That’s the most eye-opening headline about Iran in a whole slew of them last week, coming after two months of, well, not much.

In March, the United Nations Security Council set a deadline for Iran to cease enriching uranium. That deadline passed last Thursday.

U.N. nuclear inspectors concluded that Iranian leaders not only blew off the deadline, but they’ve also actually expanded the enrichment process. The top U.N. nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, said that if Tehran is pursuing a nuclear weapon (and not just nuclear energy, as it claims), it is three-eight years away from success. That compresses the five-10-year window most intelligence experts had cited up to now.

The response from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was predictably defiant: “With the support of the Iranian nation, we do not fear the enemy’s hyperbole and psychological warfare. We are nearing our final goals.”

Show of Force

The day before the U.N. inspectors released their report, nine U.S. warships sailed through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf — 17,000 personnel in a show of force unlike anything seen since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A second aircraft carrier was added to the armada at the last minute, with no explanation. And while U.S. ships typically sail through the region at night so as not to attract attention, this was done in daylight — to send an unmistakable message.

Said Rear Adm. Kevin Quinn shortly before the crossing, “There’s always the threat of any state or nonstate actor that might decide to close one of the international straits, and the biggest one is the Strait of Hormuz.”

If by “biggest” he means “most strategic,” there’s little doubt about that. Forty percent of the world’s exported oil is shipped through this narrow passage.

This too brought the usual bluster from Tehran. “Islamic Iran will resist…any kind of threat and will give a powerful answer to enemies and oppressors,” said Iran’s Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar.

Still, every indication has been that President Bush, chastened by public disgust with the Iraq war, has shied away from launching an attack against Iran, lest he wreck whatever chance the Republicans have of holding onto the White House in 2008. Thus, the thinking goes, he has thrown in his lot with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has pursued quiet diplomacy with Iran in recent months — culminating in an ambassador-level meeting yesterday in Baghdad to discuss what Washington and Tehran can do about security in Iraq.  While they didn’t agree on much, they might well meet again within a month.

Enter the veep.

Cheney’s “End Run”?

Washington policy analyst and blogger Steve Clemons reports that one of Dick Cheney’s senior aides is quietly spreading the word around the capital that Cheney is displeased with President Bush’s backing of the diplomatic track — and he’s taking steps that would force Bush’s hand.

How would this come about? Clemons cites what he calls “multiple sources”:

“The White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an ‘end run strategy’ around the president if he and his team lose the policy argument.

“The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against [Iran’s enrichment facility at] Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

“This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counterstrike against U.S. forces in the Gulf — which just became significantly larger — as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.”

In other words, Cheney doesn’t trust Bush to “do the right thing” with Iran, so he’d set events into motion that would bring Bush around to his formerly steely resolve to effect regime change in Tehran.

Of course, all of this might just be misinformation, and Bush has never wavered from a plan to attack Iran — he’s merely waiting for the right moment. That fits better with the usual picture of Bush as “The Decider” — firmly resolute or stubbornly delusional, depending on your point of view.

Regards,
David Gonigam

May 29, 2007

Who’s “The Decider” Now? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

It’s not because I’m a computer wizard (far from it), nor is it because I’m addicted to video games involving animated fighting of fantasy creatures. It isn’t because I’m a champion Dungeons & Dragons player, a widely published author of Lord of the Rings fan fiction, or because I drive some little electric roller skate of a car — although this one thing alone would qualify me…

It’s because every year in January, I watch the State of the Union address, instead of the NFL playoffs.

All right, so maybe I am a dork.

But since an informal personal poll in my group of like-aged friends showed that I’m one of only a few that watched the speech in real time (not including my colleagues in the publishing world, of course), that makes me a dork who’s at least somewhat in touch with the American political process…

And as troubling as it may be that a lot of American 30-somethings seemingly aren’t paying much attention to the goings-on of our political machine (clearly, they aren’t — look at how sporadically they vote), it’s nowhere near as troubling as what was in the State of the Union address itself — and what wasn’t.

Statists of the Union

Along with most of America, my feelings about George Dubya have been pretty wobbly of late. Not that they were ever as cheerleader-ish as many of my critics would claim…

However, I’ll admit there have been moments when the man’s, uhh, uncomplicated leadership has loaned a much-needed singularity of vision to certain political endeavors, in my opinion. His was the opposite of Carter’s “analysis to paralysis” style — and a refreshing change from Clinton’s finger-to-the-wind, ask-the-wife-first, what-they-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-’em method of governance.

