Bill Marina over on L&P has linked to an MSNBC article that reveals the Pentagon is seriously contemplating officially employing assassination squads in Iraq against the insurgents. The Pentagon is calling it the Salvador Option. What’s next for the Bush Administration? Well, get a load of this comment I added to Marina’s post:
I don’t know if you noticed this Mr. Marina, but one can easily put a rather disturbing interpretation on this quotation from the article you link to:
Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, “are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.” He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”
So… What, is the US going to start intentionally and officially to selectively target Iraqi civilians – who cooperate with the insurgents or fail to cooperate with the US military – with beatings, torture, maiming, and death? Not that this doesn’t already happen, but the key words here are intentionally, officially, and selectively.
The Ayn Rand Institute has backslided… ahem, I mean “clarified,” its position on foreign aid for the tsunami victims. I would have expected ARI to have more backbone than this, especially given the aggressive dogmatism that seems so prevalent over there. But then again, perhaps it is that very dogmatism that explains the backsliding: hammer home on the issues Ayn Rand wrote about, go soft on the issues she did not write about, don’t bother thinking for yourself.
Thanks to Skip Oliva at the Mises blog for the link. See his post for further discussion. As Skip and some commentators have pointed out, ARI’s “clarification” is decidedly lacking in percipient analysis.
The Economist writes: “The Heritage Foundation‘s annual index of economic freedom produced a surprise: America fell out of the top ten for the first time since the measure was created in 1995. The index gave the top honour to Hong Kong, followed by Singapore. Haiti suffered the steepest drop in its rating since last year, and North Korea took the wooden spoon again.”
The US fell to the rank of 12 out of 161, but it hasn’t been #1 for a while.
However, Stefan Karlsson at the Mises blog argues that the Heritage Foundation’s methology is seriously flawed. As always, it is good to be wary of statistical measures, especially of such a high degree of aggregation. And Mr. Karlsson makes some good points.
It is ten years to the day that the great Murray N. Rothbard died. The Mises Institute has posted a moving tribute to “The Unstoppable Rothbard,” whose thought continues to have a profound influence after his death. Rothbard easily ranks up there in the top five defenders of liberty in the twentieth century, among such notables as Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and F.A. Hayek.
See also The Irrepressible Rothbard.
Mike Rogers over at the LRC blog links to an interview of Iraqi intelligence service director General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani in which he states: “I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people.”
“Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter.”
This insight from Shahwani is very interesting, and telling if he is correct, but even if he is wrong about the size of the Iraqi insurgency I think that the American government’s nation-buiding project was doomed from the start. It is counterproductive to attempt to militarily build a liberal democratic state out of Iraq when that country lacks the necessary cultural foundations to make it work. (See Sciabarra’s L&P post, Moving Toward Democracy?, for more on this.) And, relatedly, it is counterproductive to attempt to crush a guerrilla insurgency with a modern statist military. But if Shahwani is correct, there is more popular support for the insurgency than the American government would have us believe.
Mike Rogers asks rhetorically: “Are we winning yet?”
“Asked if the insurgents were winning, Shahwani answered: ‘I would say they aren’t losing’.”
In short, the neoconservative project in Iraq is in deep trouble.
Antiwar.com linked to an article at the Herald Sun that reveals plans of the American government to detain suspected terrorists for life even when there is not enough evidence to charge them in court. This strikes me as incredibly and patently unjust, a violation of the prisoners’ rights, contrary to the principle of liberty this country was founded upon and in violation of the Constitution. Chris Dominguez rightly labels the proposed detention center(s) an American Gulag.
The recent tsunami that hit Asia, costing over one hundred thousand human lives, is certainly a tragedy. Some people have accused the US of being stingy in its aid for the victims, as if the American government is (or should be) the only American donor of aid. In fact, the American people habitually give far more in aid than does our government. Moreover, the American government cannot be said to be generous nor can the aid it gives be considered charity, for we cannot consider it generosity or charity to steal money from some people in order to give it to others (for the government gets all of its revenue from taxation, borrowing, and inflation). Foreign aid, insofar as it is synonymous with government handouts, is immoral and unjust. True charity is that given out of generosity; i.e., given out of voluntary initiative by private individuals and groups.
For further discussion on this subject, see the posts by David J. Heinrich (“WSJ’s Taranto Slanders Ayn Rand Institute“) and Chris Matthew Sciabarra (“The Privatization of Foreign Aid“) over at the Mises blog. See also here, here, here, and here at the LRC blog.
Highly relevant quote: “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” – Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
I comment over at the Mises Econ Blog in response to commentary on today’s daily article, Rothbard’s “The Case for Radical Idealism.”
While I agree with Rothbard’s general argument for radical idealism as opposed to gradualist opportunism and utopian sectarianism, there is an element of his argument in this essay with which I am not convinced. In short, Rothbard seems to greatly underappreciate the structural, cultural, and ethical foundations (particularly the latter two) that are necessary for the functioning of an anarcho-libertarian society, not to speak of being necessary for bringing it about in the first place. How is the state to be abolished, especially in such a way as to not pave the way for a new state to arise from its ashes, without a corresponding sea change in the institutions and values of the people? It seems to me that the state will not be abolished (for the most part) until there has been a significant cultural shift toward libertarianism. Likewise, it seems to me that if the state is abolished in a cultural climate alien to libertarianism, then the result will be first anarchism in the popular (not philosophical) sense of that word followed by the revival of the state by some new warlord. Thus, Rothbard teeters on the precipice of utopianism, though anarcho-libertarianism need not be utopian.