Libertarian Leanings

Happy New Year

I wish everyone a happy and safe New Year.  I'll be back in a few days.  For now we're off to the mountains.

A clear message

At Iraq the Model Mohammed urges the US and the UK to send a clear and unmistakable message.

To put it simply; saying that a policy that aims at ridding the world of regimes and criminals such as Saddam, al-Qaeda, Ahmadinejad or Assad is a wrong policy that breeds extremism is utterly stupid.

I personally do not think that America changed its policy from victory to exit but I see that it hasn't been good at expressing its intentions nor sending the right signals, and when I say right I mean clear even to those who have a problem understanding things.

What the free world needs to do, the US and UK in particular, is to make their messages clear and loud so that wrong interpretations by extremists do not cost us losses that can be otherwise avoided.  The message ought to be clear and loud that the change in strategy will be to renew and empower the strategy from one of victory to one of nothing but victory. 

The message has been sent.  Whether or not it gets through is another matter.

The world's wealth

Thomas Sowell wonders, so whose wealth is it anyway?  He's talking about the leftist obsession with the gap between the rich and the poor -- a crisis that will instantaneously disappear once a Democrat is in the White House, by the way.  Until then, however, news stories will stoke the fires of envy with analysis lamenting the concentration of “the world’s wealth” in the hands of a small fraction of the world’s people.

Who are these minority of the world’s population who own a majority of the world’s wealth?

They are the population of the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and a few other affluent countries. How did these particular people come to possess so much more wealth than other people?

They did it the old-fashioned way. They produced the wealth that they own. You might as well ask why bees have so much more honey than other creatures.

But people are not bees, even in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.  Anybody can produce wealth, even in non-bee places like Africa and the Middle East.  In fact the Middle East is a perfect example.  Totalitarian Arab nations supplying the world's oil and awash in riches, suffer an insurmountable gap between the rich and poor that has laid the foundation for world wide terrorism.  That gap is insurmountable because totalitarian corruption prevents their people from producing the wealth that will improve their lives.

Israel has nowhere near the natural resources of the Arab states, yet they are wealthier by far.  According to the CIA World Factbook, Israel produces a measely 2740 barrels of oil per day.  At the same time Saudi Arabia puts out 9,475,000, and Iran 3,979,000.  Yet Israel enjoys a per capita GDP of $25,000, while Saudi Arabia and Iran come in at $13,100 and $8,400 respectively.  The income gap is not a crisis in Israel because Israelis have the freedom to produce wealth.  Arab state citizens have less freedom, less wealth, and less hope for getting it.

Unfortunately, leftists (and Democrats) can't bring themselves to support the spread of freedom.  Their antidote to the growing gap between the rich and the poor is to prevent the creation of wealth.  Taxation discourages an activity, so the lefty solution to their contrived crisis is to tax wealth (income) at ever higher rates as a person demonstrates ever higher success in creating it.  The Arab solution is to wipe Israel off the map.  Actually, there are  Democrats who seem to be coming around to that view.

Gerald Ford

Former President Gerald Ford died yesterday at the age of 93.  He had lived longer than any other U.S. president.  Hand picked to fill the vice presidency after Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace, he rose to assume the presidency when President Richard Nixon was forced to resign over his involvement in the Watergate scandal.  His later pardon of Nixon for any crimes related to Watergate cost him the his own election to the presidency.  He lost narrowly to Jimmy Carter in 1976, and making him the only U.S. President to have served without ever being elected. 

Hollywood and the press were unmerciful.  Every physical stumble was seized upon to portray him as a bumbling fool.  He would trip on the way down the steps from Air Force One, or his golf shot would go astray and hit somebody.  The press and the stand up comics would have a field day, yet he was an extraordinary athlete.

By high school, a tall and muscular Jerry turned into the all-American boy. He was a scholar, a state champion football player, an Eagle Scout. He entered the University of Michigan in 1931, became the Wolverines' center and was voted the team's most valuable player before graduating in 1935. His number "48" has since been retired by the university.

Both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers quickly offered him a spot. But something had changed in Jerry Ford within the rigors of academia. He pined to become a lawyer, to study justice. About the only way he could afford to continue his education was to go work for a university. Since he was "a good kid who worked hard," he recalled, Yale University hired him as a football coach.

He coached a team that included future senators Robert Taft and William Proxmire. He took law courses along with Cyrus Vance, Potter Stewart and Sargent Shriver, and managed to remain in the top 25 percent of his class and set up a new law practice back in Michigan.