I say “was” because Bush has clearly morphed — like most modern lame-duck American politicians — into a shapeless, spineless entity more worried about his legacy than his country. Borrowing a page from the Democrats’ playbook, Bush has tailored his rhetoric and agenda toward not principles or leadership, but appeasement and capitulation to those in power, and a more favorable depiction among those who write tomorrow’s accounts of today’s history…

Seriously, all partisanship aside (literally — I’m feeling like a man without a party these days), I want those of you reading this who actually watched the State of the Union address to ask yourselves this question:

If you somehow didn’t know that George W. Bush was a Republican president, could you have figured it out by what he said in his speech?

I’ll tell you right now that I couldn’t have, at least not by any of the yardsticks the GOP likes to claim as its own. Aside from a token bit of nebulous rhetoric about erasing the deficit and balancing the federal budget — laughable coming from the mouth of what has to be one of the biggest-spending, government-bloating presidents in history — many of Bush’s talking points sounded like some of Bill Clinton’s, and Al Gore’s, from various speeches during their tenure…

Only not as well (or even as convincingly) articulated.

That’s one of the main reasons I’m writing this rambling discourse today: Because I’m alarmed at the fact that the rhetoric of the two dominant political parties in the U.S. today seems always to inexorably blend together when there’s a balance of power between them in our government — like a pair of amoebas mating…

Actually, I’m not alarmed. That’s what they do, politicians. They test the wind, kiss each other’s butts, line each other’s pockets, and then tell us what they think we want to hear while telling each other whatever pays them the most. And we all know it. What’s worse, we’ve all grown to expect and accept it. What disgusts me about it is that they all tell the same lies, just at different times — yet ALWAYS toward the same goal: a bigger and more intrusive government.

In this respect, at least across the span of the election and reign of the current administration, the Democrats are far less deceptive than their Republican rivals. Though they try to understate it in election years, most times, the left makes little effort to conceal its desire to expand government — they see it as the cure to all our ills. The GOP, however, rides to power on the votes of millions of Americans who cling naively to the hope that it is the “smaller government” party it claims to be…

Then it legislates and spends us into the governmental equivalent of a diabetic coma too!

And in this State of the Union speech, I heard not only the same old lies in frilly, updated verse, but also a whole pack of new ones that I find so brazen and absurd I can’t stay quiet about them. Here are just a few of the low spots, for me…

The Speech As Spin

Aside from being one of the least meaty State of the Union addresses I can remember, Bush 43′s latest effort rung throughout with a kind of desperation, in my opinion — not the desperate will to persevere in policy leadership against newly empowered political adversaries, but the need to simply be a relevant part of changing policies that are well beyond his control.

Though well delivered (for him), the speech smacked more of issue ownership than initiative. In other words, the status-quo “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality that so frequently pervades two-party American politics. A few examples…

SPENDING

Dubya spoke with conviction about a return to “spending discipline” in government. But does this mean “spending cuts”? Because I didn’t hear much in the speech about what programs, entitlements, or benefits are in line to get the ax. In the address, Bush never makes the promise to actually trim any spending at all. Instead, he appears to be relying on future tax revenues computed from his own rosy economic forecasts to eliminate the federal deficit and balance the budget — without raising taxes.

Yet in the real world of an ever-older American citizenry coupled with a draining invasion of parasitic illegal immigrants (from a free benefits standpoint), his pledge to restrain the spending appetite of the federal government seems contradictory to his stated desire to “fix” Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid with nothing more than “good sense and goodwill.” Again, without raising taxes.

It takes MONEY to bail out these programs. That means other programs have to go or revenue has to increase. Simple as that. Since Bush seems unwilling to do anything but expand programs and entitlements (not to mention tax cuts), where is this money going to come from? Especially in time of war?

Let me be clear: I’m all for tax cuts. They worked to stimulate the economy in Kennedy’s era (he was a fiscal conservative, you know), during the Reagan years, and have arguably worked in the current administration. But how overheated would our economy have to get to sustain tax cuts AND new programs AND a massive benefits bailout AND an expensive war?

