president of a nation governed by the liberal principles enshrined by democracies in their constitutions. Republics such as that of the United States emerged in efforts to reject monarchic rule and, above all, tyranny. This dangerous use of demagoguery and pseudo-populist rhetoric must be recognized for what it is: a call for unlimited executive powers for the president. To deploy lethal drones at the border would be not only the initiation of an aggressive war against the sovereign state of Mexico but also a flagrant assault on what remains of the U.S. republic.

*This essay first appeared at the Libertarian Institute on September 26, 2023.

Lethal Drones at the U.S.-Mexico Border?

Fentanyl has caused many overdose deaths in recent years, and much of it has entered the United States through Mexico. A number of politicians have thrown their support behind a proposal to officially label narcotics traffickers based in Mexico as “terrorists.” Not all of the Republican lawmakers who support this idea have openly embraced the use of lethal drones to eliminate such persons, but that would be the inevitable policy implication of such labeling, given the wording of anti-terrorist legislation. At least one presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, has said the quiet part out loud: lethal drones should be deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border. There can be little doubt that the many other politicians declaring “war” on the cartels are well aware that lethal force will be used once the fentanyl producers have been designated terrorists, and the current tool of choice among self-styled smart warriors is the unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) or lethal drone.

The superficially plausible assumption behind this proposal is that if the flow of fentanyl is stanched, then the overdose deaths will subside. But the prospect of deploying lethal drones at the U.S.-Mexico border is a simplistic plan for addressing a very complicated problem. There are dozens of reasons for opposing this approach, on moral, legal, cultural, and geopolitical grounds. Most of those arguments, however, will fall on deaf ears and certainly not deter politicians from plundering ahead, expanding the domain of the killing machine once again, having been, in at least some cases, sincerely persuaded that they are acting not to enrich death industry profiteers but to defend the people of the United States from foreign enemies. The only way to prevent the deployment of lethal drones at the border from happening will be persuasively to demonstrate that the plan could never succeed, on purely tactical grounds. Two fatal flaws virtually guarantee that, if implemented, the plan would not have the desired effect, as can be seen through a consideration of the origins of the opioid crisis and the cross-border use of lethal drones in the Middle East.

The tragic drug overdoses of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States in recent years have had many causal factors, but the prime mover, what initiated the whole ugly mess, was the promiscuous overprescription of narcotics by doctors. Led by Purdue Pharma, drug industry giants aggressively marketed their opioid products as safe to use by anyone for anything, all blessed by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), which permitted a package insert to be included in boxes of Oxycontin indicating that the time-release format made the product safe to use without concerns about addiction or abuse. This was a classic case of the commandeering by profiteers of a government agency established in order to protect citizens but used instead to promote the interests of those who come to enrich themselves through decisively shaping government policies. (An even more obvious case has been the capture of the Department of Defense by individuals beholden to companies in military industry, such as former Raytheon board member and current secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin.) Because most members of the populace believe that the FDA is their protector (again, just as they believe in the basic goodness of the Pentagon), many of them were taken in by this pharmaceutical industry scheme.

Doctors, too, were remarkably persuaded to believe that they could and should prescribe narcotics liberally, and patients consequently came to believe that they could and should empty their large amber vials. Preposterous though it may seem in retrospect, the pharmaceutical industry undertook aggressive public media campaigns to persuade politicians and their constituents that the nation was in the throes of a “pain epidemic,” for which narcotics were the solution. When clinicians expressed concern that their patients might be turning into addicts, they were tutored by “experts” tethered to the industry that the observed condition was in fact “pseudo-addiction,” the remedy for which would be even higher doses of narcotic drugs.

Prescription narcotics were oversupplied to perfectly ordinary patients suffering from even minor bouts of acute pain, who eventually discovered that they had become dependent on and were unable to function without the drugs. The opiates to which they found themselves hopelessly addicted were prescribed legally to them by physicians whom they had trusted as having their best interests in mind. In this way, people from all walks of life, including injured high school athletes who had never even been recreational drug users, were transformed into junkies.

