The government has no right to violate anyone’s natural rights.

I oppose President Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan and all wars because it’s wrong to kill innocent people.

As radio personality Scott Horton says, “it’s really that simple.”

Say a private individual or group carried out an “anti-crime” bombing that killed an innocent person. That person would be severely punished regardless of how many genuine murderers he justifiably killed or how many more innocent lives he saved.

I fail to see the moral difference between this sort of private criminality, and Donald Rumsfeld – as reported in The New York Times – ordering dozens of bombings he knew would kill up to 30 innocent Iraqis in the early days of the Iraq war.

The hundreds – if not thousands – of innocent Afghani and Pakistani deaths from U.S. strategic airstrikes and drone warfare in 2009 indicate President Obama doesn’t object to this sort of policy either.

Regardless of our leaders’ rationales for killing innocents, no one can quantify the value of a single human life. Indeed, that one person may well contribute more to the world than the larger group of people he and others were sacrificed to “liberate.”

How can the military possibly know that the little girl who would go on to cure cancer, or the next boy to “have a dream” that changed the world wasn’t among their “collateral damage,” in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Additionally, saying an innocent life is dispensable is to reduce the human experience to a finite value.

Human lives are special. I refuse to reduce my experiences of learning to play chess as a boy from my grandfather, falling in love and finishing my first cross country race to a finite value.

I also refuse to reduce the lives of my friends and family as a dispensable means to an end. And I’d be willing to bet the enablers of the warfare state wouldn’t want anyone doing that to their loved ones either.

But to be consistent, we have to respect other people the same way. It doesn’t matter whether they are Afghani, Iraqi or American.

If the people of the world condemned modern warfare, governments will no longer be able to kill innocent people as a means to an end.

So instead of holding your nose and trying to ignore all this killing overseas in your name and with your paycheck, I urge the reader to do the right thing.

Vocally protest Obama’s surge in the Afghanistan war – along with all other wars.

You might be called a radical or even a traitor, but you will be on the right side of history in the distant day when schoolchildren look back at the institution of warfare as we look at slavery today – with shock that society could condone it and admiration for those who fearlessly stood against it.