Is a boom of such scope even possible, never mind likely? More importantly, were it to occur, would the government REALLY be able to resist the urge to fritter away all that shiny new money squaring the books, instead of on a bunch of programs aimed at increasing your dependence on them?

Uhh, no.

IMMIGRATION

In keeping with Bush’s tone-deafness toward those who got him into office, his plans to double the size of the Border Patrol and to fund “new infrastructure and technology” run contrary to what the American people want — on both sides of the political fence (but especially on the right). A Rasmussen poll in 2005 revealed that more than 60% of Americans favored the construction of a barrier along our nation’s southern border. Surveys closer to the election pegged this number at as much as 80%. Candidates from both parties promised strong action on illegal immigration in the run-up to the 2006 midterm election, with the border fence an oft-mentioned solution…

Yet here we are, talking about the same old stuff. Increasing the Border Patrol. “Guest worker” programs. Employer accountability. These things all expand the scope and reach of government, and increase spending in all the wrong ways — yet do nothing to curb the influx and cost of illegals who come here not for work, but for the free benefits and instant citizenship status for their babies.

To be fair about it, BOTH parties want the illegal tide to continue unabated. The Republicans want it for cheap labor for businesses and the Democrats want it to expand dependency on government, which translates into votes.

But think about it: If ever there were an opportunity for Bush and the Republicans to redeem themselves in the eyes of the people, it’s with this issue.

The GOP already knows that most Americans want the fence. It’s far cheaper and more reliable than expanding the Border Patrol, and people know it. You’d think that even if Bush doesn’t want the fence in his big-business heart of hearts, he would at least aggressively push for it rhetorically to make the Democrats show their true colors by shooting it down…

But NO, he’s got to roll over into the great wishy-washy middle ground that inevitably prevails for both parties. Meanwhile, we pay out ever more in benefits to illegals, lose ever more in taxes from under-the-table wage paying, and STILL live with the most lax border security imaginable!

GAS

Here’s a gem: Bush is going to cut U.S. gasoline consumption by 20% in 10 years. Did you see Cheney’s expression in the background as the Prez unleashed this one? Was that a smirk I saw?

Yeah, this’ll happen. Our country’s population is exploding exponentially. Air travel is such a god-awful pain in the ass that people are driving more for vacations. Cities are expanding into greater and greater sprawl, so commuting distances are getting longer and longer…

Aside from this, “hybrid” gas-electric vehicles aren’t proving as fuel-efficient as they’re touted to be (look this up — it’s true). Ethanol takes more energy to produce than it saves and is a bona-fide nonstarter, as almost any of my Agora Financial comrades can tell you. Hydrogen “fuel cells” are potentially decades off — if manufacturers can work out the safety, range, and supply issues. And although rechargeable electric cars may someday indeed curb gas usage, they would increase consumption of air-polluting coal for electricity generation, not to mention present environmental challenges from this battery disposal.

Basically, this is nothing more than an attempt at issue control. The Republicans know that rank-and-file Americans (especially tomorrow’s voters) are turning greener, and are against dependence on Middle East oil — yet they’re also unwilling to tolerate ramping up domestic oil production…

So they try to rebrand themselves as being on the cutting edge of conservationist policies t A) garner future votes, B) steal some of the opposition’s core thunder, and C) be able to blame a Democrat Congress when this ridiculous proposal fails.

It’s just more of the same type of typical political rhetorical game-playing that marks the Republocrat party that’s perennially running things.

Small Gov Snubbed Forever?

I’m usually pretty good about putting a “bottom line” on these missives, but today I haven’t really got one. I just wanted to vent a bit about the mealy-mouthed, double-tongued nature of two-party American politics, as revealed by the latest State of the Union address — not that this one is so unique in the modern age. And of course, there’s a lot more I could say about the speech to buttress my points (health insurance, the war, etc.), but you already get my drift…

That all American political rhetoric is a crock of crap we’ve come to accept without outrage — and that the two parties are basically dedicated to the same insidious goal of governmental expansion. The fact that they marginally disagree about how best to do this is immaterial.