Some of the working people who were prescribed narcotics for their various, often minor, ailments lost their jobs and, with them, their health insurance. During the early years of what would become the opioid overdose epidemic, addicts and others supported themselves by selling pills they acquired through “doctor shopping”. As a direct consequence of the pharmaceutical industry-created demand for more and more narcotics, mercenary but board-certified doctors teamed up with unscrupulous business persons to open “pain clinics,” which swiftly became places where addicts convened and collected drugs to be diverted for illegal sales. Massive quantities of narcotics were distributed by the now notorious pain clinics. Many of those drugs were sold on the streets for recreational use, thereby creating even more addicts.  (For a concise and compelling summary of the government’s indisputable role in this tragic story, see director Alex Gibney’s two-part HBO series, The Crime of the Century [2021].)

Once the pain clinics were shut down, more and more addicts turned to the streets for supplies of their needed fix of whatever was available: diverted prescription pills, heroin, morphine, and most notoriously of all, fentanyl. Because it is so potent (about fifty times more than comparable drugs) and also cheap to produce, fentanyl was mixed or even used to replace other narcotics by unscrupulous dealers. The increased demand by addicts for opioids and the use by dealers of fentanyl to cut or replace heroin and other less dangerous surrogates has resulted in the deaths of many drug users who simply did not know what they were ingesting. At least some of the fentanyl deaths reported have been of non-addicts whose supplies of other drugs, too, were tainted with the highly concentrated and toxic substance.

Can eliminating supplies of fentanyl coming over the border to the United States from Mexico solve this problem? Will summarily executing suspected producers and distributors of fentanyl help to stem the tide of overdose deaths? Even setting aside concerns about procedural justice, the proposal to assassinate suspected drug dealers fails to take into account the etiology of the opioid crisis and, most importantly of all, the nature of drug dependency and the desperation of junkies to acquire the substances to which they are not only psychologically but physically addicted.

The opioid addiction crisis was not caused but seized upon opportunistically by Mexican drug cartels. The very fact that the fentanyl business has become so lucrative for illicit drug purveyors itself illustrates that there is a strong market demand for narcotics, whether natural or synthetic. If addicts cannot acquire cheap black tar heroin and/or fentanyl from Mexican producers and their network of distributors throughout the United States, then they will seek out and locate other sources of the drugs which their bodies crave. No one denies that the opioid addiction crisis is grave. But whacking drug dealers at the U.S.-Mexico border will simply produce more drug dealers, in different places.

We’ve seen a version of this story before, mutatis mutandis. What, after all, happened when war resisters transformed into jihadists on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were targeted by missiles? First, there was the hydra problem: targeting suspected militants often resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, thus fueling the very anger requisite to the recruitment by Al Qaeda and other groups of new converts to violent retaliation. Other factors, beyond the illegal invasions themselves, contributed to the increased number of radical Islamist fighters as well, including the use of torture by the occupiers, along with a variety of other incompetent policies, which led to a general degradation in the quality of life for the inhabitants of occupied territories.

Second, and directly relevant to the proposed plan to execute suspects at the U.S.-Mexico border, as the ranks of the factional fighters increased, some of them fled to other parts of the Middle East to regroup and avoid being killed by occupying forces. The comportment of the dissidents who fled war zones was entirely rational. They believed that they were right, and they naturally wanted to succeed in their missions to eject the invaders from their lands, so they relocated and strategized about how to defeat what they had come to believe was “the evil enemy.” The lethal drones then followed the factional fighters to Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, Mali, Yemen, and beyond. As a result of this lethal creep, civilians in several different countries are now under constant threat of death by missiles launched by drones.

The Mexican drug cartels are not at this point engaged in a war with the U.S. military, but recalling how and why the “Global War on Terror” spread throughout the Middle East, we must soberly consider what is likely to ensue, should lethal drones be unleashed at the border as a way of curtailing the flow of fentanyl. It is quite plausible, given what happened in the Global War on Terror, that the more missiles which are fired on the U.S.-Mexico border, the fewer people there will be who choose to continue to live there. This should be a matter of common sense even to people ignorant of the details of the disastrous Global War on Terror, and yet the politicians pushing for a new “War on Drugs” somehow have not thought through the likely consequences of their plan, preferring instead to follow their usual “act tough” approach to garner political support for superficially appealing policies. No matter that Plan Colombia, intended to reduce the flow of cocaine to the United States, had the opposite effect and led to the militarization of drug traffickers throughout region, not the renunciation of their business activities. Just as the Global War on Terror has been all but forgotten by politicians keen to “move on” rather than acknowledge their role in creating humanitarian catastrophe throughout the Middle East, Plan Colombia has been memory-holed for the very same reason. Both were abject policy failures. Mistakes were made. Stuff happens. Nothing to see here; time to move on—to Ukraine!

