Kissinger and other Americans along with many other people from many other countries on our side have committed crimes for which they will not be brought to justice. However, that does not justify what ISIS is doing nor lessen the danger that ISIS presents to people in the area. Two questions remain. Should we do anything about ISIS? If we should do something what should we do?

Kissinger, Nixon and others involved in the bombing of Cambodia are war criminals who should be brought to justice, but they will not be. There was no force at the time that could have been available and motivated to stop their crimes. That is no reason to accept what ISIS is doing even if the crimes are a reaction to actions of the USA.

There is only one answer, DavidF. Bomb everything that moves until there is nothing left that lives. It's the American Way!

Yeah, that's what our 'boys' are doing in the Middle East at the moment: firing missiles and dropping bombs on strangely clad people who are called TERRORWRISTS.

They are called this because hacking off heads requires a strong wrist whereas pushing a button to send a guided missile on its way is easy even for Americans.

Of course, hacking off a head is messy and takes some time whereas a missile asks no question but, in seconds, just blows whole buildings to Kingdom Come and all those poor souls within them.

The Western Allies, filled with a love of killing, have gathered together lots of bombs, missiles, etc and can drop them 24 hours a day without being in any danger. It's all rather one-sided!

John, thanks for your article. There are some decent people left in the world after all!

Great article John. I am sorry to say, you are back to what made you great.

Your point about ISIS being the product of earlier western foreign policy interventions is well made.

Yes it is horrible watching the criminal stupidity just keep unfolding.

And great comment david f.

Yes ISIS is a real issue. On the one hand it is very difficult for the west to restrain its impulses to intervene faced with such atrocities. On the other hand, it is definitely true that the current extremism is the legacy of past western interventions; and we have every reason to fear that current interventions will make the end result worse not better.

The other day someone was telling me of a photo of Syria in the 1970s they saw recently. The women were uncovered and wearing bikinis swimming, people were drinking alcohol, I mean basically it seemed a picture of pretty normal modern society. Now look at it.

"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"
Shakespeare

The search must be for the *principle* that will enable people to live in peace. Obviously the pronouncements of the western states have low credibility on that score.

I find an inconsistency between the left's correctly recognising the state as an engine of aggression and oppression when it comes to foreign policy, but then treating the state as the fountain of all moral and economic good when it comes to domestic policy. Even John Pilger is guilty of this double standard. The same people who denounce aggression-based interventions abroad, call for endless aggression-based interventions at home, without apparently recognising the inconsistency.

But while ever sufficient people promote the state as the fix-all and the cure-all at home, it will continue to be used as the instrument of these interventions [translation: gross crimes] abroad. The question is, why don't "we" (as the statists say) recognise the systematic aggression of government's "social" interventions as gross crimes at home? Only look at the double standard!

So there is this kind of schizophrenia in the worldview of statists of both left and right, the “progressives” and the neocons, who thus have far more in common with each other than either of them has with a libertarian. That's why both the Republicans and Democrats in the USA, Labour and Conservatives in the UK, and Labor and Liberal in Australia, keep making war criminals of themselves. Their foreign policy is indistinguishable because their view of the state is indistinguishable for all relevant purposes.
The missing piece of the puzzle is for its proponents to recognise that even at home, all the state's actions are based on the same monopoly of aggression and threats of aggression. There is no moral difference.

Rather than trying to hammer and smash foreign states and societies into the shape "we" [translation: the western states] would like them to be in, I think we need to re-think our views.

Perhaps a better question would be: if the western states were to follow the principle of non-aggression, what would the result look like?

And arguably, anybody that disagrees with your version of reality John.
It must be such a comfort to know you're always right!
Rhrosty

Such a pithy and accurate comment Rhrosty.

