Grabass, Rape, and Stuff I Don’t Understand

I am thinking of opening a new rubric,on this blog: “Stuff I don’t understand.” It’s needed because the press often omits doing its job of analyzing the news it reports on and of checking, even for superficial credibility. Much of what I hear and read makes no sense.

Here is an example:

For days, the news has been filled with reports of an epidemic of sexual abuse in the military.

The word epidemic means something like: “Large numbers and growing.” Right?

One startling number: 40 % of the victims are male members of the military.

So, I have to ask: Who is doing it to the guys?

(I don’t ask who is doing it to the women. We know the answer: Most men, or at least, many men are born rapists.)

Several possibilities:

1 The roughly 15% of military personnel who are female have unleashed their lust on the 85% who are male;

2 The military houses a large number of male homosexuals who don’t know boundaries and hit on other men who are presumably heterosexual, in the hope that they, the victims will figure out that they are really, really homosexual.

3 The small minority of male military homosexuals are like the little boy accidentally locked up in the cookie pantry sampling here and there with abandon. The sampling would include a fair share of grabass, of course.

Which do you believe is closer to the truth? Now, think hard: Is any of this credible at all?

Myself, personally, I believe in the rotten apple theory of the truth: If there is a single rotten apple in the barrel, there is no reason to think that the other apples in the barrel are perfect.

Recently, I was accidentally sitting in a bar next to a woman who must have been in her late fifties. Neither of us was inebriated. She informed me casually that one woman in three had been molested as a child. Of course, I asked her why she believed that. She told me that there are “statistics.” I asked her why she believed the statistics.

“Because it happened to me,” she said.

Was there any reason to continue any conversation with that person? Think rotten apples.

In today WSJ (5/20/13) a very brave military lawyer, a Marine officer, spreads out the numbers behind the alleged epidemic and shows the absurd, ridiculous ways in which they came about.

She tells us among other things that the actual number of recorded sexual assaults in the whole military for 2012 (that’s complaints, not convictions) was : 3,374.

That’s for more then one million members.

That might not be enough, in my book, for a youngish population. It may indicate a low libido we don’t want in our fighters.

We now have military that is so sensitive that it does not mind reporting absurdities far and wide. It’s a little frightening.

In case you wonder: I am against all forms of sexual assault in spite of occasional levity. I especially think it should be repressed in the military because it undermines solidarity in the ranks. I am against trivializing the real problem of sexual assault by calling anything “sexual assault.” (A pat on the top of one buttock is not rape.) I firmly believe that there are no crimes without criminals. If a crime is allegedly committed, someone did it. One who reports crimes of any sort has an obligation to think about who the one(s) might be. See above.

Ref. : Captain Lindsay L. Rodman: “The Pentagon’s Bad Math on Sexual Assault” WSJ 5/20/13 P. A17.

The IRS Crimes: a Gift from Providence to Libertarians

Anyone who has libertarian sentiments, in the Libertarian Party or outside of it, in the Republican Party, or elsewhere; anyone who sees himself as supporting the non-existent, imaginary “Tea Party,” is familiar with the difficulty of explaining even basic libertarian principles. There are three problems:

First, most people are lazy, especially when it comes to re-examining the creeds they absorbed in childhood or youth.

Second, libertarianism is paradoxically too familiar to draw interest. It’s more or less what you learned in high school about the work of the Founding Fathers. (Digression: It’s more interesting for immigrants like me than for the US-born precisely, because we had no superficial exposure to it at the time we had acute testosterone poisoning.)

Third, libertarianism is not sexy. It does not enjoy the emotional ease of access that big words procure: “Revolution,” “Justice,” “Fairness,” “the Future.” In other words, it’s not a cartoon; it ‘s not a reality show; it’s not a vampire movie. It’s an intellectual stance for adults only. Tough call!

Sometimes, though Providence throws us a lifeline. Now is such a time. A libertarian Hollywood scriptwriter, if there were one, could hardly come up with a better script than the current controversy regarding the IRS role in singling out conservative organizations, in persecuting them, in forcing them illegally and immorally to disgorge private information about opponents to the Obama administration. Or about imagined opponents.

