"Collateral Damage and Roosting Chickens"

Published 15 September 2001

(word count 750)

While libertarians are as horrified and revolted as all other Americans over the human flying bomb attacks in New York and Washington, we’re probably not as surprised as most.

When politicians decide to use their country’s status as The World’s Only Remaining Superpower to become international bullies, sticking their noses into everyone’s business everywhere, those noses are bound to get bloodied in return.  Every empire in the history books has been attacked by the people they’d pissed off.  Goths, Franks, Vandals and other so-called barbarians took their turns at whacking and sacking the Roman Empire, The World’s Only Remaining Superpower of its day.  Mexico wasn’t conquered by a handful of Spaniards; Cortez rounded up an army of warriors from neighboring lands whose people had been molested and mutilated by the Aztecs for generations.

But there’s a problem with the bully analogy.  The neighborhood hood gets the punch in the proboscis he deserves while Washington policy-plotters strutting on the world stage are smugly insulated from the consequences of their own decisions.  Insulated psychologically as well as politically.  These are the people, remember, who invented “collateral damage” as a conscience-soothing stand-in for “dead citizens.”  Tisk, tisk.  A few thousand deceased Americans is a small price to pay for the glories of playing planetary puppet-master.  Politicians do the bullying and everyday citizens take the punch in the nose.

Will this grotesque event finally convince our arrogant empire architects to turn America into what we should always have been – the world cheerleader for peace and non-interventionism?  Don’t start writing your own history books just yet.  Expect the opposite to happen.  We’d all love to kick ass, if only we could tell which ass to kick from a Holy War in the ground.  But the ass that will eventually get kicked, in terms of civil liberties, will be our own.  Too many of us will rush right down to the national freedom-for-security swap meet.  This is a platinum-plated opportunity for the mailed fist crowd in Washington to further knot their knuckles.  More spying, prying and eyeing into everyone’s lives.  More restrictions, regulations, rules and rights violations.  More serving up of American G.I.s around the planet as potential new (tisk, tisk) collateral damage.  All for the sake of playing King of the Mountain.

The question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, has been answered.  As a youngling I didn’t understand a quaint little saying from my elders about “your chickens have come home to roost.”  Later, I got it.  It’s a lesson in cause and effect.  The government-sponsored terrorist egg laid in Waco inevitably hatched into the anti-government chicken that came home to roost in Oklahoma City.  It’s no different when the scale is global.  In 1948 the U.S., with no conceivable Constitutional justification, helped to forcibly lay the egg of the new Israeli nation in the Arab world’s craw.  Those hijacked jetliners were nothing more than our own politicians’ chickens coming home to roost.

My first reaction to Islamic kamikazes commandeering jetliners full of people and smashing them into buildings full of even more people was  “You bastards!”  My second reaction was vented toward our own insolent bureaucrats.  “You bastards!  Your brain dead foreign policies have finally gotten thousands of us killed!”

If you’re standing next to an idiot who’s poking a stick into a hornet’s nest for no particular reason other than he has the power to do it, and you’re the one who gets stung, who are you most angry at?  The hornets or the idiot with the stick?

Make no mistake.  There has to be two responses, not one.  First, swat down the terrorist hornets.  Then take the stick away from the idiots.

Libertarians must pound away on this point until people finally get it.  The sole justification for U.S. foreign policy is to protect Us from Them.  Period.  End of story.  We are not world cops, not world nation-builders, not world democracy-makers, not world sugar daddies.

Our President actually said on national television, “America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.”  But our President is living in denial.  Terrorists don’t give a damn what we do in our own homes.  They care what we do in theirs.

It reminds me of another quaint saying from my elders.  Those who ignore history are doomed to suffer ever more collateral damage from homecoming chickens.

We’ve got to take the pointed sticks away from all of the idiots before it’s too late.

- by Garry Reed