Blame America firsters

DAVID SAID:

Try a test, Steve. Ask yourself and your conservative friends some questions. Apparently you are of the opinion that US based crimes are well known but enemy crimes, like those of Al Qaeda are unknown. Ask yourself and your friends these questions.

Here are some of the crimes from our side. Ask your friends if they've heard of them or can tell you any details.

I'm going to guess that you can't answer a single one of those 9 questions without going to Google right now. So you should ask yourself how you can sustain a claim like this when you are so ignorant of the crimes coming from our side.

i) I didn’t claim anything. Rather, I linked to an article by a guy who “served with an armored cavalry squadron during the Surge.”

ii) Notice that David is committing the fallacy of question-framing. He artificially tilts the argument in his favor by how he preemptively and prejudicially frames the issue. But why assume that these are the right question to ask? Also observe how David’s questions take certain premises for granted.

iii) I’ve lived through many of the events in question. I saw the news coverage at the time. Not to mention books and articles I’ve read.

Our crimes:

1-Do you know when the war in Vietnam started? Which portion of Vietnam was attacked? How many people died in the entire conflict? Can you answer within an order of magnitude?

i) Needless to say, that’s the wrong way to frame the issue. The Vietnam war had a context. The containment policy. Vietnam was one front in the cold war. It was an effort to check the expansion of communism. Communism is a totalitarian ideology which, at the time, posed a threat to the free world–including the U.S.

ii) The Vietnam war is not all of a piece. It evolved over time. We see the whole thing in retrospect, but, of course, people at the time couldn’t see into the future, and their own actions or inactions were shaping the future outcome in unpredictable ways. 

So, for instance, US involvement in the Vietnam war might have been a reasonable calculation in the early stages of the war.

IMO, we invested too much in the Vietnam conflict. Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it became an exercise in diminishing returns. We should have had more limited objectives. Not so much to win the war, but to sabotage the global efforts of Russian and Red China. Get in, get out.

iii) Keep in mind, too, that we can’t compare the actual outcome with a counterfactual outcome. We don’t have access to possible worlds with alternate histories.

iv) David questions the humanitarian cost of the Vietnam war, but what about the humanitarian cost when the Viet Cong swept into the South–not to mention, as a side effect, the Khmer Rouge invading Cambodia?

2-What happened on 9-11-1973? How many people died?

i) Once again, David disregards the context of the coup d’etat. Allende was a communist alley. The prospect of Latin American going communist posed a threat to American national security. Congress and the POTUS have a Constitutional duty to protect us from our enemies.

ii) Keep in mind that the CIA didn’t assassinate Allende, although it did have a hand in destabilizing his regime, which was a hostile regime. He died in a military coup, at the hands of his countrymen. Why shift the blame to the US?

3-Do you know about birth defects in Fallujah and how they were caused?

i) Whether DU is responsible for birth defects is disputed:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs257/en/

ii) If this is a “crime,” it would be a crime against America soldiers as well as Iraqi citizens inasmuch as American soldiers would also be exposed to DU.

iii) It’s sometime a tradeoff between one risk and another. Not having armor-piercing ordnance puts our soldiers at risk.

4-Do you know how many people have been tortured to death in US custody according to Human Rights Watch since 9-11?

Human Rights Watch is a far left anti-war outfit. Ideologically opposed to US foreign policy. That’s hardly an impartial source of information.

5-How many have died in Iraq since the US invasion? Do you know the order of magnitude?

That fails to draw elementary moral distinctions. Are we talking about Muslim-on-Muslim casualties? Dead terrorists? Collateral damage?

6-What is the Haditha Massacre?

i) That’s disputed. For instance:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/post_234/?print=1

ii) Notice David’s default assumption: when in doubt, always assume the worst about Americans.

7-What does Afghan Convoy of Death refer to?

i) It refers to a movie.

ii) An Afghan journalist (Najibullah Quraishi) has no presumptive credibility in how he depicts US forces. He is motivated to produce antiwar propaganda.

iii) By the same token, Afghan “witnesses” have no presumptive credibility. They, too, have an incentive to present American forces in the worst possible light.

That doesn’t mean I automatically discount their testimony. But I don’t assume their version of events is more trustworthy than the testimony of our soldiers on the ground. Why not give our courageous soldiers the benefit of the doubt? 

iv) The alleged “Dasht-i-Leili massacre” is clearly a case of Muslim-on-Muslim violence. So why shift the blame to American forces?

v) Assuming that UIF soldiers massacred Taliban war captives, what were US soldiers supposed to do? Shoot UIF soldiers? Imagine how that would play on Aljazeera or the BBC?

vi) Why should I care whether Taliban combatants were killed? The world is a better place in their absence.

8-Name the most deadly terrorist incident in the western hemisphere prior to 9-11 that involved a civilian airliner.

i) I assume David is alluding to the Flight 655 incident. I remember the news coverage at the time.

ii) Why classify that as a “terrorist incident” rather than a tragic mistake? It would be a PR disaster for us to knowingly down a passenger plane. How would that further our national security interests?

iii) This also has a larger context. It happened on the heels of the USS Stark incident, when we didn’t respond in time.

9-Name the 2 largest genocidal campaigns since WWII and where the weaponry came from.

Is David alluding to the Rwandan-Burundi genocide? Is so, wasn’t the machete the weapon of choice? An agricultural implement?

Likewise, if that's the event you're alluding to, why blame Americans for African-on-African violence?