The IRS storm happens at the same time as other Obama administration discrediting events:

It is trying to convince America that it did not deny protection to the assassinated Americans in Benghazi, Libya, and that it did not subsequently lie about what happened;

It is imposing on all American universities restrictions on free speech unheard for centuries in the Anglo-American legal tradition. (See Greg Lukianoff in the Wall Street Journal of 5/17/13);

It is attempting to justify spying on journalists on the basis of an unknown national security risk. (It might be justified. There are tried ways to convince the nation that the spying was justified. President Obama shows no intention of using them as I write.)

As far as the IRS persecution of Obama opponents, in my mind, it’s not a question of who is getting fired or of “who is going to jail.” Punishment of the more or less guilty would be low on my agenda. There is a more fundamental problem that is being pushed aside in televised congressional testimonies and in most of the printed press (I think. I welcome corrections.)

Given that the IRS exists as a very powerful, autonomous, large government organization of ordinary but overpaid people, with a proven capacity to hurt large numbers of citizens, it was bound to happen.

That the IRS is a government organization matters a great deal because , in practice, such organizations enjoy immunity from lawsuits. They exist beyond the reach of the arm of the law. But the rule of law is what largely defines civilized societies, of course. Such organizations as the IRS thus tend to pull us back toward a lesser state of civilization. That’s true irrespective of who is president and, to an extent, independent of which party is in power. If you have a famished and crazy dog chained in the backyard, you should not reassure yourself that everything is under control because it’s your house, not that irresponsible, other guy’s house.

It’s true that the IRS crimes now being discussed were somewhat more likely to take place under a Democrat administration. First, the Fascist current runs deep in the middle of the Democratic Party river. It’s the party of Roosevelt, who classically, used war to place as much of the American production apparatus under federal government control as he could reach (even artists). Second, the Democratic Party was the Party of Birmingham’s Bull Connor, of his attack dogs and of his water hoses aimed at peaceful black demonstrators. The Democratic Party is also most closely associated with labor unions, some of which (not all) have a history of thuggery extending a century or more.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, is not sinless but it carries in its veins an instinctive mistrust of government power which serves as some protection though as minimal protection. The rank-and-file Republican is much less likely than his Democrat counterpart to assume that anything is correct just because the government is doing it. Nevertheless, frankly, is there anyone who would assert with a straight face that the currently revealed IRS misdeeds would never happen under a Republican administration?

The truth now staring us in the face is that a free society simply cannot have in its midst a monster such as the IRS (described above). It should not be allowed to arise. If its exists, it should not be allowed to grow (as with the Obama administration giving it big additional responsibilities within Obamacare). Such a government bureaucracy should be given practically no discretion, no power to pass judgment without at least close judiciary monitoring.

How about collecting taxes for freeways, some will say? Supposing it has to be the federal government’s task to build freeways (just supposing) and to perform other necessary functions, it should be done with a simple flat tax allowing no deductions. It should be a low tax of 15% of gross income or less. (I live within my means; so can the government learn to do.) Federal tax collection would look like this.

You would receive a short postcard saying:

“1. Your income last year was___.

2. Send 15% (or less ) of that amount.

Thank you.”

Tax cheaters would have to deal with the local sheriff who would be paid a flat fee for each recovery.

Unrealistic? How about our existing system, is it realistic?

Fascism Explained

[This essay first appeared on this blog on May 27th 2009]

Below is a fairly long essay. You may want to read it in installments.

There is also a Part 2 posted on this blog on June 1st 2009.

The aim of fascism as a political movement is to substitute for individual self-confidence based on skills and achievements uncritical trust in a leader or in an organization. Fascism as a form of government has no objective. Invariably, it ends either in misery or in a catastrophe.

