Techno Hell

I’m experiencing a bit of technological hell. When I switched DSL providers from Earthlink to Verizon, it gummed up my email (which I finally ungummed thanks to the help of PJ Doland), after which Earthlink grabbed the line back, thereby terminating my internet service. Aaagh. I’ve been waiting for it to be turned back on for days.….That and the death of my PDA (which Dell promptly replaced, I’m pleased to say), the breakdown of my clothes washer and the subsequent flooding of my apartment, and more has led me to rethink the benefits of technology. Of course, a few days without internet service and clean clothes (not to mention the prospect of a toothache without modern dentistry) got me over that pretty quickly.

New CV and Email Address

Thanks to the generosity, patience, and stubbornness of my web wizard friend P. J. Doland, I have added a few features to the site, including.….the ability to update my curriculum vitae (see left hand column of page), which had not been updated for two years, since the coding was much too complicated for my little brain. I have also changed my email address to tomgpalmer@tomgpalmer.com, thanks to P. J.

Anyone interested in commissioning a serious web site should definitely (or, to quote Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rainman, definitely, definitely) contact P.J.

Pat Buchanan and Radical Islamicism

It’s official. Patrick Buchanan hates America. He’s pretty openly sided with Islamic radicals in a recent column in Arab News. It’s worth reading Buchanan’s fulminations against America. Here’s a sample:
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In Georgia recently, the president declared to great applause: “I can’t tell you how proud I am of our commitment to values. … That commitment to values is going to be an integral part of our foreign policy as we move forward. These aren’t American values, these are universal values. Values that speak universal truths.”

But what universal values is he talking about? If he intends to impose the values of MTV America on the Muslim world in the name of a “world democratic revolution,” he will provoke and incite a war of civilizations America cannot win because Americans do not want to fight it. This may be the neocons’ war. It is not our war.

When Bush speaks of freedom as God’s gift to humanity, does he mean the First Amendment freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses, a book considered blasphemous to the Islamic faith? If the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom, why is it our duty to change their thinking? Why are they wrong? When the president speaks of freedom, does he mean the First Amendment prohibition against our children reading the Bible and being taught the Ten Commandments in school?
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It’s not just the far left that hates America and American values. It’s the far right, too. The far left and the far right are united in their hatred of freedom. Shortly after the destruction of the Twin Towers, televangelist Jerry Falwell blamed feminists, homosexuals, and civil libertarians for the attacks and stated, “What we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”

I wrote on the topic after 9-11 and gave an impromptu talk on “Why they Hate Us” at a Cato event shortly after 9-11 and before President Bush’s speech to the nation. (I mention that the talk was “impromptu” since I was asked to give it on very short notice and spent the afternoon doing research on the interet and gathering information from online libraries and a few books I had with me. And, yes, I did misquote the U.S. Constitution as using the phrase “necessary and appropriate” when it should have been “necessary and proper.” Oops.)

More Collectivist and Statist Books

I’ve been reading through a small stack of recent collectivist and statist books. (I won’t mention them by name until I’ve published my reviews or given my comments on them.) What’s depressing is not that there are a lot of them (duh), but that they only cite each other. People with that mind set rarely ever read anything challenging to them. In one book, which is an attack on libertarianism, only one libertarian book is cited. (Guess.….ok, it’s Robert Nozick’s brilliant, suggestive, playful work Anarchy, State, and Utopia, one chapter of which the author knows he or she has to read, but which is then treated as the only defense of the free market and critique of redistributionism ever written.) The pattern is actually quite consistent. Read one chapter of Nozick and you’ve read all there is to be said in defense of limited government. And find one flaw or problem in that one chapter (and Nozick points them out for you, anyway), and you’ve refuted it and, by a remarkable logical leap, you’ve justified socialism or welfare statism or nationalism or whatever.

Inspirational Depression

If you’re feeling down, be sure to read this article from The Onion.

