All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Twenty-Five Years Later: A Look Back at “The Other Good War”

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English: Destroyed LAV-AT by friendly anti-tan...
US LAV-AT destroyed by “friendly fire” during the Battle of Khafji in Operation Desert Storm.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

On August 2, 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait, a tiny Persian Gulf emirate. Three days later, US president George HW Bush fielded questions from reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. The key line from, and substance of, those remarks: “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.”

Two days after that, Operation Desert Shield commenced with the arrival of US troops in Saudi Arabia. Desert Shield transitioned into Desert Storm — a short, sharp, successful air and ground attack resulting in the ejection of Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwait.

The early days of this military adventure were marked by spirited debate on its merits and trepidation over the possibility of large-scale chemical warfare and mass US casualties.

But by late May of 1991, when I returned home from my tour of duty as a Marine infantry NCO, the war seemed an unqualified success. Saddam’s forces had been routed with fewer than 300 Americans killed and only 800 wounded.

Parades were held. Medals were awarded. Returning troops in uniform got free beer at airport bars. Yes, really — I drank my Budweiser on layover at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. And I drank the Kool Aid that followed, too: Desert Storm had blown away the dark cloud cover of Vietnam and looked set to go down in history as a “good war” not unlike World War II.

How quickly many of us, myself included, forgot that World War II had led to 45 years of “cold war” with “hot” interspersions in Korea and Vietnam, turning America into a permanent garrison state. And little did we know that 25 years after Desert Storm we, too, would find ourselves looking back at a similar alternation between “cold” and “hot,” featuring more American dead on 9/11 than at Pearl Harbor, thousands of casualties in ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an emerging police state that puts old East Germany to shame.

These days on anniversaries like this, I still break out some fond memories of camaraderie and esprit de corps, but those memories are overshadowed by regret and by resolve to help my country break the cycle of military and foreign policy adventurism. Those false gods have proven themselves unworthy of the human sacrifices they demand.

Only by refashioning America into John Quincy Adams’s vision of it — “[S]he goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own” — can we hope to dismount this merry-go-round of death and realize our potential as a land of the free. That’s a far worthier goal than any transitory military victory.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Planned Parenthood: If You Have to Ask Why, The Answer is Usually “Money”

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Planned Parenthood volunteers help bring the f...
Planned Parenthood volunteers help bring the fight for health insurance reform to the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Planned Parenthood pops up regularly on the political radar as “pro-choice” and “pro-life” activists wage their decades-long battle over abortion. The latest controversy is over a series of videos released by a “pro-life” organization, purporting to show that Planned Parenthood is in the business of selling what pro-choicers call “fetal tissue” and pro-lifers call “baby parts” to medical research companies. And as usually happens when such controversies arise, there’s a move on in Congress to “de-fund” Planned Parenthood.

I’m not interested in re-litigating the issue of abortion per se here (that argument will never end), but I do think it’s important for all of us — “pro-choice” and “pro-life” alike — to understand what Planned Parenthood is and how it operates.

Ideological considerations aside, abortion in America is an industry, and Planned Parenthood is a business. It calls itself a “non-profit,” but in legal parlance all that means is that it isn’t owned by individuals or stockholders who rake off its profits.

Planned Parenthood boasts more than 800 local franchises and knocks down a billion dollars a year. Its CEO’s salary and benefits top half a million dollars annually; other executives and franchise managers also earn low- to mid-six-figure salaries. It IS a business, full stop.

More to the point, Planned Parenthood is a “politically connected” enterprise which games government to subsidize it and protect its  business turf.

Of Planned Parenthood’s billion dollars in annual revenue, about half comes from the federal government as direct corporate welfare. Its supporters don’t call it corporate welfare, of course. They claim its services are good and necessary and that the payout is justified. Shoes and books are good and necessary too, but if Nike or Amazon asked for a $500 million check from Uncle Sugar, we all know what we’d call it.

Planned Parenthood claims to work on behalf of women’s reproductive health, but uses its political clout to lobby strongly against, among other things, congressional efforts to make many forms of birth control available “over the counter.”

Why would Planned Parenthood do that? Answer: Plain old economic protectionism. If a woman can just drop by the pharmacy at Wal-Mart for her contraception, she doesn’t have to go through Planned Parenthood’s clinics and see Planned Parenthood’s doctors for a prescription. That would help the woman, but it would hurt the case for continuing the corporate welfare checks. This tells us something about Planned Parenthood’s priorities.

When it comes to fetal tissue “donations” that are actually sales — Planned Parenthood charges a “processing fee” — it’s reasonable to assume that the organization’s involvement is self-interested. That’s not to say that fetal tissue research is good or bad, but rather simply to point out that Planned Parenthood doesn’t care deeply enough about it to take a business loss on the proposition.

When it comes to continuing the half a billion dollars in annual taxpayer funding, the answer should be “your corporate welfare is going away — sink or swim in the marketplace on your merits.”

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Celebs vs. Amnesty: Do The Entertainment Elite Hate Women?

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English: Sex workers demonstrating for better ...
Sex workers demonstrating for better working conditions at the 2009 Marcha Gay in Mexico City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Pin it on the pimps, say the signers of an open letter to Amnesty International . “[H]uman beings bought and sold in the sex trade, who are mostly women, must not be criminalized …. However, what your ‘Draft Policy on Sex Work’ is incomprehensibly proposing is the wholesale decriminalization of the sex industry, which in effect legalizes pimping, brothel owning and sex buying.”

Prostitution probably isn’t “the world’s oldest profession,” as some like to call it — hunting and gathering likely briefly preceded it — but it’s certainly close. Anything that people value, they’ll buy and sell.

Most people value sex,  exchanging it through various barter systems. Dinner and a movie for a one-night stand. Perhaps a set of rings and commingling of property as part of a lifetime arrangement understood to include, among other benefits, physical intimacy.

Or, back to that movie, the price of a ticket for a vicarious but nonetheless titillating experience featuring the likes of Debra Winger, Lena Dunham, Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway and Kate Winslet, all signers of the letter.

Amnesty’s critics have it backward. There’s no sex work without sex workers. Pimps can’t broker transactions in, nor can “Johns” purchase, something that isn’t for sale. And as the public-facing part of the business, the workers are the easy ones to detect and to persecute. Where prostitution remains illegal, it is they who suffer.

On the other hand, if prostitution is legal, the specter of “human trafficking” will inevitably decline.

As we’ve learned from alcohol and drug prohibition, criminalizing trade in something people want merely pushes that trade into the domain of players who are willing to risk arrest — and resort to violence — for profit.

Legal prostitution might or might not be pretty, depending on one’s personal moral views. But pretty or not, criminalizing it only makes things worse. It actively harms the women who are the vast majority of sex workers. It corrupts law enforcement. It exposes sex workers (and their customers) to unnecessary dangers. And it empowers violent pimps and human traffickers by making their way of doing things profitable.

I prefer to give the celebrities who signed this letter, and who have taken up “stopping human trafficking” as a personal crusade, the benefit of doubt. I don’t think they actually hate women in general, or even female sex workers. But if they don’t, they should support Amnesty’s call for decriminalization.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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