Basically, the frustrating bottom line for me is this: Not that this would even be possible, but in order for this country to once again have a true two-party parity of ideas, there’d almost have to be a viable THIRD party in the mix (are you listening, Libertarians?). In my opinion, the Republicans are too far gone to reverse course and become the smaller-government “yin” to the Democrats’ “yang.” They’ve sipped from the fountain of big government and found that it was sweet…

Now, the two parties are only truly distinct from one another at their fringes. For the most part, neither is dedicated to preserving our freedoms (perish the thought!) or protecting our citizenry — only extracting the most money out of us to sustain the greatest possible dependency on government.

And at this, they should be toasting each other to their great and continuing success.

Wishing for a State of Disunion,

Jim Amrhein,
Contributing Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 30, 2007

Where’s the Party? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The topic of war-with all its sorry implications-is, of course, emotionally and politically charged. Some believe to the depths of their soul that we need to “stay the course” in Iraq and Afghanistan, “fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here.” Others judge, correctly in our view, that any military effort in the Middle East is akin to entering a knife fight without a knife. You might survive, but not without losing a lot of blood. Individuals in the latter camp are accused of wanting to “cut and run,” as the talk show morons like to say. But few seem to remember the origins of that phrase. When weather demands it, sailors would cut the anchor line and run before the wind to avoid an approaching catastrophe. It was a sign of intelligence in the face of danger.

Missing from the debate is a candid discussion of the true implications of our current war, not just for the U.S. soldiers killed or wounded, and not just for the local citizens wounded or killed by soldiers sent to deliver “democracy” to people who don’t know what the word means. To an Iraqi caught in the crossfire between an occupying army and its tormentors, the word “democracy” now translates as “duck!”

Into this morass, we push forward Doug Casey, Chairman of Casey Research and the editor of the International Speculator, a monthly newsletter focusing on investments with the potential for a 100% or better profit over the next 12 months. Never one for moral equivocation or political correctness, Doug, who wrote the best-selling Crisis Investing (Harper Collins 1980), is an avid student of crisis in its many varieties. He foresaw the coming of what many are now calling a world war in his July, 2001, International Speculator article, “Waiting for World War III”. A pertinent excerpt…

Waiting for WWIII

What are the greatest problems facing us today? Domestically, I’d say the continual and accelerating loss of freedom, compounded by the prospect of what I suspect could be the biggest financial/economic crisis of modern times. What might that crisis be like? That’s unpredictable, although the odds are it will be unlike any others that are still fresh in people’s memories, simply because people tend to be most prepared for the things that have most recently scared them. The big problems usually come from an unexpected quarter, and/or at an unexpected time. Like the monetary crisis of 1998 that materialized in Thailand.

That said, the question remains of where to look. My guess (although it sounds so unprofessional to use a word like “guess”; a government briefing would substitute a phrase like “our research shows” or “expert opinion indicates”) is that it will come from outside American borders, in the form of war. War is perhaps the worst thing that can happen, not only for the destruction it will cause in itself, but because it will immensely exacerbate America’s domestic problems. As Stirner famously said, “War is the health of the State.”

But neither a declared war, nor a war in the conventional sense, is likely in the cards. U.S. troops have been in combat in a dozen countries since our last “official” war ended in 1945; the U.S. troops stationed in over 100 countries are an accident waiting to happen. Besides the Balkans and Iraq, Colombia is probably highest on the dance card, but almost any place could erupt unpredictably. Who, after all, could have predicted that the U.S. would invade Somalia in 1991, a country few people other than stamp collectors even knew existed. No place is safe from being attacked in The National Interest of the world’s self-appointed policeman.

Anything is possible within this context, but I discount the possibility of another Vietnam, again because of the “recent collective memory” phenomenon. Vietnam is possibly the major reason why the Iraq attack ended so quickly; quick withdrawal obviated any danger that ground troops might get stuck in a major tar baby. But when you’re sticking your nose absolutely everywhere it doesn’t belong, there are lots of ways to get it bloodied. My guess is that something resembling a Crusade is developing against those who live in the Koran Belt. It won’t be overtly religious like the Crusades of the Middle Ages, but it will have major cultural undertones. And there’s every prospect it will be highly unconventional in nature.

And in August of 2002, he (correctly, it turns out) extrapolated where the attack on Iraq would lead, even before the bombs started to fall. (For the full article, see August 2002 “The Forever War, Chapter Next” in the Archives.)