Claims of Homosexuality Not Defamatory

A U.S. District Juge has just found that being called homosexual is not defamatory. A rather small point, but a good sign, nonetheless. I suppose that means it’s also not defamatory to call someone a heterosexual, which only seems fair.

Duck!

It would come as a surprise to many observers, but Donald Duck has had a major impact on German popular culture. There’s an excellent (and very clever and well done) example at Duckomenta, which is worth a tour. (Click on “Raum 1,” “Raum 2,” etc.) My friend Dr. Detmar Doering has written an excellent essay on Donaldismus (in German) on the website of the Deutsche Organization nichtkommerzieller Anhänger des lauteren Donaldismus (D.O.N.A.L.D.) Have fun.

A Rediscovered Essay on Natural Rights

I just came across an essay that I wrote for the May 1999 issue of Liberty magazine. It was in response to an essay by R. W. Bradford and appeared along with essays by David Ramsay Steele, David Friedman, David Boaz, Leland Yeager, and Pierre Lemieux. Anyone interested in the status of moral principles in libertarian thought might find it interesting. (The whole exchange can be found here. It complements a debate between me and Jeffrey Friedman, the three installments [Jeff, me, and then Jeff, who got the last word] of which are available on the left hand column of this web site under “Debate on Libertarianism.”)

A Climatologist Reviews a Movie?

Sounds odd, but not when the movie is about global warming. University of Virginia professor of climatology and Cato Institute senior fellow in environmental studies Patrick J. Michaels reviewed The Day After Tomorrow for the Washington Post.

An Abomination, Indeed

In case you’ve not seen this site, it’s worth a visit.

Justice

Let’s just hope that the justice meted out in Baghdad to those who violated the Geneva Convention governing the treatment of prisoners is clear, public, and unequivocal. (And, yes, the Geneva Convention does apply to Iraqi prisoners, even if not all of the conventional elements [e.g., the rights to have cutlery, a helmet, musical instruments, etc.] apply to al Qaeda members in Guantanamo Bay, who are nonetheless governed by the rules derived from natural law.) The brutal criminality (and, again, yes, not as bad as the mass executions and bodily tortures of Saddam Hussein, which some have disgraced themselves by proposing as the bar against which to judge behavior), the simple sadism, and the petty humiliations recorded in the photos that continue to emerge are disgusting. The architects of those policies and those who carried them out (despite the knowledge that they were illegal and that as soldiers they were obligated to refuse to obey illegal orders and to report them to higher officers) should be severely punished. Their behavior was not only immoral, but has severely damaged the already slim prospects for a decent system of limited, representative government in Iraq.

Twenty Years of promoting Competitive Enterprise

I had the privilege this evening of attending the twentieth anniversary gala dinner for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. I’ve known Fred Smith, CEI’s founder and president, for a long time. We worked together at the Council for a Competitive Economy before CEI was founded. He’s really an amazingly energetic and effective proponent of liberty and limited government. And he’s made CEI a remarkably good counterbalance to Ralph Nader’s movement to make life colorless, boring, and dull. (And at the same time that life would be stripped of virtually every pleasure by the humorless Naderites, we would get no increase in safety, but rather the opposite. Free-market capitalism is not only more fun, it generates longer, better, healthier lives within which to experience an ever wider array of the pleasures of life.)

(Although the event was black tie, the dinner presented me with the opportunity to wear my recently acquired white tie, evening tails, and black silk top hat. I regret that there are so few opportunities in Washington to dress properly. So I called Fred and asked his permission beforehand to be a bit overdressed.)

Troy

I suppose that I’ll try to see the new movie based loosely on some old poem by Homer, who starred in The Simpsons. A colleague who saw the film panned it and told me that the whole business of the love between Achilles and Patroclus was taken out, which made it pretty ridiculous when Achilles screams at Hector, “You killed my.….cousin!” Uh, right. That would explain all the rage and the dragging of Hector around the city. I’ll do penance for seeing the movie by re-reading the book.

The French Can Be So Hateful....