He was the right man at the right time.  The Nixon pardon allowed the country to move on, but unfortunately it forced Gerald Ford to move on as well, stepping aside for a successor who showed us what it was really like to have a bumbling idiot for a president.

Iraq on the rise

Amir Taheri says the Iraqi economy is booming. 

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the number of private companies in Iraq has increased from a mere 8,000 to more than 35,000 this year. Each week an average of 60 new companies spring up in Iraq's booming areas.

It's another reason for the anti-war left to get their knickers in knots.  Saddam Hussein may have been evil, but in leftist eyes nothing approaches the dastardly evil of capitalism.  And to add insult to injury,

The transition from a rentier economy - in which virtually the whole of the population depended on government handouts - to a free-market capitalist one entails much hardship for some segments of society. Many pensioners and some civil servants find it hard to make ends meet as prices rise across the board. The end of government subsidies on virtually everything - from bread and sugar to gasoline and water - is also causing hardship.

But, judging by the talk in teahouses and the debate in Iraq's new and pluralist media, most people welcome the switch to capitalism and regard it as an exciting adventure.

Drat!  Another socialist paradise down the tubes!

Appeal denied

Saddam Hussein's death sentence has been upheld by Iraq's highest appeals court.

The sentence "must be implemented within 30 days," Chief Judge Aref Shahin said. "From tomorrow, any day could be the day of implementation."

A Lincolnian Christmas

Michael Novak notes the parallels.

A while back, I wrote a short column asserting that no matter whether you agree with President Bush or not, or admire him in other respects or not, it is incontestable that he is one of the bravest presidents ever to occupy the White House. All around him, pundits say that his presidency is “a failure,” that he is “the worst president ever,” and that his “war to emancipate the Middle East is a fiasco” or a “total disaster.” I have seen some write, or say on television, that Bush is too much of a simpleton and country boy even to understand how bad things have gotten in Iraq; that he is lost in a fog of religious unreality; and that his visible good humor and love of little jokes are further signs of how essentially unserious he is.

Another way to look at the same evidence, of course, is to note that the president consciously and willfully gambled his entire presidency on the war in Iraq, and on the very daring (foolhardy?) strategy of getting democratic currents started in the Middle East. To the point of boredom, and despite relentless criticism, he has been unswerving.

I found the parallels to Lincoln particularly striking in the Doris Kearns Goodwin Lincoln biography, A Team of Rivals.  I'm certain she did not intend them.  Novak continues:

No end to the bloodshed flickered in sight. There seemed to be no plan for winning the war, and no general capable even of conceiving how to lead an army to victory. Many Union generals lived in fear of losing a face-to-face battle, and again and again employed tactics that guaranteed humiliating losses, wasting the lives of innumerable brave men. Lincoln’s War Cabinet mocked him, his generals sometimes disobeyed him, but more often failed to share his serious purpose and determination to win.

Many great newspapers mocked Lincoln, and hoped soon to be rid of him. Even publishers who supported the Union had come to believe that Lincoln was a simpleton who could not win the war. Key political leaders were talking withdrawal from the fight, and urging negotiations with the South, in the hope that the unrealistic dream of Union might be traded away for peace. Compared to Lincoln, they thought themselves realists.

Merry Christmas.

The only explanation

Brainwashing.  That's it.  Brainwashing.  That's how The Independent's political editor Andrew Grice explains Tony Blair's support for America and George Bush -- support that has not translated into enhanced British influence.  According to Grice, Blair wields no influence whatever in world affairs.

Tony Blair's "shoulder to shoulder" support for George Bush has been called into question again by claims that he was "brainwashed" by President Bush over plans to pull troops out of Iraq.

The Prime Minister returned yesterday from his seven-nation visit to the Middle East, apparently without achieving any significant breakthrough in the peace process.

That would be the peace process that has been in the works since the 1967 Six Day War.  Or if you'd prefer not to go back that far let's say it began with Henry Kissinger's famous Shuttle Diplomacy during the Nixon administration.  Of course if that seems to exaggerate the difficulty of achieving peace in the Middle East, we can say it began with the Carter administration's Camp David Accord.  Unfortunately that all fell apart after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who implicitly recognized the state of Israel by making his historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, was assassinated in 1981 by Islamic extremist who took exception.  So it might be better to say it began with the Oslo Accords which were orchestrated during the Clinton administration in 1993.  That makes some sense since the Oslo Accords serve as something of a demarcation.