The reason we won't be putting ISIS out of business any time soon is because it's not in our interest, or not in our interest as defined by our elected leaders, to do so. I'm not sure what they think is in our interest, but putting ISIS our of business s not part of it.
Were we serious about wanting ISIS gone, and with them the rest of the murderous Salafist gangs running rampant across the Middle East, we would make common cause with al-Assad's Syria and Iran.
This won't happen, of course. So the long and seemingly endless GWOT continues. Perhaps the question to ask is in whose interest is that?

"Perhaps the question to ask is in whose interest is that?"

And what's your answer?

John Pilger I don't agree with your left wing market view for our economies but I love your naked truth.

In reality our financial oligarchs like the Rothschilds have rigged the markets and fabricated many wars.The markets have not been allowed to operate with any honesty for a long time,since a few have far too much power.

@Jardine K. Jardine
Posted Friday, 10 October 2014 5:36:01 PM
"Perhaps the question to ask is in whose interest is that?"
GWOT seems to benefit the West's arms and hydrocarbon merchants. It also benefits the US's quest for a unipolar world in that it allows for extreme and invasive surveillance in the name of preventing terrorists attacks on or in the 'homeland'. This is the same invasive surveillance and resultant control of the narrative that allows misreporting of events in the MSM thereby shaping public hysteria which in turn allows Governments to get away with murder.
Australia, England and some EU countries are aping this degradation of basic civil liberties.
The war on ISIS benefits no one. It could be, and probably is, a sham, a con of the first order. Turkey likes ISIS as they are hammering the Kurds. The US and Israel like ISIS as it is keeping Iraq impotent, and they hope to turn it against al-Assad's Syria and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States like ISIS because they are Sunni fighting Shiah.
The entire exercise reeks of hypocrisy, and is bringing our the very worst is any number of public players, players who refuse to learn from recent history. Among them would be our PM, accurately described in this article as "Australia's aggressively weird Tony Abbott".

halduell
I largely agree with that, although I think the war on ISIS probably benefits a similar configuration of interests as the gwot.

So what do you say to those who claim that democracy justifies the exercise of power?

Jardine K. Jardine
I'm not too sure what to make of that comment. My first thought is that it's an Alice in Wonderland comment. Democracy justifies the exercise of power? Is that a request for a blank cheque?
I think I would ask anyone making such a comment for clarification. All sorts of nonsense has gone down behind "democracy" in recent years. I still think multi-party democracy is the way to go, but this has all too often been channelled into a duopoly that is a democracy, as I understand the term, in name only.
But it could be an interesting thought. Care to take it any further?

Joe Biden admits that us allies financed ISIS in attacks on Assad in Syria. As if the USA did not know this at the time. ISIS is a creation of the West like Pol Pot was in Cambodia. General Martin Dempsey n head of the joint chiefs also backs Biden's remarks.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/biden-apologizes-turkey-erdogan-isis-comments-2014-10

I used to read occasional articles by John Pilger, but everything I read provoked a deep anger within that a competent journalist could so comprehensively get everything wrong. Over the years nothing has changed and in my opinion John Pilger's view of the world is about as relevant to reality as a block of marble in the dolomites. What annoys me especially is that John Pilger as a journalist would not be able to exist were it not for the existence of the West, including America. An old expression about "soiling one's own nest" springs to mind.

"Care to take it any further?"

Yes. My underlying query is about the justification of any action against ISIS. I'm not denying that there is or could be such a justification. But I'm challenging anyone who is opposed to it, to consider whether they are not contradicting themselves in inconsistently supporting the initiation of aggression for other purposes.

John Pilger is a classic example. When it comes to western states using force to bomb foreign countries, he can see clearly the moral issues, and the wrong of initiating aggression. But then he contradicts himself as concerns domestic policy, because his agenda there is a thorough-going state control of lots of things, all to be backed up by the initiation of aggression which he ignores. And this inconsistency is virtually a taxonomic characteristic of the left wing in general.

Usually when challenged, they fall back to blandishments about "democracy". But isn't it democracy that has, all along, been deciding to bomb Iraq?

"Democracy justifies the exercise of power? Is that a request for a blank cheque?"