The hateful mistreatment of the purely innocent children of German soldiers in France is documented in a new book, Enfants maudits, by Jean-Paul Picaper and Ludwig Norz. How nasty and cruel the French can be. Just like all the rest of us.

Marriage....it's become such a "Gay Thing"

Tomorrow will be the day that the first legally recognized and legally equal gay marriages take place. What a great day! It’s been a very controversial issue, of course, and lots of people who should know better have weighed in on the issue with lots of ignorant comments. For example, the Massachusetts policy does not mean that gay marriage has been federalized (Massachusetts law extends only to Massachusetts, just as Louisiana’s Covenant Marriage Law doesn’t have to be implemented in Nebraska). And importantly, the Massachusetts court decision is not based simply on an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, but on the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Article VI of which states:

“No man, nor corporation, or association of men, have any other title to obtain advantages, or particular and exclusive privileges, distinct from those of the community, than what arises from the consideration of services rendered to the public; and this title being in nature neither hereditary, nor transmissible to children, or descendants, or relations by blood, the idea of a man born a magistrate, lawgiver, or judge, is absurd and unnatural.”

Article CVI states:

“All people are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness. Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin.”

It’s hardly a stretch to interpret Article VI as forbidding making marriage available to heterosexual couples but denying it to homosexual couples. Article CVI could also be so interpreted, but doing so is a bit strained, whereas Article VI is quite clearly relevant to the issue of same-sex marriage. In the state of Massachusetts, on the grounds of the constitutional prohibition of “particular or exclusive privileges,” homosexual couples will be allowed to enter into the same legal relationship as heterosexual couples. And in so doing, they will be enabled to engage in “seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”

A discussion of the issue will take place at the Cato Institute on Monday, May 17. You can watch it or listen to it live or check it out on the Cato archives later. It will feature Jonathan Rauch, author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, and Michael S. Greve of the American Enterprise Institute and Genevieve Wood of the Family Research Council.

I Can See! Thank you, John Wahl.

I am extremely happy with the results of my Lasik surgery. I feel liberated from eyeglasses and contact lenses. My friend John Wahl, who’s an eye surgeon, did the work and provided the overnight hospitality (at his brother’s home) for my recovery. Although the first hours after the procedure were a bit difficult (unlike for my colleague, who also had the same procedure), by the next morning I felt like a new person. This morning I got up a bit disoriented and looked around for my glasses for several minutes before noticing (I was, after all, in my pre-caffeinated state) that I could see everything quite clearly. I couldn’t find my glasses, not because I couldn’t see them, but because I had put them away.

It looks like I won’t be needing reading glasses, at least not for some time, since my myopia was slightly undercorrected. I can read quite well but the tradeoff is a bit of blurriness in the distance. That I can correct whenever I need to see things in the far distance with a single mild corrective daily wear lens in my right eye, or with glasses for night time driving (when one’s pupils dilate to let in more light and therefore cannot focus quite as well as during the day), hiking in the mountains (when seeing distant peaks is part of the enjoyment), and so on.

Thank you, John! (And my deepest thanks also to his lovely wife Rosie and to his brother Michael and his sister-in-law Tina for their gracious hospitality.)

New Eyesight

I’m off tomorrow to have my eyes worked on with Lasik. I may still have to have reading glasses (damn!), but I hope to be free of the glasses and contact lenses that I’ve had to wear since I was young boy. There are some risks, of course, but what else is new? There are also benefits, like not having to grope around blindly in the morning for my glasses (which my cats frequently knock off the nightstand, anyway), not being afraid of falling asleep in my contacts (or worse, falling asleep in my contacts and dealing with painful dried out eyes afterward), being able to swim without having my lenses float off, and so on. I love modern technological capitalism.

Liberty and Power Blog

I’m having trouble getting my blog management program to add a link (in the links on the left hand side of this site) to the Liberty & Power Group Blog. It’s got lots of interesting material on it and is well worth a visit. I’ll try to get the system to work again later. (I suspect that the problem is that I switched my DSL from Earthlink to Verizon, in order to save a bundle of money by having all my phone services with one firm, and a variety of glitches have come up, like my firewall now blocking access to my hotmail account. Aargh.)

