From Dean's major foreign policy address on Monday:"I have supported U.S. military action to roll back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, to halt ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, [and] to stop Milosevic's campaign of terror in Kosovo...."
Now, I guess that's not surprising. But Dean's argument against the Iraq war has focused on the idea (I'd say, the fact) that Iraq was never a national security threat. Well, it wasn't a national security threat in 1991 either, and Clinton's half-hearted argument that we had national security interests in Serbia amounted to"well, World War One started over there somehow when somebody killed some archduke or something." And if ethnic cleansing and terror argued for war over Kosovo, it's pretty hard to see why they didn't in the case of Hussein, who made Milosevic look like Niles Crain.
There's nothing in the rest of the speech that provides any kind of bold new foreign policy vision either. Spend more on foreign aid. Do more to wipe out AIDS in Africa. Work with our allies and don't tick them off gratuitously. Snore.
I'm rooting for Dean because he seems angry about something, and I'd like to see a fight, rather than a Clinton-Dole 1996-style lovefest in 2004. But the idea that he'd be a marked improvement over Bush is tough to credit. As somebody put it once, government's a massive runaway freight train careening towards disaster. Every four years we have a big to-do over who gets to sit up in the front car and pretend they're driving. It's hard to get excited about that.
Before continuing with my serialized autobiography, I’d like to do some blogging….
Hurray for Orville and Wilbur Wright! Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle featured a number of articles honoring the 100th anniversary of their first flight. Staff Science Writer Keay Davidson contributed the contrarian, “Techno-skeptics weren't all wrong about Wrights,” (though I’ll be criticizing it, I think it raises some interesting questions and I did enjoy reading it.):
“Aviation pioneers weren't just nuts-and-bolts types who loved tinkering with gadgets. They were also social utopians. They believed airplanes would transform the world.”
“Consider the closing vision of an 1894 book by Octave Chanute, a leading aviation enthusiast and ally of the Wrights: ‘Upon the whole, the writer is glad to believe that when man succeeds in flying through the air the ultimate effect will be to diminish greatly the frequency of wars and to substitute some more rational methods of settling international misunderstandings. This may come to pass not only because of the additional horrors which will result in battle, but because no part of the field will be safe, no matter how distant from the actual scene of conflict.’”
According to Davidson, Chanute and the...
First it was the (intentional?) leak of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's memo, which brought into question the administration's effectiveness in the"War on Terror." Rumsfeld may have been born in Chicago, but he was educated at Princeton University. In New Jersey. Hold onto that fact for a moment.
Then, it was former EPA head and former governor of New Jersey (do you sense a pattern here?), Christie Todd Whitman, who slammed the Halliburton contracts in Iraq."That was dumb," this former Bush appointee said in November's Harper's Bazaar."Why in God's name [would] you let that happen? Halliburton may be the best people to do the job, but you have to bid it, because it just looks terrible."
Now it's another former New Jersey governor, Tom Kean, who is singling out"immigration inspectors,""visa people,""FBI people," for not being vigilant enough to thwart the 9/11 attacks. He's not"yet" naming any incompetent senior administration officials, but he's hinting that more than a few heads should have rolled because of the monumental collapse in US intelligence and defense on that dark day.
Forget Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Forget the Hollywood Left and the antiwar movement. Perhaps the administration ought to take a closer look at New Jersey, and all of its own appointees who are being a little too critical, and who may have had some connection to that state. Methinks there's a conspiracy afoot.
I have been debating"pro-war" advocates on several lists over the newest developments in Iraq, but it seems that I've earned the disapproval of at least one antiwar advocate too, because of my"Death to Tyrants" approach to Saddam Hussein.
Let me say, in response, that I am second to none in my appreciation of the role of U.S. foreign policy in engendering the demons it now seeks to exorcise from the world stage. I address the issue of Saddam and U.S. complicity in this post, where I quote appropriately from scripture:"If we sow wickedness, we will reap the same."
My recent discussion of the lethal triangular relationship between the US government, the Saudi government, and ARAMCO is yet another instance of my emphasis on the role of US complicity in the eradication of life, liberty, and property. (And if you want to puke over the Saudi role in all this, take a look at this article.)
But I do not believe that US complicity qualifies as a"mitigating circumstance" in judging Saddam's guilt. It is not a defense in morality or international law for Saddam to say:"Hey, everybody knew I was doing this, and the US encouraged me, and nobody raised hell about it before. Why now?" Saddam deserves due process, and if found guilty, he deserves the ultimate penalty for his crimes.