At risk of being unpopular (admittedly a risk I’ve run my whole life), let me state my brief: the impending war is not only unnecessary, it’s unethical, will turn out to be totally counterproductive, will serve to further erode Americans’ freedoms, and move them further towards national bankruptcy, to boot. Are there any positives to it? I’m not sure there are any at all.

Quite frankly, the current drive toward war with a small (13 million people), backward country pretty much on the other side of the globe puzzles me. I have no question that its leader is a sociopath. But that’s true of many, if not most of the world’s leaders, and we aren’t about to start wars with them for that reason; many have been, or are, “allies.”

And here we are, four years later-with Doug’s dire predictions borne out. Where does Doug see things going over the next four years, and what are the Forever War’s more immediate implications for the global economy? We caught up with him in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Q.: It’s sort of hard to know where to start. One day, the country was ticking along, the next, September 12, 2001, we were up to our neck in a global war. In the beginning, there was an international outpouring of support for the U.S. Now we are increasingly isolated. What was the name of the truck that hit us? Or, put another way, what do you think were the controlling mindset and principles of the Bush administration that led us to this point?

A.: First let’s look at who’s been pulling the strings in Washington. The Bush Administration is overwhelmingly composed of Neocons.

They’re highly ideological academics and intellectuals who started off as hard-line socialists but converted to “conservatism” because they were bright enough to see socialism is a one-way street to universal poverty. But they don’t believe in free markets for any reason other than they generate more wealth for the people in charge to allocate-pretty much the same pragmatic approach taken by the Chinese Communist Party. And they never believed in personal freedom. Political hacks are pretty similar, no matter where you find them.

The Republicans in the U.S. have always pretended to believe in free markets while they nurtured the warfare state, but they were quite sincere in their disavowal of social freedoms. The Democrats, on the other hand, have always pretended to believe in social freedoms, and sometimes mounted weak rhetorical attacks on the warfare state, but they were quite sincere in their dislike of free markets. It was logical that, as Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, and the rest of them saw the writing on the economic wall, they’d become Republicans. The Neocons, in other words, take most of the worst in both theory and practice from both parties. They’re fans of both the Welfare State and the Warfare State. They’re dangerous people.

In addition, almost all high-level Bush types are either Zionist Jews or Fundamentalist Christians, in either case reflexive and zealous supporters of the state of Israel. For myself, I have no problem with Israel going about its business; but I think the U.S. should treat it like any other of the world’s 200-odd countries.

Of course the U.S., as evidenced by the approximately $4 billion of aid it gives Israel every year, plus another $1.3 billion to bribe Egypt to be cordial toward Israel, has long treated the country as something approaching the 51st state. Bush has taken this to a new level.

Q.: How do Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda fit into this?

A.: It’s funny, people talk about Osama bin Laden all the time. But nobody ever listens to him. This is very unwise, in that the single most important thing in a conflict is to understand your opponent’s mindset. Osama has said several times that he’s conducting his jihad for three rather simple and clear reasons. First, he wants foreign troops out of Islamic countries. Second, he wants foreign powers to stop propping up dictators in Islamic countries. Third, he wants foreign powers to cease their support of Israel, which he views as the usurper of Palestinian lands. These impress me as reasonable goals. He’s never said he’s fighting the U.S. because, as Bush seems to think, he “hates our freedom.”

Of course he loathes the U.S. and what it stands for, but that’s really got nothing to do with the actual reasons for his attacks.

The attacks were vastly more successful than Osama could have imagined-but only because of the Administration’s idiotic response. Bush immediately puts the world on notice they’re either “for us or against us,” then invades two small, primitive countries, neither of which had anything to do with the attack. This is followed up with all kinds of draconian measures at home and abroad-Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, snatching people on suspicion, the PATRIOT act, disregard for habeas corpus. Then, at least initially, the American people jumped on the jingoist bandwagon with their self-proclaimed war president and make a big deal of things like Freedom Fries. A hundred heavy-handed and pointless measures added up to convince people around the world that the U.S. had whooped itself into an out-of-control bully, undeserving of sympathy.