P.S. Yep. That was it. For some reason, my firewall software blocks access to certain web services. Now I have to call McAfee to reconfigure the firewall and then Gateway to reconfigure my WiFi router, which also doesn’t work now. Gosh, technology can be soooo liberating.

Let's Remember Whom Coalition Troops Are Fighting

This is unpleasant, but it’s important to remember the nature of our enemies. Drudge has posted still photos of the execution of Nick Berg, whose offence was wanting to repair Iraq’s infrastructure and, of course, being a U.S. citizen and a Jew. It’s hard to know whether one should look or not. I’ve thought about it and I think that the public should see these photos for the same reason they should see the photos of the abuse of prisoners by U.S. guards. Just as they should know the difference between civilized behavior and barbarism, they should know whom we are fighting.

THE VIDEO: I am in tears from having watched the video of Nick Berg’s execution. And I want the people who sawed off the head of a living and screaming man to be caught, tried, and…yes, executed. I think that they’re unlikely to be caught alive, but if they are, jail may not be appropriate for them, despite my general opposition to the death penalty. Watch it here (it’s on some sort of utterly disgusting site that seems to glorify violence and horror) if you can stomach it. But only if you can stomach it and are sure that it will make you more resolute in tracking down and eliminating his killers. (12:35 am, May 13)

Moral Equivalence

Here and there we’ve heard a few voices saying that the abuses of Iraqi prisoners were not as bad as Saddam’s, as though that were some kind of excuse. Equally unhinged is the equation of the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by American military personnel with the mass murder, the gassing, and the torture practiced on a daily basis by Saddam Hussein (or even with the murders and indiscriminate bombings currently undertaken by the forces fighting against the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi government). Moral outrage can coexist with moral perception; the criminal acts we’ve seen documented in shocking detail are not excused by comparison with the crimes of Saddam Hussein, nor are they their equivalent. People who suggest otherwise merely discredit themselves; they lose all claim to be taken seriously.

No Draft

Thanks to Gene Healy for the link to this great bit of history: Barry Goldwater’s 1964 television commercial calling for an end to the draft. Goldwater helped to set in motion a movement to end the evil of conscription; many years later he spoke up against throwing gay soldiers out of the military with his memorable quip, “You don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.” Although I hardly agreed with him on everything, Barry Goldwater was a great inspiration.

San Francisco

I love San Francisco, possibly the most gracious and at the same time brilliantly exciting city in north America. I spent the day today (while suffering from a poisoning of some sort that has given me a headache and overall illness for three days) in North Beach and Chinatown, sipping espresso in the wonderful Cafe Puccini and buying Chinese kites for various nieces and nephews, fragments of Ching dynasty vases that were shattered by the Red Guards and salvaged in the form of small boxes, jade, and carved chops. It’s off at 6:45 am to the airport and D.C.

A Catalogue of Abuse...and Shame

A friend from India came by today and found me depressed by the horrible events and activities that have come to light in Iraq. He said that, in the long run, it shows the strengths of open societies that what happens on a regular basis and in much worse ways in every closed society has been brought to light. That’s true, but hardly enough to lift my spirits, because in the near and medium term it means a lot of people will be (quite rightly) shocked and outraged by the inability of the U.S. military to control some of their members. And that means that other members of the military and their allies in the coalition and in the Iraqi police and civil defense forces will be killed. It means that the idea of democracy and non-dictatorial government has been poisoned in the middle east. It will be much harder to promote such ideals and much easier for our enemies to promote theirs. The crimes committed by a small number of U.S. military personnel may cost the people of Iraq for many, many years.

On January 19 of this year Lieutenat General Ricardo Sanchez, senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, ordered an investigation into reports of abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The report was prepared by Major General Antonio M. Taguba. It’s worth reading.

