Is This Really War?

In 1985, Wilson Goode became the first U.S. mayor to bomb his own city. In an effort to rid a West Philadelphia neighborhood of a ragtag, violent, back-to-nature organization called Move, which had engaged in a shootout with police, Goode ordered explosives dropped on the Move house from a helicopter. The whole block of row houses burned, 61 homes in all. Eleven people were killed, five of them children. Some 250 people lost their homes.

Goode came in for universal condemnation and ridicule. Too bad for him he didn’t drop his bomb in a foreign country and call it war. At least in Goode’s case he could claim he was the mayor of the city using the police to suppress a dangerous group that not only engaged in violence but also lived in an unsanitary way that affected its neighbors.

President George W. Bush cannot make the same kind of claims in Iraq, where things far worse than what Wilson Goode did happen regularly.

Read the rest at The Future of Freedom website.