Following the same logic used by both the radical jihadists in Afghanistan, and the cocaine cartels in Colombia, targeted groups at the U.S.-Mexico border who wish to continue to ply their trade, producing and distributing fentanyl and other drugs to the people of the United States, may well set up shop somewhere else, in places where they will be safe from the specter of lethal drones hovering above their heads. If fentanyl is easy to produce in Mexico, it is no less easy to produce wherever the same raw materials can be found. We can expect, then, that if lethal drones are used at the border, fentanyl production and distribution will migrate as a result. Some of the producers will move south, some may relocate to Canada, but it seems far more likely that many of them will opt to use the distribution apparatus they already have in place in the United States to begin or increase synthetic drug production in the very country where fentanyl is being sold.

The illicit drug purveyors may well reason that they will be safer moving their businesses to the United States, rather than further south in Mexico or other parts of Latin America, or up north to Canada. They may find it difficult to believe that the U.S. government would deploy lethal drones in the homeland, thereby directly endangering U.S. citizens. That assumption, however, is false. We already have precedents for such deployments abroad, and even the use of robotic means of homicide within the homeland against U.S. citizens.

The case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was summarily executed by the U.S. government in Yemen without ever having been indicted for a crime, on the basis of evidence never made public to his fellow citizens that he was a “terrorist,” illustrates that the drone killers are ready and willing to inflict capital punishment upon citizens at the executive’s decree. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the sixteen-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, was also destroyed, along with a group of his teenage friends, by a missile launched from a drone in Yemen, about two weeks after his father was eliminated, and shortly after the boy had turned sixteen, making him a “military-age male”. To this day, we do not know whether the son was killed because military analysts worried that he would be radicalized by his father’s assassination, for the U.S. government has never explained what happened on October 14, 2011.

It is possible, albeit implausible (given the government’s silence on the matter), that the drone strike which ended Abdulrahman’s life was a mistake, an incredible coincidence that the younger al-Awlaki happened to find himself at the receiving end of a missile intended for somebody else. But the case of U.S. citizen Warren Weinstein, who had been taken prisoner (along with an Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto) by a group of suspected Al Qaeda members, and was also destroyed by a lethal drone, illustrates that, in pursuing their targets, the technokillers are ready and willing to risk harming U.S. citizens not even suspected of criminal activity.

Lest anyone suppose that the U.S. government would draw the line with citizen suspects located abroad, it is important to recognize that the presumption against the use of intentional homicide against citizens has been significantly weakened in the homeland as well, arguably as a result of the U.S. military’s “shoot first, suppress questions later” conduct abroad everywhere on display throughout the Global War on Terror. That homicide should be used to resolve conflict has been normalized in the minds of not only military and political elites but also every random mass shooter who emerges out of nowhere to annihilate a group of people as a way of expressing his discontent. When Micah Xavier Johnson, the Dallas cop killer, was blown up on July 8, 2016, using a robotic device at the behest of David O’Neal Brown, the chief of the Dallas police, nearly no one questioned the wisdom of the decision, though it would have been a simple matter to load the robot with incapacitating sedatives instead. Both of these African American men had been indoctrinated to believe that the way to resolve conflict is to obliterate human beings. Johnson, a military veteran apparently suffering from PTSD, claimed that he felt the need to kill Dallas cops as a way of protesting their killing of innocent black men.