A Champion of the Poor and the Oppressed

I’m off on Thursday to San Francisco to see an old friend get a well deserved prize. Hernando de Soto will receive the second Biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. (I met Hernando in Moscow in 1989 and was greatly impressed by what a powerful champion of liberty he is.) His Institute for Liberty and Democracy has done a great deal to provide to the world’s poor the benefits of law, liberty, and property.

His book The Mystery of Capital I consider one of the most interesting books of the past decade. Not only does it provide information that was not widely available before, but it asks new questions that had not occurred to others. Many people have explained how important property is to liberty and development. But few had asked why some countries enjoy legal systems that provide well defined and secure systems of property, while others do not. I strongly recommend de Soto’s books to anyone interested in the deeper questions of legal and economic development.

Disgusting Treatment

I just saw the BBC broadcast (link is to print story; click on “Video” to watch the broadcast) on the abuse of prisoners by a few U.S. soldiers. The soldiers who carried out such degrading treatment are a disgrace and have tarnished the reputations of the U.S. military and of the U.S. itself. They deserve whatever punishment can be meted out under law.

The fact that they are being prosecuted is not evidence against what I had written below, but evidence for it:

“I should point out, as well, that the U.S. armed forces and their allies (the British, the Poles, the Italians, the Bulgarians, the Australians, the Danes, the Estonians, and all the rest) are perhaps the most law-governed military force ever fielded. The careful attention to matters of military law and the great efforts to limit harm to noncombatants are truly remarkable in the history of modern warfare. To point that out is not to justify the initiation of the war (it would be absurd to justify a foolish war because it was waged within legal and moral constraints), but it should be understood and acknowledged.”

Monitoring and controlling the behavior of large numbers of people is difricult, which is why the military spends so much time on training, team-building, instruction, and protocols. When that fails, they resort to law. It obviously failed in the case of those who carried out the degradation of prisoners, but the punishments they’re likely to get will make the message much more clear to anyone else who might think that that sort of behavior would be appropriate.

It’s a general truth that law-governed institutions often appear in the media in a worse light than those that are lawless, precisely because cases of bad behavior are brought to light under the former and not under the latter. Just as reporters covering China are now reporting on industrial accidents more and thereby giving the impression that Chinese working conditions are worse than they were under communism (because under communism there were no statistics and no coverage regarding such accidents, so it is implicitly assumed that they didn’t happen), lawless military regimes don’t document abusive behavior or prosecute it, so there’s no evidence that it happened.

A Feast for the Mind

I am very pleased to have started a new book by the great legal scholar Harold Berman. It’s the second volume of a sweeping and truly brilliant history of western law. The title is Law and Revolution : The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition.

I’ve read the first volume of the work twice and refer to it frequently. That book, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, has had a profound impact on my life and has been a reliable source of new insights, new research problems, and new questions. I’ve recommended it many times and have given away dozens of copies for Christmas, birthdays, and the like. I’m eagerly looking forward to some time to sit down with volume II. Not only are Berman’s works informative and stimulating, but they’re great fun to read, as well. (Unfortunately, I’m a fairly slow reader and I’ve got a great deal on my plate at the moment, including several other books that I have agreed to review, but this one will be dessert.)

I'm Against the Death Penalty in General, but...

The death penalty is one of those issues by which people tend to measure your moral character, rather than listen to your arguments. If you favor the death penalty, you’re a terrible person. If you oppose it in all cases — even if you favor the most draconian loss of liberty for the most minor of infractions — you’re a good person. I disagree. I oppose the death penalty in general, not because I’m just such a good person, but because I think that it is a terrible power to entrust to anyone, because it is a penalty for which no compensation can be offered if it was carried out in mistake, and because I’d rather not live in a country where the government feels empowered to kill people.