The U.S. likes to blame all terrorism on Osama and al-Qaeda. That’s because it makes the problem seem containable; it makes it seem as though there’s just one little group of bad guys the U.S. can track down and eliminate. That was once close to the truth. But now it’s just posturing. Today there are scores of Islamic groups all over the world, with similar worldviews and agendas. Of course they are all mutually sympathetic and try to support one another, but they’re completely independent. The way the U.S. has handled the problem is directly responsible for the metastasis.

Q.: You seem to think that Afghanistan wasn’t complicit in the 9/11 attacks. But there is a strong connection between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, and even bin Laden himself said he was behind 9/11. So wasn’t some sort of punitive action called for?

A.: The first thing is to decide whether the events of 9/11 were an act of war by another state, or simply an act of criminality by independent actors. Clearly it was the latter. There’s no evidence whatsoever that the government of Afghanistan, run at the time by the Taliban, had anything at all to do with it. Is there a connection between the Taliban and Osama? Yes, of course. Osama was something of a national icon for helping to drive out the Soviet invaders in the ’80s, which is why he was living there. But people forget that none of the 20 conspirators was an Afghan, and 15 of them, not to mention Osama himself, were Saudis. There was as much reason to attack Saudi Arabia as Afghanistan.

So we have an independent act of criminality with only an incidental tie to Afghans. And these are, incidentally, the same Afghans we armed and supported in their fight to evict the Soviets in 1980. At least the Soviets were invited in by the ruling government, as we were in Vietnam. Somehow we seem to think Afghans like our soldiers running around killing people and destroying property more than they liked the Russians doing the same thing. They don’t. The difference in political goals and the ideological distinctions between the U.S. and Russia are completely lost on these backward, religious, tribal people. So you can plan on the Afghan War growing ever larger and nastier.

Q.: Getting back to what should have been done…

A.: What should have been done if 20 IRA soldiers, or 20 Quebecois separatists, or 20 Colombian Mafiosi had done the same thing? It’s a crime, albeit a very large, spectacular and unusual one, but you treat it like a crime. The U.S. military is not suited for police work.

Few Americans realize that the Constitution provides for the issuance of “letters of marque,” that authorize private bounty hunters to bring pirates to justice. Outfits modeled on Pinkerton’s of the 19th century or Executive Outcomes of the 20th would be far more effective in dealing with al-Qaeda and vastly cheaper than a regular army. That, and less likely to invite retaliation against the U.S. itself. But who reads the Constitution anymore?

One interesting thing about al-Qaeda and its clones is that I think they’re indicative of the way the world is going to evolve. The nation-state, which is only an historical aberration in the big scheme of things, and a terrible idea, is on its way out. It’s going to be replaced by transnational groups of people who coalesce based on what’s important to them-religion, race, hobbies, philosophy, any of a million things that draw people together. Loyalties won’t be to a bunch of people who happen to share some government ID document, but to self-selected, and much stronger, groups. There’s a lot more I could say about this.

Q.: I think I know your answer this to one already, but why do you think the U.S. invaded Iraq? You’ve said that attacking Iraq for 9/11 would have been like bombing China for Pearl Harbor. So, why did we do it?

A.: Einstein said that, after hydrogen, stupidity was the most common thing in the universe. And I think that really is the best explanation. But Bush gave two reasons for the invasion. One, that Iraq was “linked” to al-Qaeda. Two, that Saddam was developing so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction. At the time I said that both excuses were pitifully transparent, even ridiculous, lies.

As to the first point, Saddam’s Baath regime was highly secular; the Baathists and the Islamic fundamentalists viewed each other as mortal enemies. True, they both had reason to distrust and dislike America in general, and the Bush regime in particular. But Saddam was precisely the type of Arab leader Osama wants to get rid off. The assertion they were “linked” is laughable.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction issue is more interesting. Anybody at all with some money, technical skill and motivation can develop biological and chemical weapons. Atomic weapons are more complex and expensive, but hardly rocket science in today’s world; the methods for making them are well known. My God, even North Korea, one of the most backward countries in the world, has done it. These things used to be lumped together as ABC (atomic, biological, chemical) weapons because they were unconventional. But only atomic weapons are actually capable of mass destruction. The WMD moniker was coined recently by the U.S. as a propaganda gimmick, to create an atmosphere of hysteria conducive to the war. It’s a stupid designation, but the press seems to like it. A classical artillery barrage, or a B-52 strike, is really much more of a WMD than chemical or biological weapons.