Given these precedents, it seems likely that once lethal drones are deployed in the latest doomed-to-fail War on Drugs, the “War on Fentanyl,” they will be used not only in Mexico, but also in the United States as fentanyl production migrates to the homeland along with those fleeing the missiles being fired near the border. In the face of the overdose epidemic, politicians, goaded by both angry and mourning constituents, feel the need to act, and they will likely be supported by many in the populace in their quest to send out lethal drones—until, that is, innocent family members and neighbors begin to be incinerated in the homeland. At that point, perhaps the nation will finally have its long overdue debate about the policy of summarily executing suspects and the labeling as “collateral damage” of any innocent person unlucky enough to be located within the radius of a missile’s effects. But revisiting the immorality and illegality of killing thousands of unarmed brown-skinned young men in the prime of their lives abroad, on the basis of sketchy evidence which would never hold up in a court of law, while perhaps salubrious for future foreign policy, will have no effect whatsoever on the overdose epidemic.

The only truly effective solution to the opioid crisis, given the manifest failure of both the War on Drugs and the Prohibition, will be to legalize all drugs, making it possible for addicts and recreational drug users alike to buy what they need or want, and to know what they are actually getting. Anyone who wishes to liberate himself from the chains of addiction and return to a semblance of normal life should be assisted in that endeavor. Every addict has a story, and rather than criminalizing all of them, we would do well to take seriously the genesis of the opioid crisis in the United States. Many well-meaning patients, leading perfectly ordinary, noncriminal lives, ended up as junkies because they trusted their doctors who, in turn, trusted the pharma-coopted FDA. To those who worry that legalizing drugs will create even more junkies, there is a ready-made, highly visible anti-narcotics abuse campaign currently underway in every major city in the United States. No rational person would freely choose to wind up in the sorry state of the zombies currently haunting our streets. Rather than pinning up posters of fried eggs captioned “Your brain on drugs,” parents need only to take their children to such scenes to dissuade them from making the mistakes which led to the creation of what appear now to be mere vestiges of human beings.

Unfortunately, instead of viewing the opioid crisis as the humanitarian disaster that it is, some of the very politicians who culpably condoned industry malfeasance for years by refusing to acknowledge its root cause—pharmaceutical industry greed and our captured federal agencies—have decided that the suppliers of fentanyl from Mexico are the latest “bad guys” who must be eradicated from the face of the earth. Stigmatizing drug purveyors as “terrorists” not only will not effectively address the overdose epidemic, but it will further undermine our already crumbling republic. If the use of lethal force against suspected drug dealers is undertaken at the border, it will only be a matter of time before the presumption of innocence in the homeland is inverted into a presumption of guilt, just as occurred in the thousands of drone strikes targeting suspects on the basis of hearsay and circumstantial evidence throughout the Global War on Terror abroad.

Note: This essay first appeared at LibertarianInstitute.org on June 27, 2023.

“Lessons from Fentanyl” offers an in-depth discussion of the current fentanyl crisis and its implications.

Turn Off, Do Not Automate, the Killing Machine

The quest to develop and refine technologically advanced means to commit mass homicide continues on, with Pentagon tacticians ever eager to make the military leaner and more lethal. Drone swarms already exist, and as insect-facsimile drones are marketed and produced, we can expect bug drone swarms to appear soon in the skies above places where suspected “bad guys” are said to reside—along with their families and neighbors. Following the usual trajectory, it is only a matter of time before surveillance bug drones are “upgraded” for combat, making it easier than ever to kill human beings by whoever wishes to do so, whether military personnel, factional terrorists, or apolitical criminals. The development of increasingly lethal and “creative” means to commit homicide forges ahead not because anyone needs it but because it is generously funded by the U.S. Congress under the assumption that anything labeled a tool of “national defense” is, by definition, good.

To some there may seem to be merits to the argument from necessity for drones, given the ongoing military recruitment crisis. There are many good reasons why people wish not to enlist in the military anymore, but rather than review the missteps taken and counterproductive measures implemented in the name of defense throughout the twenty-first century, administrators ignore the most obvious answer to the question why young people are less enthusiastic than ever before to sign their lives away. Why did the Global War on Terror spread from Afghanistan and Iraq to engulf other countries as well? Critics have offered persuasive answers to this question, above all, that killing, torturing, maiming, and terrorizing innocent people led to an outpouring of sympathy for groups willing to resist the invaders of their lands. As a direct consequence of U.S. military intervention, Al Qaeda franchises such as ISIS emerged, proliferated, and spread. Yet the military plows ahead undeterred in its professed mission to eliminate “the bad guys,” with the killers either oblivious or somehow unaware that they are the primary creators of “the bad guys.”

