Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

The Problem Isn’t Willie Pete. The Problem is War Crimes.

Leave a comment
White Phosphorous Bombardment of German emplac...
White Phosphorous Bombardment of German emplacements (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The New York Times reports  that US and/or US-allied forces in Syria may be using white phosphorous munitions in the assault on Raqqa, capital city of the Islamic State in Syria. The use of white phosphorous in war is a perennial complaint among human rights activists. And while it’s valid as far as it goes, it misses a larger and more important point.

White phosphorous — nicknamed “Willie Pete” by the US mortar, artillery and air forces who use it — produces highly visible plumes of white smoke, justifying its use to mark targets or screen movements.

It’s also highly incendiary. It sets things on fire, it causes terrible burns, and it can’t be put out with water (it must be smothered and deprived of oxygen). For that reason, international law prohibits its use “on personnel” and in populated areas.

When I worked with 81mm mortars in the US Marine Corps, those restrictions were treated jokingly. Sure, we couldn’t use Willie Pete on personnel, but we could use it on equipment. Rifles, rucksacks and helmets are equipment, right? If someone happens to be wearing or carrying that equipment, that’s THEIR problem, right? One of our favorite training missions involved firing white phosphorous rounds, theoretically to “mark the target,” followed by high explosive rounds. That kind of mission was nicknamed “shake and bake.”

I’m glad that I was never called upon to fire white phosphorous at other human beings in combat (I was, for all intents and purposes, a rifleman during the Gulf War). But when I tremble in retrospect at that possibility, it occurs to me that the focus on a particular munition doesn’t do justice to the problem of war crimes as such.

In war, people die. While there are better and worse ways to do so, it seems to me that we should be less worried about how people die than about which people die and why.

The problem with bombarding Raqqa, or any other populated area, isn’t that it’s being done with white phosphorous, it’s that it’s being done at all. In addition to Islamic State combatants — fair game, so to speak —  the area is full of civilian non-combatants. Killing them is a crime whether it’s done with white phosphorous, sarin gas or just plain vanilla bullets and artillery shrapnel.

Of course, we’re frequently and piously informed that innocent civilians killed by US or US-allied forces are accidental “collateral damage” or even “human shields.” The US Department of Defense always thoroughly investigates such killings and always ends up absolving US troops of responsibility. It’s only a crime to kill non-combatants if “the enemy” can be blamed for the killing, and — mirabile dictu! — that always turns out to be the case.

But in reality, when you pull a trigger and send a round of any kind downrange, you are responsible for where it lands and who it kills. Until and unless US forces accept that military responsibility, it’s our civic responsibility to treat them as the war criminals they are.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

Op-Eds

Bitcoin: Riding High, But in Crisis

Leave a comment

RGBStock Binary Background

As I write this, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency sits at a near record price level — $2,800 US dollars buys one Bitcoin. While the price is volatile, it’s been on a fairly steady upward trend recently and its price graph for the last year looks like the proverbial “hockey stick” (last June it traded for around $600 per Bitcoin).

Mark Cuban — a billionaire investor who’s a billionaire investor precisely because he has a head for this kind of thing — thinks that Bitcoin is due for a fall. He tweets: “I just don’t know when or how much it corrects. When everyone is bragging about how easy they are making $=bubble.”

Personally, I’m not worried about a “bubble” per se (Cuban wouldn’t be the first guy to incorrectly assay Bitcoin’s future in terms of how high the price can go). Rather, it seems to me that Bitcoin remains in what has now stretched out into months of true existential crisis. It’s in danger not of “correcting,” but of dying.

The problem: Regular people can’t buy and sell regular things in the usual way with it at the moment.  The transaction fees are too high and the transaction times are too long.

For example, I just spent about $15 from my Bitcoin wallet. Paying the lowest “mining fee” required to make the network process the transaction ate up 48% of that $15 … and I have no idea how long it will take for the $7.80 of Bitcoin that was left to get to where I sent it (a recent transaction took about 30 hours).

Any currency, digital or otherwise, has to function well as a “medium of exchange” if people are going to use it. That is, they need to be able to actually buy and sell stuff with it. If they can’t, it’s also not going to be something they trust as a “store of value” to save for later buying and selling.

 

Bitcoin has come up against the problem of more transactions than the network can handle quickly. Transaction costs in the form of mining fees have gone through the roof, while transaction speed has slowed to a crawl. It’s a train wreck as a medium of exchange and if that’s not fixed it will soon cease to be a viable store of value.

Solutions such as “Bitcoin Unlimited” and “Segregated Witness” have been proposed, but every time an agreement among developers and miners on how to reduce costs and speed up transactions seems near, things fall apart.

A year from now, one of two situations will exist:

It will be possible to spend Bitcoin worth $1 US on a soda at your local convenience store using your phone, a debit-style card, or a “hardware wallet” at a transaction cost of 5 cents or less and in a minute or less.

Or, Bitcoin will be a fondly remembered fad that’s been replaced in actual commerce by something better.

Cryptocurrency is here to stay. Bitcoin’s miners and developers need to decide whether they want to be part of its future.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

Op-Eds

Drug Overdose Deaths, 2016: Casualties of War

Leave a comment
Heroin aufkochen
Heroin being “cooked” prior to injection (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death among Americans under 50, the New York Times‘s Josh Katz reports. In 2016, overdoses claimed somewhere between 59,000 and 65,000 lives.

That’s more American lives than were lost in the Vietnam war. It’s 20 times the casualty count of 9/11. It’s half again as many deaths as attributed to the “gun violence” we hear so much about in its peak year, 1994.

Katz pins the blame  for these deaths on use, abuse, and sometimes accidental overdose of heroin, fentanyl, and prescription opioid painkillers. He goes along with the current fad of calling the phenomenon an “opioid epidemic.” That’s soothingly simple.  The word “epidemic” implies an infectious agent to which we need attribute neither consciousness nor responsibility.

But those 60,000 or so dead Americans aren’t victims of a faceless “epidemic.” They’re casualties of a decades-long war waged on the American public by the federal and state governments. It’s called the war on drugs, and the Times  piece, curiously, doesn’t refer to it even in passing.

Here’s what life would look like in an America at peace: If you wanted an opium product for either medical or recreational purposes, you’d walk into your nearest pharmacy and buy it.

You’d get a product of known quality, quantity and purity. As long as you followed the instructions on the box correctly, your chance of overdosing would be infinitesimal.

You’d probably stop on your way home from work for your daily fix, perhaps with the milk you forgot to get while grocery shopping. It would be cheap enough that you could support your habit with a regular job like the millions of smokers, alcoholics and Starbucks customers who don’t have to burglarize homes and steal car stereos to support their habits.

Yes, that simple. Really. In fact, that’s exactly how it was before the war.

Here’s what America at war looks like:

Tens of thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of POWs in local, state and federal prisons, and tens of billions of your tax dollars to keep up the pace of killings and cagings, year after year, decade after decade.

Rule by people simultaneously more lethal to Americans than, and morally inferior to, Osama bin Laden (he never tried to tell us he was murdering us for our own good, did he?).

Oh, and the people who want the drugs are going to get them anyway.

Which America sounds better to you?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY