Tag Archives: duty

My New Book Is Out

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Titled A Conservative’s View of the Conduct of Just Wars, it’s available in Kindle format here.  It presents this Conservative’s view of the proper conduct of a just war: when it’s appropriate to join one, how it should be fought once joined (regardless of how or why it was joined), and importantly, what should be done with the nation that unjustly attacked.

Since St Augustine of Hippo’s exegeses of the early 5th century, Western thinkers have attempted to define Just War in their recognition that war is a part of the human condition. Through this, they hoped to limit the onset and scope of war and its damage to those innocently caught in it.

Many Just War theories center on the idea that human lives are God’s to take. Thus, war as a human endeavor begins inherently immoral and unjust, and it’s the war fighters’ responsibility to make the case that their war—this war, this time—is just and then to fight it justly.  My argument proceeds from that point.

Unfortunately, Just War arguments generally stop short of war’s true completion. The war is entered, it’s fought, it’s won or lost. But then…what? Just War theories until very recently haven’t asked that question, much less essayed an answer.

Is that all there is, though? Is a conflict over just because the enemy has been utterly defeated or a peace treaty signed? No, the conflict simply slides into a post-war recovery effort by the victor which may or may not include the loser.

In truth, peace by itself cannot be a just end of war; mere restoration of quietude is not a proper goal of victory. Nor can mere victory be the goal of war. True victory, victory in a just war must entail the restoration or creation of justice and freedom—of both, since neither can exist without the other.

Given justice in entering the war, the defender then must fight to a conclusion that not only redresses the wrong inflicted by the war’s attacker but also maximizes the probability that the aggressor will not—cannot—aggress again for a reasonably foreseeable future. Notice the implication: this requires the defender to fight to total, unconditioned victory.

The VA Fails Again

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This time it’s the Marion, IL, Veterans Administration clinic.

In 1971 Kirby Williams went to Vietnam as a US Army draftee and worked as a finance clerk. In 2010 he went to a Veterans Affairs clinic in southern Illinois where a radiologist took a scan of his kidneys.

Unfortunately, the radiologist missed a 2- to 3-centimeter mass in one of his kidneys, and by last December that mass had grown to between 7 and 8 centimeters. Now the 66-year-old has, at most, two to five years to live.

Williams isn’t the only victim.

Within weeks…of starting at the VA [in March of 2016!], he [Dr L Anthony Leskosky, a board-certified radiologist] noticed patients previously diagnosed as healthy had radiology scans from years prior documenting grave conditions. These conditions, such as cancers, aortic aneurysms, bleeding ulcers and obstructions in their small bowel and colon—if left untreated—could cause patients tremendous pain or even premature death.

“In radiology, we compare current scans to old studies, so I was pulling up the last two years of the scans. That’s when I noticed the radiologists had called their previous exams ‘normal,’ but I would see a mass on the older scans, and then on my scan, I would see the mass had enlarged, and in some cases become a spreading cancer. Usually that is not survivable,” Leskosky said.

As many as four to five times a day, Leskosky said, he found serious errors in prior readings….

Leskosky whistleblew on this and too many other such incompetencies, and the VA’s answer was to fire him rather than correct the problem.

That’s damning enough, but read the whole article.

President Donald Trump touts improvements in the VA, and there have been some.  However, they’re too little, too small, and too late, and the VA’s destructiveness continues.  The Veterans Administration must be disbanded and its budget sent to our veterans as vouchers with which they can seek medical care with doctors of their choosing at medical facilities of their choosing.  And get actual treatment.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Error in Judgment

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A CVS store in Beltsville, MD, was robbed earlier in the week, and the manager, an Army veteran, intervened in the attempt. CVS fired him for the effort.

It seems two men jumped the pharmacy counter and forced the pharmacists to open their safe so the two thugs could steal the controlled drugs inside. Our army vet had his cashiers call the police, and he locked the doors so the thugs couldn’t leave.

In the end, the thugs got away, anyway. When the vet’s boss arrived afterward, he fired the vet—for intervening. The vet, a bigger man than some, said this about his firing:

My boss, when he came in to deliver the news, he was sick to his stomach. He didn’t want to, but he didn’t have a choice.

Actually, the boss did. Misguided CVS policy, or not, the boss didn’t have to fire the man; he could have stood as tall as his employee.

Remember these errors in judgment, by both the boss and by CVS, as you contemplate doing business with CVS.

State’s Cynical Distortion

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The State Department accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of taking congressional testimony by Secretary of State John Kerry out of context in Netanyahu’s address to a joint meeting of Congress Tuesday.

What Kerry said in Congressional testimony:

[I]f you have a civilian power plant that’s producing power legitimately and not a threat to proliferation, you could have as many as 190,000 or more centrifuges[.]

What Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said:

He [Iran’s Supreme Leader] says, Iran plans to have 190,000 centrifuges, not 6,000 or even the 19,000 that Iran has today, but 10 times that amount—190,000 centrifuges enriching uranium. With this massive capacity, Iran could make the fuel for an entire nuclear arsenal and this in a matter of weeks, once it makes that decision.
My long-time friend, John Kerry, Secretary of State, confirmed last week that Iran could legitimately possess that massive centrifuge capacity when the deal expires.
Now I want you to think about that. The foremost sponsor of global terrorism could be weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons and this with full international legitimacy.

Out of context? Not so much, FactCheck.org notwithstanding (their statement, Kerry wasn’t saying that “Iran could legitimately possess” 190,000 centrifuges. He was saying that “a civilian power plant that’s producing power legitimately” could have 190,000 or more centrifuges, simply restates what Netanyahu said Kerry said—that Iran could possess as many as 190,000 centrifuges under the Kerry/Obama deal). The Obama/Kerry deal on offer to Iran would allow Iran to have “peaceful,” “civilian” nuclear power plants “producing power legitimately.”

What’s key here is this. Those centrifuges, busily spinning away to produce fuel-grade uranium for peaceful nuclear power plants, could just as easily be spinning away through additional purification cycles to produce weapons-grade uranium. Netanyahu understands that.

John Kerry and Barack Obama just as clearly understand that; their cynicism and crocodile ire over Netanyahu’s speech aside.

See the centrifuges spin. Spin, Centrifuges, spin.

“We Don’t Have a Strategy Yet”

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President Barack Obama reiterated, in his speech Thursday, his reluctance to strike Syria, whether to support good-guy rebels or to attack ISIS forces there.

He also reiterated his reluctance to go beyond “humanitarian” air strike potshots in northern Iraq, whether to support the Kurds or to attack ISIS forces there.

He also ruled out any sort of military help for Ukraine by the US in the face of the now open Russian invasion of that country.

He also reiterated his reluctance to provide arms and ammunition to the Ukrainian forces so they could defend themselves, even if by themselves.

He didn’t address Iran’s nuclear weapons program at all.

He didn’t address the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly aggressive sea grabs in the East and South China Seas and its increasing harassment of American surveillance flights—in international airspace, albeit above those claimed waters.

This is after two years of butchery in Syria; after four years of watching, according to a West Point report, the growing strength and organization of ISIS; six years after Russia’s invasion and partition of Georgia and six months after Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea oblast; over a year after the PRC began its aggression in those Seas.

We don’t have a strategy, yet.