Up to that time the world had been negotiating the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  By the time the Oslo Accords were negotiated it had been transformed into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  Of course over that time period, the Arab-Palestinian objective remained constant, the elimination of Israel, and no amount of negotiation ever changed it.  Even today Iranian President Ahmadinejad predicts Israel will be wiped off the map, while to nearly everyone's chagrin, except the U.S., Israel, and Great Britain, Israel doggedly continues to exist.  How gauche.

Well it strikes me as odd that Mr. Grice could, seemingly with a straight face, observe that Tony Blair returned from the Middle East without having made a breakthrough in a war that has been going on for nearly 60 years.  While expectations from Mr. Blair's seven nation trip were unrealistic, assessments of British influence over American foreign policy are miles off the mark. 

Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas, the outgoing director of Chatham House, said: "Blair has learnt the hard way that loyalty in international politics counts for nothing. And his successor will not make the same mistake of offering unconditional support for US initiatives in foreign policy at the expense of a more positive relationship with Europe."

It was the Chatham House think-tank that came up with a report claiming Mr Blair enjoyed "no significant influence" over the Bush administration in spite of British support for America in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Robert Tuttle, the U.S. ambassador in London, disagrees.

Robert Tuttle, the US ambassador in London, described the Chatham House report as "puzzling and incorrect". He said: "Our relationship is the strongest of any two governments in the world and I think the world is a better place for that relationship."

Mr Tuttle added: "I think that the special relationship is very, very strong ... You have a very strong prime minister who made the commitment [in Iraq] on what he thought was best for the United Kingdom."

Mr. Blair echoed that sentiment, predicting that his successor would also maintain a close relationship with America.

Perhaps Mr. Grice offers the explanations of brainwashing and lack of influence because British foreign policy hasn't gone in the direction he would have preferred.  Maybe if political editors understood that British foreign policy like American foreign policy has winning the war on terror among its most important aims, Blair might not be considered so ineffectual.  The fact is, he's been pretty influential.

Consequences of defeat

A recent CIA simulation revealed dire consequences that would result from a U.S. defeat in Iraq.

The CIA-sponsored simulation predicts that al Qaeda will view a U.S. defeat in Iraq as another jihadist victory over a superpower and one that will bring it even more terrorist recruits.

"When we did the simulation, the ramifications were enormous," said the source, who asked not to be named. The source said al Qaeda will proclaim, "God has given us a second victory over a superpower.

"Imagine what defeat in Iraq would do," said the source. "Al Qaeda picks new targets after it thinks it's won."

This person expressed unhappiness that the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, devoted less than a page to what a loss in Iraq would mean for global terrorism.

The source said he hopes the CIA report is circulated within the administration to drive home the point that the stakes are high in Iraq. Mr. Bush is set to announce early next year new strategies and tactics for winning in Iraq. He previously has dismissed proposals from Democrats to pull out all 135,000 U.S. troops now or withdraw them on a set timetable regardless of events on the ground.

Changing priorities

Sandy Berger temporarily stashed the classified documents he lifted from the National Archives under a nearby construction trailer, according to a Washington Times report. 

Mr. Berger, who served as national security adviser under President Clinton from 1997 to 2000, pleaded guilty in April 2005 to a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. The material included documents outlining the government's knowledge of terrorist threats in the United States during the 2000 New Year's celebration.

He was fined $50,000 by a federal judge, ordered to perform 100 hours of community service and barred from access to classified material for three years. The top Clinton adviser had faced a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, but a plea agreement in the case reduced the fine and kept him out of jail.

The removal occurred while Mr. Berger was preparing to testify before the September 11 commission investigating intelligence and security failures, raising questions about whether he was attempting to cover up the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policies and actions.

Mr. Berger, with authorization from Mr. Clinton, also was reviewing National Security Council documents on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, Sudan and related presidential correspondence to prepare for testimony before the House and Senate intelligence committees.

In his televised testimony to the September 11 commission, Mr. Berger said the Clinton administration's "sustained attention" to terrorist threats and "rigorous actions" had foiled a terrorist threat in December 1999 to bomb airports in the United States.

But Attorney General John Ashcroft told the commission that he saw some of the documents that had turned up missing from the Archives and that the plot was stopped with "luck playing a major role."

Republicans had apparently hoped for an investigation of the matter.

In a letter to the House Government Reform Committee, the lawmakers asked Chairman Thomas M. Davis III, Virginia Republican, to investigate whether there was criminal misconduct in the removal of the classified documents by the Clinton administration official.

Democrats will assume control of Congress next month, and the request for an investigation is expected to be shelved.

Ho hum.  Business as usual.