Meanwhile, the logic of automation has been openly and enthusiastically embraced as the way of the future for the military, as in so many other realms. Who needs soldiers anyway, given that they can and will be replaced by machines? Just as grocery stores today often have more self-checkout stations than human cashiers, the military has been replacing combat pilots with drone operators for years. Taking human beings altogether out of the killing loop is the inevitable next step, because war architects focus on lethality, as though it were the only measure of military success. Removing “the human factor” from warfare will increase lethality and may decrease, if not eliminate, problems such as PTSD. But at what price?

Never a very self-reflective lot, war architects have even less inclination than ever before to consider whether their interventions have done more harm than good because of the glaring case of Afghanistan. After twenty years of attempting to eradicate the Taliban, the U.S. military finally retreated in 2021, leaving the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (as they now refer to themselves) in power, just as they were in 2001. By focusing on how slick and “neat” the latest and greatest implements of techno-homicide are, those who craft U.S. military policy can divert attention from their abject incompetence at actually winning a war or protecting, rather than annihilating, innocent people.

For decades now, military officers have expressed outright disdain toward those who dare to broach the topic of civilian casualties. When asked about the Iraqi death toll after the 1991 Gulf War, General Colin Powell infamously muttered, “That’s not really a number I’m terribly interested in.” General Tommy Franks, when asked a version of the same question after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, similarly quipped, “You know, we don’t do body counts.”

Once a war has been waged, “rules of engagement” are specified by military officers themselves, which is one of the reasons why the killing of civilians seen throughout the “War on Terror” has occurred wherever and whenever wars have been fought. In the twenty-first century, however, the problem of designating who is “fair game” for slaughter is far more serious, for the assassination of suspects has been rebranded as targeted killing and claimed by the highest authorities of the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, to be perfectly permissible, even in “areas outside active hostilities,” i.e., beyond war zones. That the Barack Obama administration somehow persuaded nearly the entire nation to believe that it was not only acceptable but in fact laudable to execute U.S. citizen suspects located outside a war zone without so much as an indictment, much less a court trial, was a remarkable accomplishment, and in some ways unbelievable.

Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden followed the precedent set by Obama in radically expanding the use of lethal drones to target suspects on hit lists drawn up by their own administrations. The normalization of assassination achieved by the Obama administration was well illustrated by Trump’s authorization of the intentional and premeditated execution of an Iranian general located in Baghdad, General Qasem Soleimani (on January 3, 2020), as though this were a matter of business as usual. Indeed, Trump gleefully bragged about having executed a high-profile public figure using a lethal drone, effectively asserting the right to target named foreign officials at the pleasure of the U.S. president. By openly assassinating General Soleimani, Trump essentially put any leader who dares to demur from U.S. policy on notice that they, too, can be eliminated through the push of a button at the caprice of the U.S. executive.

Most of the thousands of victims of drone strikes have been unnamed persons (of unknown identity at the time of their demise) located in areas where “unlawful enemy combatants” were said to hide. After having claimed that they had killed yet another “senior Al Qaeda leader” in northwest Syria on May 3, 2023, officials at the Pentagon emended their report, acknowledging that the victim, identified by locals and his family as Lotfi Hassan Misto, a 56-year-old shepherd, may not have been the “bad guy” they had been pursuing after all. To soften the blow, a Pentagon spokesperson suggested that Misto was nonetheless somehow “associated” with Al Qaeda, a vague assertion backed by no evidence and in fact denied by area residents and effectively refuted by terrorist experts who noted the highly significant absence of jihadist group chatter in the aftermath of the event.

It is most plausible that on May 3, 2023, the “savvy” techno-killers destroyed yet another family like that of Zemari Ahmadi, who, along with nine other people, including seven children, was annihilated by the U.S. military in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, in a drone strike initially touted by the public relations team at the Pentagon as the successful neutralization of a terrorist attack. Ahmadi, an aid worker, had the misfortune of driving a white Toyota Corolla, which someone in the “intelligence” community had determined was being used by a “bad guy” to plan and perpetrate an attack on the airport. The usual confirmation bias kicked in as Ahmadi was followed around all day by surveillance drones while he performed actions interpreted as “suspicious” by those looking to “get some.”