Well that's what I'm asking.

"I think I would ask anyone making such a comment for clarification. All sorts of nonsense has gone down behind "democracy" in recent years."

You can say that again.

"I still think multi-party democracy is the way to go, but this has all too often been channelled into a duopoly that is a democracy, as I understand the term, in name only."

So why do you think democracy is the way to go? Why isn't that just a blank warrant for power limited only by what the government can get away with? Which, considering that it has a self-granted legal monopoly of force and fraud, is pretty much every kind of corrupt and oppressive activity?

Dear Jardine K. Jardine,

I think the reality is that whether the government is called democracy, monarchy, dictatorship, theocracy or something else any nation is ruled by an oligarchy or governing class whose main interest is to keep and maintain power. In the case of the Australian duopoly and its attitude to ISIS there is no debate between the the two major parties. Whatever one decides on the other will support.

david f

No doubt you're right.

However "the reality" is that murder, rape and the bombing of innocents also exist, too.

The question is what justifies one's own decision to participate in or support the initiation of aggression, including by political support, which is by far the biggest vector.

The prey develop a state and task it (inter alia) to enact and enforce laws to protect the prey from predators. This infuriates wannabe predators who rail against this restriction of their predation as tyranny of one sort or another. The predators' buzz word is "libertarianism". Watch them straining at the bit. Moslems whine incessantly about Western measures which interfere with their drive to impose Islamic rule untrammelled by law and based on violence. Western apologists are voluble in Islam's defence as it seeks to rule without let or hindrance. Only total unremitting ideological war on the theocratic Moslem cult based on a firm commitment to the values of the Enlightenment will ever solve the ISIS problem.

EmperorJulian

"The prey develop a state and task it (inter alia) to enact and enforce laws to protect the prey from predators."

That statement is completely unhistorical: a total inversion of what actually happens, and what has happened in reality. See Franz Oppenheimer's classic study: "the State". He shows how it always develops from the most successful armed gang taking over a territory and subjecting its population to its depredations; or by succession from such a group.

States develop the way ISIS is developing. If it had not been opposed by the West, it would probably have taken over its intended territory by now. And if it had been supported by the West, it might have a seat on the UN by now.

A state is by definition that group in society who claim a legal monopoly of the use of aggression, what you're confusedly calling "predation" (no-one's eating anyone's flesh so it's mere empty hyerbole). They legalise their own "predation" which is how they get all their funds, and carry out all their operations.

[Snip paragraph consisting of mind-reading, circularity, misrepresentation, mockery, sarcasm, double standards.]

We have already established, by your own admission, that you believe in unlimited state power to kill its subjects as slaves, the only limiting principle you would allow being "democracy".

So either admit it, or answer the questions that you ran away from last time.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16710&page=0#293576

So, according to you, in principle there's nothing wrong with shooting people dead or threatening to cage and rape them to force them to obey and submit to anything whatsoever so long as a majority vote for it, or rather, so long as a government voted for by a majority does the predation and enslaving? Please admit that's what you're arguing; but if not, why not?

And notice you changed your justification for predation and slavery? You were arguing it's okay if the state does it. Now you're disowning the state per se, and confining your defence to democratic states.

So at what point in Australia's history did the government acquire the right to shoot people for whatever it wants, as you maintain? If it doesn't have that right, why not, according to you?

Also, isn't "might is right" the opposite of a rule of just conduct? The opposite of ethics? Isn't the whole purpose of rules of just conduct to have some other principle of social relations than that the stronger will take from the weaker and attack them if they don't submit and obey? You do know, don't you, that Hitler and his national socialist party were democratically elected?

So how is your so-called "principle" any different from 'might is right'?

For the sake of intellectual honesty, could you please not go quiet and run away like you did last time, popping up here re-running all the same fallacies as if your your political and economic ideology has just been totally demolished, even according to your own terms. Instead please either answer the questions or admit that you can't because your belief system hypocritical and wrong, because you've never thought it through properly.