Keep US Out of War

 

Keep US Out of War

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

October 30, 2023

 

 

 

People have different opinions about the battle between Israel and Hamas, but one thing should be clear to all of us. America must stay out of the conflict and follow our traditional non-interventionist foreign policy, magnificently defended by Murray Rothbard and Dr. Ron Paul.

Steve Berger gets to the essential issue:

“[We need a] non-interventionist policy that doesn’t stir up hornets nests or in words of JQA [Jon Quincy Adams] doesn’t go abroad in search of monsters to destroy is not inconsistent with protecting our own borders or citizens. Economic law all about tradeoffs. Security sent abroad makes us more vulnerable to infiltration of terrorists here as you outlined dramatically in your recent podcast. Biden called all the arms etc. we are sending over there a dividend for our security. Maybe it’s just a dividend for our military corporate contractors as Smedley Butler would conclude.  I have no issue if a private citizen wishes to go over and help Israel just as I had no issue if someone wanted freely and with informed consent wished to take a covid shot. I don’t like being called an anti-vaxxer for protesting mandates or raising issues of efficacy or safety. I don’t like being called an antisemite for questioning  our foreign policy decisions or Israel’s even though I condemn the atrocities and murders for what they are.”

Brain dead-Biden and his gang of neocon controllers are taking precisely the wrong path. They are shipping a massive amount of arms and money to this troubled region. If we don’t stop them, we could find ourselves in a three-front war. This could lead to the thermonuclear annihilation of the world. Dr. Ron Paul warns us:

“President Joe Biden announced last week that the United States would be funding – and possibly fighting – three wars in three different parts of the world at the same time. It is an ambitious foreign policy for a president who doesn’t even seem to be able to express a coherent thought without the help of a teleprompter.

Nearly every word of Biden’s speech was untrue, including the preposterous suggestion that “American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe.”

US interventionism in Ukraine for over ten years and in the Middle East for decades has brought those two regions to the brink of an explosion unlike anything seen before. And if that is not enough, Biden’s neocons are also determined to take us to war with China over Taiwan. The world is literally falling apart in front of us as Biden claims we are the only thing holding it together!

After a brutal attack on Israel by Hamas earlier this month, Israel declared war not just on the terrorists who attacked its territory, but on the entire population of Gaza itself. Israel’s policy of collective punishment – razing Gaza to the ground – has inflamed Muslims from the Middle East to Asia to Western capitals. The anger rages more fiercely than we have seen in decades, perhaps since the founding of Israel in 1948.

Yet instead of trying to help facilitate a ceasefire and a peaceful solution, Biden has poured gasoline onto the fire, sending two US carrier groups and at least 15,000 troops, while threatening war on Lebanon, Iran, and Syria if they intervene in Israel’s war on the Palestinians. What might Russia do if the US attacks Russian forces in Syria or Russia’s allies in Tehran?

Biden also repeated the line that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” While that may be true, it is not Israel defending itself. It’s the US government intervening to defend Israel. And as the entire Muslim world rages against Israel over the destruction of Gaza, how do we think they will feel about us as the financiers and facilitators of that destruction?

By dragging the United States into this war, President Biden has planted the seeds of innumerable 9/11-style blowback attacks on the US. Yet he has the audacity to claim that all of this is keeping us safe.

Recent polls show that most Americans disagree with Biden. A CBS/YouGov poll taken last week shows that the majority of Americans oppose sending weapons to Israel. His Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen assured us that “we can afford” to finance two wars because the US economy is doing “exceptionally well.” Maybe the American people know something Yellen and the elites do not.

As Biden demands another $105 billion to fund the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Taiwan, his speech seemed to have a touch of campaign rhetoric in it. “I’m told I was the first American [president] to enter a warzone not controlled by the United States military since President Lincoln,” he said in his speech. The statement is blatantly false, but he must believe it gives him an air of bravado.

They say that it is advantageous to be seen as a “wartime president” when elections roll around, but Joe Biden may have miscalculated the level of support he will get for being a “World-War-Three-time president.”

Michael Snyder also warns of the danger of a war on multiple fronts:

“It is becoming clear that Israel is going to have to battle enemies on multiple fronts, and that means that this war is going to look a whole lot different than a lot of people thought that it would. If the fighting could have been confined to just Israel and Hamas, there still would have been a lot of death and destruction, but everyone knows that Hamas is no match for the IDF.  But if Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and the Palestinians in the West Bank all jump into the conflict, all of a sudden this becomes a war of national survival for Israel, and in such a scenario it is much more likely that weapons of mass destruction will be used.  So it should deeply alarm all of us that fighting has now erupted on multiple fronts.