The word “fascist” has been so overused – entirely by Left-leaning people, – that is has become an empty insult. I am guessing that most Americans alive today only know the term as a nasty epithet, perhaps with vague references to Italy’s Mussolini. This is too bad because fascism is a real socio-political phenomenon that took over a fair number of developed societies in the middle-part of the twentieth century. Fascism is also alive, under other names, in and out of power, in the semi-advanced but chronically stagnant societies of Latin America. I think that the fascist temptation is always, forever present in the background of modern societies, including democratic societies. (There are more discussions of contemporary fascism further down in this essay.)

I am addressing this brief description of fascism to my younger contemporaries, in the US and elsewhere, because fascism has become relevant to the current American situation. I am not trying to shout an alarm call as I would with a fast spreading forest fire, for example, just helping inform the curious and intelligent but justifiably ignorant as I always try to do on this blog.

Much has been written about two aspects of the best known fascist movements and regimes. First, there have been many books about the most visible leaders of the most visible fascisms, especially about Hitler and Mussolini. These works have focused on the personalities, the families and the psychological antecedents of those leaders and, to a lesser extent, on the leaders’ inner psychology while they were in power. Second,there have been a number of notable studies of the immediate followers that is, on the large numbers of ordinary people who joined explicitly fascist organizations, such as the infamous SS in Germany. There is current resurgence of interest in the long-lived Spanish brand of fascism, under Francisco Franco. (Franco achieved his dictatorship after a bloody civil war. Yet he governed Spain peacefully for more than thirty years.)

To my knowledge, it’s difficult to find much about the more passive supporters of fascist movements, the great bulk of them. This is an important question because the foremost fascist party in history, the Nazi Party, came to power through largely constitutional means. Many ordinary Germans who were probably nice people supported it. It’s difficult to think about it because of so many movies but initially, supporters of fascism are sweet-faced and pure-hearted. It seems to me many Hitler and Mussolini supporters were hoodwinked, in part because they were too lazy to think of the consequences of their choices.

To make a long story short, the Nazis won the largest number a vote in a regular election, assumed government power and proceeded to eliminate democratic rule. Nazism was brought to power by the naivety of some and by the passivity of others. Mussolini’s Fascist Party seized power with considerable popular support. The short-lived but devastating French version of fascism, was formulated and led by a general and war hero to whom the democratically elected representatives of the Republic handed power willingly.

The less known, less flamboyant, but much longer-lasting Portuguese brand of fascism was invented by a mild-mannered Professor of Economics. Although he was installed after a military coup, Salazar was for practical purposes, little opposed by Portuguese civil society for most of his rule. He led Portugal to the lowest economic rank in Europe, pretty much to Third World status. Similarly, fascist movements came to power mostly peacefully in Hungary and in Romania in the late thirties and early forties. After WWII, General Perón of Argentina implemented a successful fascist program with the assent of the broad mass of Argentineans. He was able to pull it off twice. He left the country in a shamble from which it has not recovered, thirty years later.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a conventional fascist state installed originally by a broad mass movement. It has limited political representation. Economically, it conforms faithfully to the historical fascist experience of initial success followed by a continuous descent into poverty. This, in spite of massive oil revenues. Its apparatus of repression includes draconian laws, summary arrests, trials without protection for the accused, capital punishment for a broad range of non-homicidal offenses, and prison murders. It looks completely familiar though the repression is done in the name of religion.

So, let me correct a common mistake: Fascism is not a political ideology imposed by force from above. It’s a mass movement. It requires both mute consent from some and a high degree of enthusiasm from others.

All fascist regimes ended in blood and disaster or in whimpering economic disgrace because they showed themselves unable to provide more than the bare necessities of life. Given the dramatic ending of the more dramatic fascist regimes, again, such as Hitler’s and Mussolini, we tend to ignore this prosaic truth: Fascism is a recipe for prolonged poverty, at best. That’s when it does not end in total economic ruination as in Germany. The end of Spanish and of Portuguese fascism were negotiated affairs conducted under Army pressures. Spain’s and Portugal’s economies began taking off immediately after the transfers of power to democratically elected government that lacked any economic experience.

Fascist economic programs never work.