Still. US complicity must also be put on trial. In the court of public opinion. It is my hope that such a court will begin to understand the...
Principal Karen Davis of Horsham’s Dorothea Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland has ordered the removal of a nativity scene display but allowed other displays to remain in place including a Menorah and an item representing Kwanzaa .
Her reasoning is strained. She claims that “Kwanzaa isn’t a religious holiday and the Menorah is as much of a cultural symbol as it is a religious symbol.”
Unfortunately, the existence of the public school monopoly, which forces parents and children with diverse perspectives into a “one best system,” guarantees that silly stories of this type will continue to plague us on an annual basis.
Gene has just finished a new Cato Policy Analysis paper, "Deployed in the U.S.A.: the Creeping Militarization of the Home Front."
In this piece, he argues against looking to the military to solve domestic problems, such as illegal immigration, the threat of terrorism, and drug prohibition.
Like previous guest bloggers I'd like to thank David Beito for inviting me – and also for creating this high-caliber blog. I don't believe that I've met any of you regular L&Pers in the real world (that I've heard so much about) but I have read and admired a number of your books and articles (enough said), so I feel privileged to be able to share my thoughts with you all. Please feel free to comment on and criticize what I write, as I think conversations and debates are often more useful and entertaining than serial monologues.
Moving right along, I'd like to explain why I've been asked to guest blog. The short answer is that I'm on loan from the Antiwar.com (AWC) blog, which debuted this summer. A couple of years ago I started AWC's letters-to-the-editor section, called Backtalk, and I've run it since. I was also Assistant Managing Editor /Webmaster in '01 & '02. It was a challenging job before the 9/11 attacks, after the attacks it was what my mom calls an AFGO, or Another F-ing Growth Opportunity. I'd like to ramble on a little here and describe the events that brought me to AWC.
I
graduated from high school in Massachusetts the '80s,
skipped college, moved to San Francisco and played
music (no, you never heard any of it) while working at
a series of low-paying jobs (visualize High
Fidelity, close enough). I read a fair amount
but somehow managed to keep...
For one thing...why mention the death penalty? It was akin to throwing gas on a raging fire for the joy of making sparks. As the UK Independent notes,"the death penalty issue could cause friction between the United States and Europe. All 15 member nations of the European Union have abolished capital punishment, and they often encourage other countries — most notably the United States — to abolish it. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan also has said the world body would not support bringing Saddam before a tribunal that might sentence him to death." Ever the faithful lapdog, Tony Blair courageously stated that, although Britain opposed the death penalty, it would have to accept an Iraqi decision to execute. My point: why even raise the issue of executing Saddam...and so prominently? It is as tho' Bush sat down and pondered,"How can I possibly make the situation worse?" The answer is obvious, of course. He doesn't care how his statements impact the world as long as they please the American electorate.
Don't expect to see a trial or public process of any sort surrounding Saddam in the near future. The US is already announcing a long delay before a trial date is set. After all, what Saddam could say in a public trial might prove tremendously embarrassing to the Bush administration. As the BBC...
Vice President Cheney is in the news today. First, Paul Krugman, in Patriots and Profits, mentions Cheney in connection with Halliburton and crony capitalism. No surprises there. Even the liberal Krugman admits that"worries about profiteering aren't a left-right issue. Conservatives have long warned that regulatory agencies tend to be 'captured' by the industries they regulate; the same must be true of agencies that hand out contracts." I talked about this phenomenon in"Mixed Economy 101."
But the best Cheney reference today, by far, is this one, in Todd S. Purdum's NY Times article,"After 12 Years, Sweet Victory: The Bushes' Pursuit of Hussein." Purdum writes:
There were ample reasons for the first President Bush not to go after Mr. Hussein. The current vice president and then the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, outlined some of them in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1992, when he said:"If we'd gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein — assuming we could have found him — we'd have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground someplace. He would not have been easy to capture. Then you've got to put a new government in his place, and then you're faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq?"
"Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shia government or a Sunni government?" Mr. Cheney continued."How many forces are you going to have to leave there to keep it propped up, how many casualties are you going to take through the...