On Sunday, IDF troops clashed with Hamas terrorists inside the Gaza Strip…

Hamas fighters and Israeli forces engaged in limited clashes inside Gaza on Sunday as the Israeli military ramped up airstrikes on the Palestinian enclave ahead of what its spokesperson described as the “next stage” of its war on the militant group.

Hamas claimed its fighters had destroyed two Israeli military bulldozers and a tank in an ambush near the Gazan city of Khan Younis, forcing Israeli troops to retreat without their vehicles. The Israel Defense Forces confirmed its forces had been operating inside Gaza during the incident, and said an IDF tank struck militants who had fired on its troops.

The episode appeared to be one of the first skirmishes between the two sides on the ground inside the strip since war broke out after Hamas’ deadly October 7 attack on Israel which killed more than 1,400 people. On October 13, the IDF said it had carried out raids inside Gaza.

According to the IDF, this raid was part of the preparation for a full-blown ground invasion.

And I think that we are very close to the moment when that full-blown ground invasion will be launched.

Meanwhile, the Israelis have evacuated more towns and villages near the northern border in anticipation of a war with Hezbollah…

On Sunday, the defense minister confirmed that another 14 towns and villages have been told to evacuate, in addition to the 28 initially ordered to do so last week. “According to the IDF and Defense Ministry, the 14 communities being added to the list are: Snir, Dan, Beit Hillel, She’ar Yashuv, Hagoshrim, Liman, Matzuva, Eylon, Goren, Gornot HaGalil, Even Menachem, Sasa, Tziv’on and Ramot Naftali,” Times of Israel details.

Evacuating those areas is a wise move, because fighting along the northern border just continues to escalate…

Fears mounted Sunday that the Israel-Gaza war could swell into a wider conflict amid rising cross-border attacks on Israel’s north from Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon and expanding Israeli airstrikes across the region.

On Sunday, Hezbollah released video of a particularly disturbing attack on the Biranit barracks that happened on Friday…

Israel sees Iran-backed Hezbollah as its most serious threat, estimating it has some 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel.

Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus accused the group early Sunday of “escalating the situation steadily.” He said the recent cross-border skirmishes had produced both Israeli troop and civilian casualties but did not provide additional details.

Hezbollah on Sunday posted a video of what it said was a Friday attack targeting the Biranit barracks near the Lebanon-Israel border, the command center of the Israeli military’s northern division. Footage shared by the group showed an overhead view of a strike on what it described as a gathering of soldiers.

Fighting Hamas and Hezbollah at the same time would be difficult enough, but it appears that Israel will be forced to tangle with Syria as well.

Iran sends enormous amounts of weapons and supplies to Hezbollah by flying them into airports in Syria, and on Sunday the IDF bombed the international airports in Damascus and Aleppo for the third time in ten days…

Syria said it was forced to shut down international airports in Damascus and Aleppo because of the Israeli strike. The Syrian Transport Ministry said landing strips at both airports were damaged by missiles and one civilian worker was killed and another wounded at Damascus International Airport. Israel has carried out several strikes in Syria since the war began, citing the need to prevent Hezbollah and other militant groups from bringing in arms from Iran, which also supports Hamas.

We have also seen clashes directly along Israel’s border with Syria in recent days, and I fully expect an intensification of fighting in that area during the week ahead.

On top of everything else, fighting has also erupted in the West Bank…

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed at least five people there early Sunday, according to the local Health Ministry. Two were killed in an airstrike on a mosque in the town of Jenin, which the Israeli military said belonged to Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had carried out several attacks and were planning another one.

Can the IDF handle enemies coming from all directions at once?

I don’t know.

We shall see what happens in the days ahead.

But I think that it is quite likely that if Hezbollah enters the war the U.S. military will intervene.

Over the weekend, we learned that the Biden administration has decided to send even more air defense assets to the region…

The U.S. will send a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system and additional Patriot air defense missile system battalions to the Middle East, the Pentagon said on Saturday, in response to recent attacks on U.S. troops in the region.

The United States has sent a significant amount of naval power to the Middle East in recent weeks, including two aircraft carriers, their support ships and about 2,000 Marines.

The Biden administration had been trying to delay a full-blown ground invasion of Gaza for a couple of reasons.

Number one, there was hope that negotiations could secure the release of more of the hostages.

Number two, there was hope that diplomacy could keep Hezbollah out of the war.

But now the time for talk is ending, and the IDF is gearing up for a major ground campaign in Gaza.