In power, fascist parties invariably attempt to concentrate the levers of the national economy in a few government hands. They do so either by nationalizing outright the means of production, or by forcing employers and employees into the same state-controlled organizations. Often, they cynically call these organizations “labor unions,” or “trade unions.” This mode of organizations is technically called “corporatism.” The word does not imply that corporations have power but the reverse: The government or its agents make the main decisions for corporations. Of course, corporatism is the complete negation of capitalism which requires all-around competition. That includes the competition of owners and controllers of capital with workers. All-around competition is inherently messy. It’s the converse of a well-trained army marching in lock-step, for example. Fascists hate disorderliness. They are fussy.

Technical note: Nationalization, the government take-over of a company owned by stockholders almost never requires a majority of the shares of ownership. Under current laws, in the US, the control of 15% of the shares is usually sufficient. Frequently, it takes much less than 15% ownership for a government to dictate a corporation’s policies. That’s because the stock is usually widely dispersed, with the largest stockholders owning a very small % of the total.

Fascists concentrate economic control in the name of orderliness.

Fascist governments and fascist movements detest capitalism.

A fascist movement always preaches national unity. Fascists begin by deploring unpleasant partisanship. In the name of national unity, fascist parties seek to weaken open discussion. They use words such as “bi-partisan,” and “overcoming our differences,” repeatedly and until they appear to describe what is obviously desirable. The American practice of democratic governance, by contrast, is based explicitly on confrontations followed by negotiations, one issue at a time, between often-changing coalitions.

When it comes to power, the fascist party abolishes competing political parties. It may do so by absorbing them or by persecuting them and murdering their members. The same fascist government often practices both forms of elimination. Thus, the powerful German Communist Party pre-1933, ended up partly in Nazi concentration camps, partly in the Nazi SS guard.

Fascist politics require the elimination of competing voices.

Fascist movements are often headed by providential leader, one who presents himself a a savior from a grave crisis, real or imagined ( real or imagined, and sometimes made up). The best known fascist leaders such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Perón, have also been charismatic. This is not absolutely necessary, providential is enough. Salazar of Portugal, a rotund, short man, was as lacking in charisma as anyone. Franco was downright sinister, even to many of his followers. Yet, personal charisma certainly helps a fascist leader achieve power. It helps his credulous followers suspend their sense of criticality.

Fascists profit by the unchecked veneration of leadership and they cultivate it.

Fascist movement are usually not content to suppress dissent. They demand the sincere submission of individual wills to the benefit of a greater collective good. That’s because only inner submissions guarantees a long, unchallenged rule in spite of increasingly bad living conditions. The fascist movement imposes this demand first on movement followers and then, on all citizens.

Fascism places the collective (real or not) much ahead of the individual.

The muzzling of the press, serves both to eliminate the voicing of dissent and to achieve the submission of individual wills. A society with no press though is not the most desirable goal of a fascist government. Fascism seeks to whip up mass enthusiasm. So, the best situation is one where the press speaks in a unified voice in support of the fascist party, or of its leader. What is true of the press narrowly defined, is true of other mass media as well. Thus, Hitler, actively encouraged the development of a German cinema entirely to its devotion. So did the French fascist regime between 1940 and 1942 (with active German Nazi help, by the way.) Enthusiasm helps ordinary people bear burdens and it helps them suppress their pangs of conscience when they witness immoral actions.

Fascism requires the uncritical enthusiasm of many to achieve power, and more so to keep it because of the progressive impoverishment it causes, and also to gain toleration for its bad actions.

In some important historical cases, there is not much muzzling to be done because much the bulk of the mainstream media is already supporting the providential leader, before he comes to power. That was the case in Germany in and, to a lesser extent in Italy. Mussolini himself was a journalist, presumably with ability to manipulate the press rather than suppress it. Having the movie industry endorsing unconditionally a fascist leader would prove invaluable in a contemporary society because of the superior ability of movies to engage the whole person’s emotions along with his intellect. Also, it’s likely today that many more people watch movies than read newspapers. This is especially true of the young.