After the fact of their demise, the victims of U.S. military interventions are essentially fictionalized in the minds of those who ended their lives. This tendency is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than by Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s response to a question (posed by Errol Morris in his 2003 documentary film, The Fog of War) about “mistakes made” by any commander during the prosecution of a war:

“He has made mistakes in the application of military power. He has killed people, unnecessarily, his own troops or other troops, through mistakes, through errors of judgment.”

Note McNamara’s stunning omission of civilians among the possible victims of commanders’ mistakes.

The fictionalization of civilian victims of drone strikes is especially troubling in cases where the U.S. government offers no explanation of what transpired when named persons such as Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and Mamana Bibi are erased from existence. Abdulrahman was the 16-year-old son of suspected Al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, and Mamana Bibi was a 68-year-old grandmother “taken out” by a U.S. drone while picking okra all alone in her family’s fields. In many cases there has not even been a report of any U.S. missiles having been fired when incinerated corpses are discovered by locals on the ground.

The capacity for high-level decision makers in the military to deny any and all responsibility for what have been decried by the public as war crimes has been amply illustrated in case after case. For example, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison was blamed on a handful of “bad apple” low-level grunts, when in fact they were acting in accordance with their interpretations of what they were asked to do. The problem in such cases is two-fold. First, low-level soldiers are required to obey the orders of their superior officers. Second, when officers or bureaucrats redefine key terminology, such as the use of the neologistic “enhanced interrogation techniques” in place of “torture,” which most everyone seems to agree is wrong, then no one should be surprised when atrocity ensues. Similarly, “rules of engagement” said to permit the targeting of any person present (as in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004) will naturally generate civilian deaths. Again, when Reuters journalists were killed in 2007 by soldiers in an Apache helicopter hovering above New Baghdad, film footage of the event made public by Wikileaks (Collateral Murder) was met with the horror and outrage of people all around the globe. The Pentagon concluded its investigation of the killings with the expected announcement that no crimes were committed on that day.

The CIA ran drone operations outside areas of active hostilities for years (most likely to avoid congressional oversight), and it appears that they continue to do so in places such as Somalia, where seven civilians, including three children were killed by a “suspected” U.S. drone strike on January 30, 2023, not claimed by the Pentagon. This is a case where irrefutable evidence of homicide, dead people destroyed by a missile and discovered by bereft family members and friends, has not prompted U.S. administrators to accept any responsibility whatsoever for their actions, no doubt under the “get out of jail free” (a.k.a. “state secrets privilege”) pretext according to which the publication of facts somehow undermines national security.

What facts undermine are spurious claims by warmakers to be accomplishing anything worthwhile for anyone but death industry profiteers in running this nonstop killing machine. Originally the marketing line for unmanned rather than manned combat planes was that the new technology would save troops’ lives. But by using lethal drones, and expanding their use to places where there were no U.S. military personnel on the ground to protect, the presumption against killing civilians was weakened to the point where, today, in many cases, only civilians’ lives are being risked by missiles launched from drones. The victims of drone strikes are labeled “collateral damage,” just as they have been for decades in combat theaters, but according to the lethality maximizers, so long as the killers “intend” to kill bad guys, they never do anything wrong. They may have curtailed the lives of innocent men, women, and children who never posed a threat to anyone, but it was all part of a good faith effort to defend the nation.

This normalization of assassination as a standard operating procedure of warfare not only endangers civilians in order to protect combat soldiers but also flouts widely accepted conventions regarding the proper conduct of war. According to longstanding international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions, soldiers are to be provided with the opportunity to surrender before they are killed. In drone strikes, the targets (usually unarmed) are summarily executed without warning under the assumption that they are guilty until proven innocent, which is of course impossible for them to do ex post facto.