Once that happens there will be no turning back, so brace yourselves for what is coming next…  The Economic Collapse.

When the government says that “we” must send aid, who are “we”? The money for aid has been taken forcibly from us in taxes. Jacob Hornberger notes the fundamental libertarian issue:

“When referring to military aid to the Israeli government, American interventionists often use the pronoun “we.” “We need to stand with Israel in this time of crisis,” they exclaim. “We need to send military armaments and money to Israel.”

This mindset is much like the mindset that undergirds American welfare-state programs. When the federal government is providing welfare assistance to others, it supposedly reflects how good, caring, and compassionate “we” are. By the same token, when the federal government is providing warfare assistance to some foreign regime, it supposedly reflects how good, caring, and compassionate “we” are.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Foreign aid, like welfare, bears absolutely no relationship to how good, caring, and compassionate the American people are.

It’s important to keep in mind that there are two separate entities involved here: the U.S. government and the American people. They are not one and the same. There is the government and there is the citizenry.

Among the best evidence of this phenomenon is the Bill of Rights. It expressly protects the American people from the federal government. If the federal government was the same thing as the American people, the Bill of Rights would make no sense.

Thus, when one refers to actions of the federal government, there is no “we” involved. There is only the federal government that is involved.

With the enactment of the federal income tax in 1913, the federal government acquired the power to extract a certain percentage of people’s income. Through the use of this tax (and other federal taxes), the federal government acquires a vast amount of money.

U.S. officials then decide how to dispose of the large amount of money they have collected from the American people through taxation. They use some of it for foreign aid — in the form of cash or armaments to foreign regimes, including the Israeli government.

That is obviously just a governmental decision on how to dispose of money that has been collected through taxation. Given such, how can the American people be considered to be good, caring, and compassionate simply because U.S. officials have decided to send a portion of their tax revenues to some foreign regime?

Let’s even assume that Congress enacts a law approving the sending of money and armaments to some foreign regime and that the president signs it into law. How does that law reflect the goodness and compassion of the American people? By the fact that people voted in congressional or presidential elections? What if they voted for the losing side?

Of course, it might be said that Americans are showing their goodness and compassion by paying their taxes. But the payment of taxes is based on coercion, which is contrary to genuine care and compassion. If you refuse to pay your taxes, they will come after you with liens, garnishments, attachments, foreclosures, harassment, abuse, indictment, prosecution, incarceration, and fines. There is nothing voluntary about the payment of taxes.

The only genuine system of care and compassion is one in which people voluntarily help others out of the goodness of their individual hearts. That would mean a system in which Americans would be free to keep everything they earn and then decide what to do with their own money, including sending a portion of it to anyone they wish, including the Israeli government and the Israeli people (who are also two separate and distinct entities).

It’s worth mentioning that our American ancestors instituted a governmental system in which there was no income tax, no welfare-state programs, and no foreign aid. That system lasted more than 100 years. Of course, that’s the only system that is consistent with freedom. And it’s the only system that is consistent with genuine care and compassion.” The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Murray Rothbard, the foremost political thinker of the twentieth century, warned us of the danger of getting involved in foreign quarrels:

“The basic element of any libertarian foreign policy is to pressure the government to do nothing abroad, just to pack up shop and go home. General Smedley Butler, one of my great heroes, formerly of the Marine Corps, in the late 1930s proposed a constitutional amendment in the Woman’s Home Companion. His article was a sensation for a while but of course the amendment never was adopted and has now been forgotten. But it was kind of a charming constitutional amendment—I recommend that everybody read it. In essence it says something like this: no American soldier, plane, or ship shall be sent any place outside America. In other words, complete abstinence from any kind of American military intervention and political and economic intervention.”

Murray Liked to quote Canon Sydney Smith – a great classical liberal in early 19th century England who wrote to the wife of his warmongering Prime Minister, thus:

“For God’s sake, do not drag me into another war!”

I am worn down, and worn out, with crusading and defending Europe, and protecting mankind; I must think a little of myself.

I am sorry for the Spaniards – I am sorry for the Greeks – I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Baghdad is oppressed, I do not like the present state of the Delta; Tibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people?

The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be champion of the Decalogue, and to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy?

We have just done saving Europe, and I am afraid the consequence will be, that we shall cut each other’s throats. No war, dear Lady Grey! – No eloquence; but apathy,  selfishness, common sense, arithmetic!” 

Let’s do everything we can to keep American arms and money out of the Middle East and to restore our traditional non-interventionist foreign policy!

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.