The intelligentsia, the educated class, or a large fraction of it, invariably plays a role in the ascent or legitimation of fascist ideas. Martin Heidegger, then and later, an important German scholar philosopher, became an active Nazi directly upon Hitler’s accession to power. In the case I know second best, that of France, foremost novelists, such as Drieu la Rochelle, and Louis Ferdinand Céline, were early and ardent supporters of fascism. Marcel Déat, a noted philosophy professor with the best academic credentials turned politician, was one of the most effective collaborators in the Nazi occupation of France. (It’s also true that many more French intellectuals supported the totalitarianism of the Left, instead. So?)

Fascism gains intellectual respectability from the endorsement of conventional luminaries.

Given their insistence on national unity, fascist movements must appear respectable to the political center, the main abode of respectability. The great American sociologist Martin Seymour Lipset famously called fascism, “the extremism of the (political) Center.” Hence, fascists cannot afford to suppress opposition openly by illegal means. Once they are in power, they change the laws so that anything they wish, including the mass murder of the mentally ill and later, the attempted destruction of all Gypsies and all Jews within their reach, is made legal. Before they reach power however, they must appear civilized to avoid unnecessarily alarming ordinary middle-class citizens. In order to pursue both ends, fascist movement employ goons, organized extremists toughs whose actions they are able to condemn when expedient.

Fascist movement commonly employ goon associates to wreck democratic elections by putting unbearable pressure on electoral organs designed for a civil transfer of power. In a normal democracy, it usually takes a small percentage of the votes cast to win an election. Thus, pressure tactics are often successful. Fascist movement sometimes sacrifice their goon wing once they are in power. Hence, Hitler liquidated his strong-arm SA guard in 1934. that is, after he had gained the chancellorship (more or less the presidency), when they had outlived their usefulness as a tool of street terror. Hitler may have had only a hundred or so SA leaders assassinated. The bulk of the SA rank and file learned to stay down. Many were incorporated into the other and rival strong-arm branch of the Nazi movement, the SS.

Fascists use extra-legal methods to gain political power, in addition to legal methods.

Fascist regimes are never conservative. They are revolutionary or radical reformists with an agenda of social justice. These words mean always and everywhere, “equalization.” There is some confusion in history books on this issue for several reasons. First, the head of Spanish fascism, General Franco had a Catholic agenda that looks culturally conservative on the surface. In fact, Franco tried to restore his own archaic version of Catholicism in a country where religious practice had gone down to near-zero levels among the men. Thus, Franco was not trying to conserve anything but to go back to a largely illusory, invented past.

An other source of confusion in that in several European countries and most dramatically, in Germany, big business circles eventually did lend their support to fascists governments. Two reasons for this. First big business leaders were then afraid of a Communism which had not yet demonstrated its incompetence as a solution to anything except the good life. (More below on the relationship between fascism and Communism.) Second, the owners and/or managers of large business enterprises are often natural collectivists. They tend to abhor real, unfettered competition and to prize workplace discipline. Fascist regimes protected them from the one and provided the other to perfection.

I believe that liberal scholars in the West have deliberately fostered the confusion, the idea that conservatism and fascism are two positions on the same axis. I don’t have the space to develop the basis of my belief here. Yet it’s a critical belief I developed during thirty years around liberal and left-wing scholars. Fascists and big business leaders love neatness above all. They detest the give-and-take and the tumultuous competition of the market.

It goes without saying that once they are well established, fascist governments attract the usual conscience-less opportunists, in addition to several breeds of fanatics and sadists. We know roughly what kind of personalities are attracted by the potential to exercise unchecked power. More interesting is the question of what kinds of people tend to become passive followers of fascist movements before they assume power or, in the early stages of their being in power. The question is important again because fascism is not imposed from above. Rather, it comes to be the government through the acquiescence of masses of people no-one would call, “fascist.”