What the military knows how to do is perpetrate mass homicide, and this they will continue to do, if they are not somehow reined in. The revolving door between government administrators and military industry makes it difficult to see how this might be accomplished. The problem is not only one of corruption, although that is a part of the problem. Even more intractable is that the persons who rise in the ranks of the military are precisely those who wholeheartedly agree that conflicts are to be resolved through homicide. (It turns out, felicitously for many of them, that the death industry is also highly lucrative.) It matters little whether military leaders such as current secretary of defense and former Raytheon board member Lloyd Austin are profoundly self-deceived or willfully ignore the carnage and misery which their policies have sown for people far from U.S. shores. They occupy positions of power and advise the president on matters of foreign policy.

Not everyone who joins the military rises in the ranks to become an administrator, having bought into the company line. Certainly drone operators are not always happy to learn that they have been transformed into contract killers, required to execute strangers at the request of “the customer,” and expected to deal with their reservations and guilt for what they have done through dosing themselves with psychiatric medications. Happily for war entrepreneurs, however, machines will solve all of the problems of hesitation to kill and critical thinking about what exactly the guiding strategic objective is supposed to be in “whack-a-mole and all of their family” missions conducted by soldiers at no risk of death when they terminate the lives of fellow human beings.

When computer algorithms have replaced human judgment in decisions about when and where to launch missiles from drones, it will become even more difficult to hold anyone responsible than it already is. When an automated program determines that a swarm of drones should be sent out to kill suspected “bad guys” located in an area inhabited by many civilians, no one will be held accountable when some of those civilians are stripped of their lives. Those who wrote the algorithms will continue to shirk personal responsibility by muttering the usual shibboleths: “Mistakes were made.” “Stuff happens.” Note the absence of an active subject in these sorts of reflexive responses to the military’s commission of war crimes. The move from evading responsibility through the use of passive verbs to the outright denial that any agent of the U.S. government has ever done anything wrong will be seamless once lethal drone missions are computer programmed, for there will be no identifiable moral agent behind any specific decision at all.

It is a single-minded obsession with maximizing lethality which has created the perpetual motion drone killing machine, and the problem will only grow worse with automation. The “drone warriors” have amply displayed their insouciance toward the thousands of innocent victims whom they have already killed, so it falls on people who do not serve as cogs in the machine to pose legal and moral objections to what has been going on now for more than twenty years. This is easier said than done, for citizens have become inured to the atrocities funded by them as a result of the military’s effective management of the mainstream media. With the U.S. government engaged in the suppression and outright censorship of counternarratives, the problem of profligate killing has become even more challenging to address, for citizens and politicians alike are largely ignorant of the crimes committed in their name.

Indeed, the Pentagon exerts such control over the narrative transmitted to the populace today that whistleblowers and others who expose war crimes, such as Julian Assange, are ruthlessly criminalized and persecuted as a direct result of highly effective discreditation campaigns. When the government labels even nonviolent dissidents in the homeland as extremists, then the next logical step will be to “neutralize” them, too, by all means necessary. With artificial intelligence already being used to identify so-called extremists, and the looming specter of automated lethal drones ready to deploy, it has never been more dangerous to defy the government. Nonetheless, we must find a way to turn off this killing machine while it is still possible to do.

Note: this essay first appeared at LibertarianInstitute.org on May 30, 2023.

War & Delusion: The Ukrainian Edition

In this episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, Alex Bernardo sits down once again with Laurie Calhoun. Laurie is a philosopher, a cultural critic and an author. She is a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute, where she regularly writes articles analyzing war and the military industrial complex. We discuss her 2013 book War and Delusion, a devastating philosophical and empirical critique of the ‘just war’ theory, which posits that there are conditions under which a war can be justly waged. We explore the inconsistencies of the just war theory, the medieval Christian assumptions that undergird it, the ways in which it has been consistently applied to legitimate American foreign policy, and how it has ultimately led us to war in Ukraine.

Media Referenced:
War and Delusion, Laurie Calhoun

https://theprotestantlibertarianpodcast.buzzsprout.com/1978104/12372407

I Support HB0220: The Maryland Defend The Guard Act

Here’s my letter in support of HB0220: the Maryland Defend the Guard Act (I’ll also be testifying at the hearing on February 15, 2023): 

HB0220 Favorable

Dear House Health and Government Operations Committee:

I write in support of House Bill 220, the Maryland Defend the Guard Act.

