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From
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Memo on the Margin
June 11, 2001
Timothy McVeigh, Killed in Action
Memo To: Families of Oklahoma City Casualties
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: The War at Home
If you type "Waco"
into "Google" search engine at the right, you will find I�ve been writing
about the consequences of Waco since 1993, when
the Branch Davidians were incinerated by the Federal Government while
Timothy McVeigh looked on. I continue to get crazed hate mail from people
who complain about my attempt at objective analysis, which led me to
advocate life in prison over execution for McVeigh. Yet in the last
days before he was put to death this morning, I saw that he had carefully
thought out the reason why he had to be executed, "killed in action"
being preferable to spending the rest of his life in a "concentration
camp." These are my terms, not his, as I can now more easily understand
his willingness to die. For as he reasoned, he was willing to die for
his country when he went to war in the Gulf, when it was not clear to
him why it was so important that so many young Iraqi boys in uniform
had to be killed. Yes, our Commander-in-Chief thought it had to be done,
and those kinds of decisions were above his pay grade. He was troubled
sufficiently by what he was seeing and hearing in the Gulf -- tens of
thousands of Iraqi boys slaughtered by the forces assembled against
Saddam Hussein -- that on his return home he began acting strangely,
looking for a political footing.
Something was wrong, he says, and I believe him. That�s because
I have thought something wrong too, but Jude Wanniski can get up every
morning and think he can leverage himself to be able to change the direction
our government is taking in the way it manages problems at home and
in the rest of the world. I�ve been totally disgusted with the behavior of
our government these last ten years in our treatment of
the people of Iraq. I cannot forget our U.N. Ambassador, Madeleine Albright,
telling Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes that the deaths of 500,000
Iraqi children during our embargo was a price worth paying in
order to deal with Saddam. Collateral damage.
I�m not a soldier and have never had to think like one. But as
a man of ideas, some worthwhile and some not, I was horrified by Waco,
and could see that in politics, as in physics, for every action there
is a reaction, and there was bound to be one, just as the blowing up
of the World Trade Center came from Muslims acting out of a sense that
our Federal Government was deaf to the entreaties of the Islamic world.
Even though McVeigh chose the anniversary of Waco for his personal act
of war, the initial belief was that Oklahoma City was a Muslim act.
To me, Waco was a signal that in our national organism which we might
call the Body Politic, there was a cancer, one that called out for an
anti-body from its immune system. It was McVeigh who believed himself
to be drafted for the purpose of attacking that cancer.
As soon as I learned that David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians,
went into Waco every two weeks to shop, buy the papers, and look around,
it was obvious our Federal Government had committed mass murder at Waco.
If the government wished to, it could have picked him up at the 7-11
and asked what was going on in the compound with guns and little girls.
So it was a Holocaust, Ruby Ridge writ large. And please, my Jewish
friends, do not write me that the Nazis wiped out 6 million Jews and we only
wiped out several dozen sect members. Volume does not count. Our foreign policy toward
Iraq has already racked up 1.5 million innocent
s since 1991, mostly little children and old folks.
As a political philosopher, I did think the Waco action had to produce
a violent reaction if it were not satisfactorily addressed by the
government. If President William Clinton had called in the press corps
and announced that his administration
would take full responsibility for the deaths of the Waco incident and
condemn those responsible -- that would have been sufficient. Instead,
as we all remember, our new, young President hid under his desk, his
press secretary issuing the statement that the assault of the Waco
compound
was not his decision, but that of Janet Reno, his Attorney General.
But I do not for a moment say responsibility stops at the desk of Bill
Clinton, which is how President Harry Truman might have handled it. The
ENTIRE political establishment crowded under the same desk. If Timothy
McVeigh were waiting for some kind of action from his government to
explain why all those kids and ladies went up in smoke at Waco, he was
to be disappointed. They all ran for cover, the elected officials of
both political parties, the bureaucrats, and the major media, which
explains why McVeigh decided the "reaction" to the "action"
should NOT be the assassination of Ms. Reno. She was the only "good
guy" in the whole enterprise. A war had broken out in his head
and his mission would be to blow up the nearest federal building.
It has been repeatedly called a "cowardly act," but I have
seen some relatives of those killed in the bombing acknowledge that
McVeigh seemed prepared to die at the time, if the timing device did
not work and he had to return to set the bomb off manually. His lawyers
yesterday told the press assembled for the execution that when he referred
to the 168 men, women and children who were killed in the blast as
"collateral
damage," he meant to equate them with innocent civilians who die
when our pilots drop bombs on military targets.
Because I wished to see some good come out of that horrible
event, that the deaths of the innocents not be without meaning, I wrote
in 1993 that the experience might be instructive to Mr. Clinton, our
new President from Arkansas who found himself at the pinnacle of military
power on earth -- with no experience in its use. I said perhaps Waco
might have taught him about the unintended consequences of the ill-
considered
use of force. There is little doubt in my mind that Waco + Oklahoma
City had that effect on President Clinton. Even when he bombed the aspirin
factory in Khartoum, he asked if we could bomb at night, and when perhaps
only the night watchman might be there. So consider this possible meaning
in the lives of your loved ones: We have had eight years without war,
perhaps the longest stretch in a century with no American in the armed
services losing his life in combat.
I address these comments to you, the families of those who did lose
their lives, because I believe in a roundabout way that your loved ones
lost their lives in a way that did have meaning. When McVeigh called
them "collateral damage," he was using a term that was taught
to him as a serviceman who would need something to enable him to pull
the trigger at targets he did not understand. The incubus he attacked,
in his mind, was one that had to be excised. He was ready to pay the
ultimate price, of death, and so he has. Just as a cancer attacks the
body, an excision is necessary to remove it. From what I can tell, McVeigh
never sought martyrdom nor does he deserve any honor even close to that.
He took the law into his own hands, a vigilante, but the whole experience
needs to be understood and appreciated, or we will find this kind of
individual act of retribution coming at us again and again and again
and again. These are my honest thoughts, citizens of Oklahoma City,
not meant to irritate you, but to hopefully suggest that there was some
over-arching purpose in the loss of so many innocents. I am truly sorry
they died, even while I believe I understand why McVeigh did what he
believed he had to do.
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The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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