Of course, it would be unfair to compare the magnitude of Saddam's bellicosity and human rights violations with those of President Bush. After all, Saddam Hussein went to war with two countries-Iran and Kuwait-without provocation; so far, President Bush has needlessly invaded only one nation--Iraq--without first being attacked or genuinely threatened. In addition, Saddam killed thousands of his own people (some with chemicals sold to him with the approval of the U.S. and other Western governments); President Bush only had his law enforcement agencies intimidate and interrogate thousands of innocent Arabs and Moslems based solely on their ethnicity or religion and detain and mistreat thousands of similar immigrants indefinitely without charges or access to a lawyer.
Saddam used censored media to justify or hide such heinous human rights violations; President Bush merely relies on a White House spin machine and a cowed and compliant post-September 11American press corps to positively pitch his violations of America's founding principles--adequate due process and equal protection under the law.
In war, we become a little more like our enemies.
But like Saddam, President Bush may ultimately find that his political fate depends on digging himself out of a hole of his own making. Most experts on counterinsurgency expect...
If we accept the above point then the justification for the invasion is even further diminished. Whether or not Hussein had weapons of mass destruction has always been an irrelevant point. Even if he did still have them, to use them against America would have been an act of suicide by the least suicidal man on the planet. We could have easily traced any use of such weapons back to him because we provided him with such capabilities that he had back in the 1980s when he was one of our best friends fighting one of our worst enemies Iran.
Some of the neocon commentators suggest that we are in a new world war with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. If this true, what are we doing wasting enormous resources and precious lives in a country that was never a threat to us in the first place? I have no doubt that the fall and capture of Saddam Hussein is a good thing for the Iraqi people. However, the job of our government is not to make the Iraqi people happy, the job of our government is to make the American people safer and when George Bush invaded Iraq he was not doing his job.
I have some follow-up discussion on the capture of Hussein here. In that post to the SOLO Forum, I actually reiterate a point I made way back in February 2003 to the Philosophy of Objectivism list, which Arthur Silber republished on his blog here. There is no mystery as to why Hussein didn't go down in a blaze of glory. Telling his captors,"Don't shoot" is rather typical of a man who sees his own survival as the only barometer by which to measure victory in any battle. As I wrote:
This brings to mind a really wonderful skit from earlier this season on"Saturday Night Live." A group of Islamic terrorists are sent out to die so they can all get the rewards that come from sacrificial martyrdom: X number of virgins in paradise, etc. When somebody asks the Osama Bin Laden character why he isn't fighting, why he hasn't died for the cause, he fumbles over his words, screams out something about Allah, and proceeds to send out another group of martyrs to die—in his place.
We all know why this is the case. [Ayn Rand's villain from The Fountainhead] Ellsworth Toohey provides the answer:"Don't bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes. . . . It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. . . . The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." Hussein, Bin Laden, and other leaders of Islamic terrorism are...
But the Geneva protections have already been violated, as Rumsfeld well knows from his experience with the Guantanamo prisoners. 3GC (Article 3) states that POWs must be spared"outrages upon personal dignity,""humiliating and degrading treatment," as well as"insults and public curiosity." Rumsfeld has openly acknowledged that the GCs forbid showings PoWs -- an acknowledgement occasioned by the criticism surrounding widely-publicized photographs of prisoners at Guantanamo. At that time, the defense...
I also hope this improves our chances for a rapid and dignified exit. And maybe now we can work on capturing that other guy, you know, the one that attacked us. As former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro told ABCNEWS in September, the hunt for Saddam was impeding the hunt for Bin Laden:
"'If you've drawn off many if not all of your Arabic language resources and sent them off to Iraq you're shorthanded in terms of dealing with intelligence collection problem of fixing bin Laden's location,' said Cannistraro. 'So there are fewer resources to deal with in trying to basically find and capture, the principal leader of a terrorist organization that's killing Americans.'"
And so, the US armed forces find this brutal mass murderer cowering in a mud-hole. I understand Sheldon's mixed feelings, especially given the US government's former support of Saddam Hussein. It is therefore my hope that the Iraqis give him the due process he denied others and that his crimes against humanity be fully exposed. There isn't an industrial plastic shredder big enough to make him pay for the enormity of those crimes.
Will this end the unrest in Iraq? I doubt it, because the unrest is deeper than any one man, even the Ace of Spades. We can only hope, however, that it will bring some stability to this region, and that it will hasten the withdrawal of US troops.