There are arguments (generally of a consequentialist sort) that could lead me to a different conclusion. For example, if one could show that the death penalty for murder, combined with powerful safeguards against wrongful conviction, would save a sufficient number of innocent lives, well, I think I’d be for it. Buyt I’m not convinced at present. At the same time, some of the arguments often advanced against the death penalty are pretty unconvincing. One argument often offered up by people who come to the same conclusion I reach but in which I put little stock is that “no one ever deserves to be killed.” This case is one in which it is hard to imagine anyone concluding that Abdullah Shah did not deserve to be killed, even if he should not have been. So I’m against the death penalty in general, but I’ll shed no tears for a man who “was found guilty of killing one of his wives by pouring boiling water over her body” and who “earned the nickname Zardad’s Dog for attacks on travellers along the road between Jalalabad and Kabul in the 1990s.”

Do Letters to Congress Matter?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Anyone reading this is on the net. And most readers will be opposed to military conscription. I hope that everyone who opposes the draft will take just a few minutes to send an email letter in opposition to resuming conscription to your 2 senators, to your representative in the house, and to the White House. They are read and counted and it’s a fact that they do influence votes in congress.

A few words of advice to those who actually want to have an impact for the better (rather than just letting off steam):

State your view clearly and respectfully;
Don’t question the morality or intelligence of the person to whom you’re writing;
State that you vote (or will vote) and that the issue is very important to you and your family and friends; and
Avoid any inflammatory or insulting language.

You can help to stop injustice. Please take the time to do so. (Despite living in unrepresented [thank God] D.C., I‘ve done so myself.)

Pat Tillman and Other Casualties

The death in Afghanistan in combat of former football player Pat Tillman is just the latest in a series of deaths that have led me to reconsider my attitudes toward those who go abroad in the uniforms of the U.S. military. A good starting point is the attitude that was expressed by Herbert Spencer, when he exclaimed about the second Afghan war that “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.” That obviously only applies to volunteers, not to conscripts, and it only applies to those who ask nothing about the justice of their cause.

Pat Tillman and all the others who have been killed in Afghanistan and in Iraq were volunteers. Did they ask about the justice of their cause? Most certainly in the case of Afghanistan and most certainly in the case of Pat Tillman, who gave up a lucrative multi-million dollar career for $18,000 a year as an Army Ranger, the answer is yes. He died as an Army Ranger hunting down Osama bin Laden and his accomplices. A more just cause would be hard to imagine.

The sentiment expressed by Spencer was occasioned by a purely imperial war that was in no way related to defensive purposes. Indeed, in that same essay (which was published in 1902), he wrote, “Suppose our country is in the right – suppose it is resisting invasion. Then the idea and feeling embodied in the cry are righteous. It may be effectively contended that self-defence is not only justified but is a duty.” Self-defense against al Qaeda terrorists is certainly justified. Was force similarly justified in the case of Iraq? As the facts have turned out, no. But as they were presented to the U.S. public, yes. (I was not convinced by Powell’s speech to the U.N. Security Council or by the other evidence brought forth by the administration and its supporters and therefore I opposed the war. But I did listen and could have been convinced by evidence that Saddam’s terror regime posed a serious threat to the U.S. I just didn’t think that the evidence presented was sufficient.) Furthermore, a bad — even disastrous — decision was already made and we now have to decide what’s the best path forward. You can’t undo the past. As such, those volunteer soldiers in Iraq who have been fighting against authentically evil enemies are clearly justified in their actions. They deserve support. And we should mourn each and every one who is killed.

I should point out, as well, that the U.S. armed forces and their allies (the British, the Poles, the Italians, the Bulgarians, the Australians, the Danes, the Estonians, and all the rest) are perhaps the most law-governed military force ever fielded. The careful attention to matters of military law and the great efforts to limit harm to noncombatants are truly remarkable in the history of modern warfare. To point that out is not to justify the initiation of the war (it would be absurd to justify a foolish war because it was waged within legal and moral constraints), but it should be understood and acknowledged.

Of All the Dumb Ideas!

Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is calling for a renewal of conscription, but almost certainly with both a military and a civilian servitude option. I was very active in the late 1970s and early 1980s driving a stake through this bad idea’s rotten heart and I’ll do it again. (I traveled the country through 1979 and 1980 speaking on college campuses and organizing opposition groups; I testified before Congress [and really pissed off Senator Nunn]; I wrote articles for the papers; I organized and spoke at rallies; and I was a founder and national secretary of the Committee Against Registration and the Draft — CARD — which included the ACLU, the National Taxpayers Union, the American Friends Service Committee and other religious bodies, various libertarian groups, the usual assortment of leftists, and some conservatives.)

The idea of introducing conscription is profoundly repugnant. It is:

Immoral to conscript people into doing what you cannot induce them to do voluntarily;

Inefficient to treat human labor as a nonpriced resource that can simply be confiscated and then wasted at no cost to the decision-makers;

Contrary to the national security interests of the United States, since the All Volunteer Force (AVF) has shown itself to be far superior to the conscript army of the past and the addition of a “civilian” option would simply lead to the kind of flabby military that Germany now has, unable to develop professionally because it serves as a cheap source of coerced unskilled labor for old folks’ homes and hospitals;

Incompatible with limited government, since adding millions of young people as involuntary “employees” of the federal government would greatly expand its size and inevitably its powers.

This is an idea that has to be stomped. Now. Letters to lawmakers are very much in order.

If there is imperial overreach (and there certainly is), we should start to ask where we have troops that could be pulled back. How about Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, and Germany, for starters?

(By the way, here’s what Senator Hagel said last year.)

Another View on Iraq

Justin Logan, a very bright fellow with whom I work, has posted a response to the opinions I expressed on Iraq below. I’ll try to find a bit of free time to think about his points and compose a response.

Tear Gas and Battling the Ba'athists and Fanatics

What is the obstacle to using tear gas against armed combatants in Iraq? As I understand the matter, there is concern that the use of non-lethal gas is banned by international law. One discussion suggested during the early phases of the war that legal questions were the primary obstacle to their use.

Surely there must be some way to deploy tear gas lawfully against the monsters who have seized central Fallujah. Are U.S. forces required by international law to use only lethal force when nonlethal methods could be used?

A Foreign Policy for Adults

If one believes, as I do, that the invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake, what implications does that have for current policy? Does it follow that one should advocate immediate withdrawal of coalition forces? Should we “bail out”? Is the security of the United States the one and only legitimate goal of U.S. foreign policy, now that the invasion has already taken place?

From the perspective of adults who understand that what we say has serious consequences, including death for the wrong answers, the answers are “no,” “no,” and “no.” First, immediate withdrawal would simply be a rout, and more coalition soldiers would be killed in a rout than would be killed even in a prolonged occupation. Second, unconditionally withdrawing forces would mean nothing more than an encouragement to further attacks on the U.S. and U.S. allies. There is simply no concession that would stop the fanatics among our enemies from attacking us, and there is plenty of evidence that capitulation would embolden them. (Unlike, say, terrorists such as the ETA in Spain or the IRA in the United Kingdom, withdrawal would not satisfy them; what they seek is the extermination of the unbelievers.) Further, the resulting chaos would provide perfect conditions for the reestablishment of al-Qaeda recruitment and training camps. Third, there are ancillary goals and constraints that accompany even the most security-focused policies. If one could achieve some small increase in U.S. security by killing a million non-combatants, it would nonetheless be morally and legally unacceptable to do so. Even a moment’s thought should tell us that increasing national security is not the only guideline of U.S. foreign policy. In the current case, it is clear that every Iraqi who has assisted the U.S. would be killed and their heads mounted on spikes by the savage Ba’athist fascists and jihadist fanatics. And not only those thousands and thousands of people, but also the hundreds of thousands who would be slaughtered in a war of factions for control of the country. Our government made that mess, and now we have an obligation to bring about something that is, at the very least, compatible with our interests and an authentic improvement over what the Iraqis suffered before (i.e., Saddam and his cruel regime of mass murder and human meat-grinders).

Saying that coalition forces should “bail out” is the response of those who prefer to say “I told you so” to finding adult solutions to life-and-death problems.