In September 2001, the Bush administration was preparing a “Global War on Terrorism” in response to the attacks of September 11th. The White House expressed the desire to be granted the latitude to control the warmaking capacity of the government, which according to the U.S. Constitution is to be checked by the Congress. In the post-9/11 climate of fear that further terrorist attacks might be undertaken against Americans, both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate passed an open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), effectively ceding both their right and their authority to limit the Executive’s ability to mobilize the Armed Forces of the United States to fight, kill, and possibly die in wars abroad. Rather than needing to confer with the Congress before sending troops into harm’s way, the AUMF of 2001 vested in the president the power of a monarch to wage war at his discretion and according to his own timetable.

Under the Constitution, the president already possessed the legal ability to wage war in an emergency or invasion scenario, when time was of the essence and so consultation with Congress could not be undertaken. What changed with the 2001 AUMF was that the Congress delegated to the president the right and authority to wage war without needing to demonstrate or claim conditions of emergency. In emergency military actions, the executive is required within a narrow timeframe to secure the retroactive consent of the Congress, without which the mobilization may not legally continue. With the 2001 AUMF, however, the requirement of retroactive advice and consent was lifted.

What ensued over the next twenty years was the nonstop engagement of U.S. military forces, including National Guardsmen, in the Middle East and Africa, with four successive presidential administrations asserting the right to wage war without congressional consultation. The 2001 AUMF and the subsequent 2002 AUMF against Iraq were ratified under President George W. Bush, but they were regarded by President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump as permitting them to continue the work begun by Bush. Today, in 2023, President Joe Biden continues to deploy troops and bomb countries in the Middle East supposedly under the AUMF authority granted to George W. Bush, while 88% of the people who initially voted for these resolutions have departed from Congress.

It is hard to believe that the men who penned the U.S. Constitution envisioned a scenario in which one Congress could permanently change the balance of warmaking power through passing a single law, but that is what has transpired.

It is unsurprising that no president after Bush chose to roll back the expanded executive powers he had assumed. Power once secured is seldom surrendered. Nor should we expect a Congress to acknowledge the mistakes of the past. An effort to repeal the 2002 AUMF is underway, but this would not stop the president’s ability to wage endless, global war granted by the much broader 2001 AUMF.

With the unlikelihood that either the president will cede his warmaking powers back to the legislative branch, or the Congress will demand that they be returned, House Bill 220 currently under consideration would provide the restraint needed to prevent the Maryland National Guard from being deployed into combat missions abroad at the executive’s caprice, by requiring that the U.S. Congress pass an official declaration of war.

I support the Defend the Guard Act because National Guardsmen enlisted to serve the country under specific conditions which have been bypassed since 2001. The politicians in Washington, DC, have abdicated the most weighty of all of their responsibilities, that of determining whether and when soldiers must be sent to fight. Because Congress has neglected their responsibility under the Constitution to serve as a restraint on the warmaking powers of the executive, the time has arrived for states to assert their sovereign rights and protect their local Guardsmen from reckless and counterproductive deployments as occurred throughout the past two decades of the Global War on Terror in several different countries for which no mission-specific AUMF was ever ratified by Congress.

It is too late to do anything about the soldiers sacrificed in Afghanistan, only to withdraw from that country with the Taliban still in power in 2021. Nor can the tragic loss of Guardsmen to suicide be undone. But House Bill 220, the Maryland Defend the Guard Act, will help to protect future guardsmen from such fates.

Sincerely,

Laurie Calhoun

Complete recording of the entire hearing on HB0220 Maryland Defend the Guard Act.
Laurie Calhoun’s testimony begins at minute 27 and lasts two minutes.

Out of the Blank: The War Machine in All Its Sprawling Ignobility

Robbie Robertson and Laurie Calhoun discuss on the Out of the Blank podcast a wide range of topics, including drone killing, the war machine, the implications of the normalization of assassination using robotic devices for domestic policing, government control of the narrative, the importance of transparency, the Black Budget, the CIA, institutional conservatism, and why we cannot renounce free speech if we are to save the republic.

#1341 – Laurie Calhoun – Out Of The Blank | Podcast on Spotify

#1341 –Laurie Calhoun –Out Of The Blank / YouTube