George F. Will

Call it masochism. Yes, masochism. I can find no other explanation for reading George F. Will's columns. They are sometimes comical in their faux seriousness and simpleton logic i.e. "Most U.S. wars have been fought with military mass sustained by military might." Wow! You think? Sometimes even ribald i.e. "'Gosh!' Says Roosevelt on Death of Yamamoto." Amazing!! Maybe it's their formulaic quality: first a reference to ancient wisdom, then exercises in erudite vocabulary, then the an obvious moral conclusion. A great simplifier, this. We read quotations from Plato,Aristotle, Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, Churchill, , all in service of explaining conservative, or what passes for conservative, Republican truths: tax increases on the wealthy are always bad; government control of the economy is always bad except in the case of defense expenditures and in the case of subsidies to industry. Sometimes our armchair Feldherr even comments on our military i.e. "When you set out to take Baghdad, take Baghdad." (A paraphrase of Napoleon. No mention was ever made of what happened after Baghdad was taken.) Then the pretension to erudition - more nonsense: "although prostrate from its [the state of California] own profligacy..." Big words, small ideas. The state of California is broke not because of profligacy but because of the recession, brought on by the profligacy of banks, and an idiotic property tax law, which keeps rates, especially on commercial property, extremely low. Is it a surprise that the state treasury has no money? Only to jejune George and his cohorts. Now we come to the moralizing, the appeal to right, truth, justice and the American Way. The comment on the demise of Twinkies, "If, however, Twinkies and perhaps other Hostess brands retain value, the market will say so, and someone will produce them...Business moves to states that make them welcome." First, the appeal to sweet reason and then economic truths that only the "market" can demonstrate. Yet these arbiters of logic, the markets, do not operate unfettered unless in the service of industry and the wealthy. The recent New York Times article on state subsidies to industry...oops I meant tax rebates, tax incentives, property tax relief... is clear proof. The state of Texas alone underwrites its industries with a 19.2 billion dollar tax subsidy. Yes, markets are really not trusted to work, ah, ah, they have to have a little help from the taxpayer. And that is the subtext of George's remarks, "Business moves to states that make them welcome." Or, to put it into MBAese, "Subsidies, here we come."

Now gentle George comments ["A Case for Targeted Killing", December 9, 2012, the Washington Post] that targeted killings via drones is a valid and legal aspect of the new realities of war. He says that John Yoo, intellectual pimp of the W administration, has written a brilliant guide to targeted killings in "Assassination or Targeted Killings after 9/11." Yoo notes that these murders "further the goals of the laws of war by eliminating the enemy and reducing harm to innocent civilians." This contributes to the war effort in today's "undefined war with a limitless battlefield." Because the enemy "resembles a network, not a nation", they can hide among the civilian population and have no large and targetable command and control apparatus.

Do the above strictures apply to, say, the resistance movement in Poland in World War II? Certainly the structure of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krakowa, or AK) resembled "a network, not a nation". And it could and did hide among the civilian population while carrying out sabotage of German installations and railways. For the Nazis it was a "undefined war with a limitless battlefield" especially because they planned to annihilate 85% of the population of Poland to settle the empty land. Viewed from a German perspective the Poles were enemies; before the war even began, Hitler ordered that professors, intellectuals, church officials and other leaders be executed in order to, as Yoo notes, "demoraliz[e] the enemy, prevent...planning, sow...confusion and drain...the reservoir of experience." He wanted the Polish population to be a "leaderless mass of laborers." Sounds like Yoo to me.

Stalin also subscribed to Yoo theory for he murdered thousands of Polish officers and other Polish leaders in the Katyn Forest Massacre in 1940; thereafter the Soviet state would have little to fear from the Polish populace; their natural leaders would be dead.

("Of the total killed [22,000, est.] about 8000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6000 were police officers with the rest being Polish intelligentsia arrested for allegedly being 'intelligence agents. gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials, and priests." ) - from Wikipedia.

Indeed, this massacre "demoraliz[ed] enemy, prevent[ed] planning, sow[ed] confusion and drain[ed] the reservoir of experience. Yes, all this has John Yoo justified.

While George Will addresses both the implications and results of both Yoo's article and their applications, he ducks the most essential issue, the absolute center of this question. Put simply, DOES IT WORK?

Does assassination demoralize the enemy, does it prevent planning, does it sow confusion, does it drain the reservoir of experience? To some degree all of the latter are true, but the point that Yoo misses is that this does not win a war, other leaders will emerge, the questions that began the conflict have not been resolved - targeted killings, while militarily and technologically attractive, cannot and will not bring conflict to a close. What our country wants, George and John, is not a continuing low-level conflict, but instead a resolution of struggle and achievement of peace.