Withdrawal is surely a proper goal. But only after something acceptable has been put in place of occupation. For citizens of coalition states, that means not reacting hysterically to every daily headline and not focusing only on the bad news. It means remembering our moral obligations. The goal is to withdraw from Iraq without conceding to terrorists, without encouraging terrorist attacks, and without abandoning those who have stood by the U.S. and other coalition members.

The above considerations do not mean that there are no lessons from this set of problems. The biggest lesson is that we should not intervene when there is no clear danger to the United States. Let’s learn that lesson. But let’s also not throw away the lives of those who have stood by the United States. There are moral limits on the pursuit of national security. That’s an important lesson, too.

American-European Comparisons

It’s a pleasure to be involved in the editing of a brilliant book, and that’s the project to which I’m devoting the weekend. (That and working with a friend who’s returning to Baghdad on Monday to develop a business plan for an Iraqi institute and related membership society to promote liberty in Iraq.)

Olaf Gersemann, American correspondent for the German business weekly Wirtschaftswoche, has updated, revised, and substantially refocused for an American audience his outstanding work Amerikanische Verhältnisse: Die Falsche Furcht der Deutschen vor dem Cowboy-Kapitalismus(“American Conditions: The Unjustified Fear of the Germans of Cowboy-Capitalism”). Olaf examines a number of beliefs about the American economy that are widely held by European intellectuals and writers at the New York Times and then compares them to the evidence, to the disadvantage of the former. Olaf is really an outstanding economics reporter — not the kind who started on the sports page or covering cats stranded in trees, but a trained economist who works easily with statistics and high level economic analysis and who can then translate what appears in the American Economic Review or the official statistics of government bureaus into everyday German or English. The American edition is scheduled to appear from the Cato Institute in the Fall of this year — but that’ll happen only if I get back to my work!

P.S. I should point out that heavy lifting on the project has been undertaken by Olaf, by Jens Laurson as translator, and by Beth Kaplan, my colleague at Cato, who has undertaken to revise the translation into more standard and flowing English.

Back Home and Recovering

I got back last night from St. Petersburg, minus my luggage. (I was told it should arrive this afternoon.)

St. Petersburg is a remarkably beautiful city, and now that capitalism has cleaned things up and made people more friendly and pleasant, it’s on its way to becoming a world class city.

Along with Cato president Ed Crane and my friend Piotr Kaznacheev, who works as an advisor to the administration of President Putin, I visited the headquarters of “Lenta,” a brilliantly organized chain of “big box” stores that sell everything from pots and pans to fresh fish, shampoo, and photo developing. We were showed around by August Meyer, a member of the board, and met with Oleg Zherebtsov, the founder and CEO. Lenta isn’t just a store; it’s a work of art. I wonder what would have been the response of an ordinary Russian plucked fifteen years ago from the streets of St. Petersburg and then transported into the middle of a crowd of happy Russian shoppers wheeling carts full of French cheeses, toothpaste, toilet paper (!!!!), and lean meats (rather than awful blobs of fat) through a building overflowing with high quality consumer goods. Either a heart attack or madness, I think.

What a Difference Capitalism Makes

It’s been over a decade since I was in Moscow last and what a difference there is. I try to be careful not to infer too much about the state of Russia — or even of Moscow — from short trips, but nonetheless the difference is truly astonishing. I remember from the Soviet time how drab, shabby, dirty, and utterly depressing Moscow was. It’s now ablaze with advertising, signs, beautiful restaurants, and shops full of goods. Furthermore, whereas the streets had in the past been full of downcast and depressed people, the open gaiety and liveliness among those walking is quite remarkable. Imagine what a rich, progressive, and wonderful place Russia might be today had they not been taken down such a disastrous wrong turn by the Bolshevik criminals in 1917.

I did manage to get to the Kremlin today and saw the treasures of the tsars, which was quite an experience. I’ll be taking the night train to St. Peterburg this evening.