Machan's Musings - Barbaric Insurgents

Machan's Musings - Barbaric Insurgents
by Tibor R. Machan

BBC on Line carried a story about a very recent event and so far as I can tell, it pretty much nails the case against the Iraqi insurgents on the matter of their barbarism:

[Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad] Allawi's first cousin, the cousin's wife and
their daughter-in-law were kidnapped from their Baghdad home on Tuesday,
spokesman Georges Sada said. They were seized in the south-western Qadisiyah district after a gun-battle, police told Reuters news agency.An Islamic group has said it is holding the three, and threatened to kill them unless the assault on Falluja stops. (From:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3998681.stm)

This is, of course, not the first time that the insurgents and their allies have deployed this barbaric approach to doing battle with the "coalition forces" and anyone who is associated with them. In some cases they have taken soldiers, and that may qualify their actions as part of military combat, although thatšs a stretch since captured combatants are supposed to receive some variety of due process (a point constantly made to the Bush Administration concerning its by-all-accounts far less barbaric treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba). But to go after relatives, especially the children and cousins of one's enemy is a classic case of brutal villainy.

Compare the way these vicious thugs operate to some of the ways of the Nazis. The following little (fictional but illustrative) account, from Philip Rothšs novella, Prague Orgy (Vintage, 1985) will tell it well:

One Sunday, a Sunday probably much like today, the two Gestapo officers
went out drinking together and they got drunk, much the way, thanks to your
hospitality, we are getting nicely drunk here. They had an argument. They
were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one
who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the
dentist's house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him. This enraged
the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he
shot my father, and my brother also, who was eight. When he was taken before
the German commandant, my father's murderer explained, "He shot my Jew, so I
shot his." "But why did you shoot the child?" "Thatšs how God-damn angry I
was, sir." They were reprimanded and told not to do it again. That was all.
(pp. 19-20).

A couple of weeks ago I sat in a restaurant in Greenwich Village and had someone tell me that terrorists are merely reacting to US foreign policy and all of their activities are in fact the fault of the US government. Come to think of it, this same line has been peddled to me by some friends of libertarianism on and off, those who consider US government foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, uniformly morally vicious.

Without getting involved in the morass of the history of US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, it is nevertheless baffling to me that anyone could suggest that, for example, beheading relatives of a PM qualifies as some kind of proper response to anything wrongful that's been done to these perpetrators. If I firebomb my neighboršs home, coming after my children is utterly inexcusable. Might as well come after the children of the people down the road. The matter isn't to be judged on the basis of, "Well, you will be more likely to change your ways if your own children are in peril." The matter is to be judged on the basis of whether these children or other relatives are deserving of the brutal treatment by the terrorists and the answer there is unequivocally "No, they aren't." That is the end of that.

But, you see, that idea rests on the notion of individual rights and these barbarians deny such rights. That denial, however, then suggests that their own protests against how some of their fellows are treated isnšt well grounded. Indeed, it suggests that they act out of sheer anger, nothing else. However badly one's group is being treated by others, it doesn't in the slightest justify treating those others as if they had no rights - that is precisely the theory of due process in civilized legal systems. Even in the process of retaliation that's prima facie warranted one must not abandon the principle of individual rights. Until this point sinks in with the parties involved, none of the outcries in behalf of the terrorists and those whom they wish to serve in some capacity can have any credibility.

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