Fox News is reporting a stunning theft of U.S. arms by jihadist salafists in Libya. This news item will be made much of by critics of Obama on the right. However, military and government blunders, cost overruns, unneeded weapons systems, and general mis-management are par for the course.
Of more relevance is the light this sheds on the U.S. arms being shipped into Syria. There have already been detailed press reports that there really are no significant controls that prevent these arms from reaching the most terror-prone and jihadist elements among the Syrian rebels, whose numbers are large in proportion to all the rebels. This decision to ship arms was foolhardy from the get-go, and now in light of the Libyan theft it looks even more ill-conceived.
This theft of arms needs to be seen in an even broader context, which is the utter folly of the U.S. military adventurism of the past 15 years. The libertarian anti-war position has, among its themes, consistently argued that the foreign U.S. military actions in the last 15 years were spawning terrorists, terrorism and retaliation of various kinds. The Nairobi event has to be seen as connected to events in Somalia. Another theme has been that these intrusions were de-stabilizing states and delicate balances between Shia and Sunni sectarian interests. These intrusions have been creating whole new regions in which terrorism and armed conflicts could flourish. Yet another theme has been the folly of thinking that the U.S. could secure itself or eliminate terrorism by military actions, or that it could rebuild states in new democratic forms, or that it could remake societies along lines desired by the U.S. government.
A large theft of U.S. weapons in Libya reinforces the meaning of the Benghazi event, which is the futility of these armed interventions as a means of creating a better world. That approach is bankrupt, and more and more people and even officials are recognizing this. No one can miss that message except for the staunch warmongers who persist in calling for more and ever more. No one with any sense can be listening any longer to Netanyahu’s broken record. Every day in Iraq, a very large number of persons are being slaughtered in sectarian strife. Syria is an equally large tragedy.
Libertarian analysis cuts even deeper, with the position that if people want a better world, they’re not going to get it no matter what the conventional governments of the day do or attempt. The opposite is going to happen with any and all forms of conventional government actions, and that is exactly what the events of the past 15 years (that are in recent memory) show. Unconventional government today means government that takes natural law seriously, which no government does.
The greatest relevance of this news report of an arms theft is to add one more glaring piece of evidence that the U.S. has to move in very new directions. The U.S. has brought about and is encouraging 4th generation warfare in lands where it is interfering.
Americans need to be thinking in very different ways about what proper government is, what it should be doing if they want peace, freedom and justice, and what it should not be doing.
11:29 am on September 25, 2013