By the way, last November, there was a video released showing Saddam and his generals before the Iraq war, discussing the possible use of slingshots, Molotov cocktails and crossbows to fight back against the U.S. In the video, Saddam got quite excited about the idea of providing every Iraqi with a slingshot. So much for the scary WMDs.

In any event, was the fear of Saddam getting ABC weapons a reason to invade Iraq? Well, it wasn’t enough of a reason to invade Israel, India or Pakistan when they got them. The fact is that there are a couple dozen countries that could have a nuclear arsenal within a year if they wanted it. The nuclear weapons genie has long been out of the bottle.

And you don’t have to build them to own them. I’ll be quite surprised if some Russian general doesn’t sell some to a party with the right amount of cash. Or maybe some Russian sergeants, since they’re the ones who actually handle them. But the big danger here is Pakistan. The Islamic world views Musharraf as a stooge of the Americans. After he’s assassinated, the odds of which are very high, there’s no telling what will happen to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq has morphed from the Osama links and WMD’s to an altruistic desire to bring “democracy” to the Middle East. Like almost everything else the man says, it makes no sense. In the first place, democracy is just a means of installing rulers; it doesn’t in any way guarantee protection for free minds or free markets. In fact, in today’s idiom, it’s nothing but mob rule dressed up in a coat and tie. What I personally want is individual liberty, which is possible only with an extremely limited government, whose sole purpose is to protect one’s life and property from aggression. I recognize I’m in a small minority, even among Americans, who today view government as a cornucopia of all they desire and see democracy and majority rule as their opportunity to scoop out as much as they want.

But Americans, even though they’re pretty far from being libertarians, come a lot closer than the average devout Muslim, for whom the Koran is the direct and incontrovertible word of Allah. It’s not just the prohibition on drinking, gambling and earning interest and the other puritanical features that make the faith unacceptable to me. Not just the obligatory zakat, which, feeling as I do about charity (see IS 6/2006), doesn’t fit. Not just the ritualistic prayer five times a day or the pilgrimage to Mecca. It’s that Islam is more than a religion; it’s a way of life that submerges politics, philosophy, economics, everything. It’s not a religion that allows for much individual liberty; the word itself means “submission.”

Q.: So here we are, three years later, and the situation is a real mess, as you and others accurately warned would happen even before the first shots were fired. Humor us by describing how you think the current mess in the Iraq and then in the Middle East will unfold from here.

A.: One thing is now clear to all but the dimmest observers: the U.S. has lost this war, and the longer it goes on, the worse it will get. The outcome was obvious from the start, because it’s not possible for an army from the other side of the planet to win a guerrilla war. At least not in a politically correct way. You could engage in wholesale ethnic cleansing, the way the Romans, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane did, but, at least in today’s world, that would be counterproductive in any number of ways, entirely apart from moral considerations. Simply killing guerrillas serves no purpose; to the contrary, the more you kill, the more you get. And, as the statistics show, for every fighter you kill, you kill several non-combatants. And there you’re really sowing dragon’s teeth, especially in a society that has high chronic unemployment among young, unmarried males-which are extraordinarily dangerous and volatile creatures.

My guess is that the next U.S. president will try to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But it’s going to be harder then, because the U.S. will be in full retreat, taking many more casualties than today. The Brits and other members of the phony “coalition of the willing” have already bailed. From a strictly tactical point of view, it’s going to be much tougher than leaving Vietnam. The only portion of the Iraqi army that won’t have stripped off their uniforms and turned into the biggest jogging team in Asia will be the ones who are working with the insurgents. But, unfortunately, that’s the best-case scenario.

The worst case, and a not unlikely one, is there is another incident like 9/11, possibly much more serious, especially while Bush is in office. At that point, mass hysteria may take over, and the government will lock the country down like one of its many new federal prisons. If the Iranians are implicated, it may be the excuse Bush is looking for to launch an air strike against them. Now you’re looking at WW3.

A surprising number of Neocon types are saying that WW3 has already started. They’re not just saying that to make an astute observation; they’re saying that because they want the U.S. to actually broaden the war. The enemy is Islam.

To be continued…
Doug Casey

January 24, 2007

Make War Your Friend, Part I was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.