It seems to me that at the basis of this acquiescence lies a combination of dispositional attributes. The first such attribute is probably a tendency to become alarmed, to live in the expectation of frequent or impending disasters. Such inclination will cause some people to throw up their arms from impotence and to search for a radical solution. This makes sense: If the real situation is extraordinarily threatening, the hope that the usual, ordinary solutions will work may vanish. This attitude historically led to an abandonment of institutionally valid politics, such a majority vote, or respect for legality in general, and for individual liberties in particular. Second, since fascism is an impatient recourse to authoritarian solutions, it’s often a psychological return to childhood.  (Almost all children are impatient. ) Under a perceived serious threat, some people will pull harder while others will revert to the days when, in their own personal experience, Mom or Dad made things right. Third, backers of fascism tend to be naive. This is difficult to comprehend because their naivety is often accompanied, in every other respect, by normal intelligence. The naivety I refer to operates as if a corner of their brain shut itself off from regular, adult reality checks. I suspect the part of the brain that becomes activated then is the same that makes us love fairy tales, and fiction in general.  Fourth, and neither least nor last, followers of fascism are almost always burning with a sense of justice. Their requirement for justice is impatient (see above) and of the simplistic, kindergarten variety: Jimmy got two apples; I have to have two apples also, and Charlie must have  two; otherwise, it’s not fair!

In summary:Fascism abhors the idea of the individual will of ordinary citizens. In this, it is the complete moral opposite of classical conservatism which recognizes only the individual. Fascism’s main achievement everywhere and in every epoch, is to make ordinary people poor, dependent and afraid. Fascism is not imposed by force. It wins through the support of the uncritically enthusiastic

This is just and introduction. It’s easy to find good material to read on fascism. Or, you might just decide finally to read the great short book you pretended to have read in high school but never did: George Orwell’s “1984.”

Next: The relationship between historical fascism and communism. (Hint: Same damn thing!)

I Agree with Obama on Guantanamo but….

I agree with President Obama. It’s unacceptable that we, the US, have kept people as prisoners for as long as ten years without trial or any other procedure that could conceivably result in their release or  conviction.

Let me say first that it’s not an issue of toughness or not toughness. I, for one, think it’s ridiculous to invoke the Geneva Conventions to protect people who burn women and children alive and who assassinate while wearing  civilian clothing. I am also in favor of making their lives difficult, of increasing the hardship of doing their disgusting job any way we can. That would include making a public announcement that specific individuals may be volatilized from the sky anytime, any place. That sure would create a circle of isolation around them. I would also be in favor of including an option to surrender and be investigated (by us.) I don’t understand why this option does not already exist.

There are three purposes for keeping people locked up. One is  to secure them while they await trial. The lock-up time in this case should be as short as technically possible. The second reason is that they are serving a prison term, a punishment imposed  after a conviction of guilt in a well-described, appropriate procedure.

The third reason  to prevent people from leaving is to keep them out of any situation where they can hurt others. Thus, the classical treatment of prisoners of war is to secure them until there is peace. No punishment ought to be intended. In fact, there is international agreement that such prisoners should be treated the same as the soldiers of the nation detaining them.  Again, to punish people, you have to try them formally and to find them guilty of something. That’s true even if the accused are prisoners of war, for example. A prisoner of war may also be guilty of crimes. The two issues are separate.  A civilized society should not allow its collective judgment to drift from one situation to the other.

I often hear comments among my fellow conservatives that obscure the existence of a line separating the task of punishing terrorists from the mission to keep them out of our harm’s way. I also hear an absence, the absence of realization that the issue if not one of some Middle-Eastern strangers’ – many of whom openly hate us – rights. It’s about our rights. (It always is, in the final analysis.) Confinement to a small space open has not chosen is experienced as  punishment regardless of intent.  It’ s even the most severe punishment several other civilized societies have. I agree with President Obama that we should not punish severely individuals who may be completely innocent. They may be people who are no more guilty of violence against the United States and against Americans than I am. (Repeat this sentence. Make th”I” yourself.” )

I suspect many of my fellow conservatives believe in their hearts that those detained by American forces because they are suspected of terrorism must be at least a little guilty, or guilty of something. Of course, there is no such thing as being a little guilty in our legal tradition. The idea belongs in totalitarian societies.

If we need to control  some people’s movements for the third reason, to prevent from from doing us harm, in a war that may never end, we owe it to ourselves  as a nation to develop inventive solutions that don’t confuse our need to be safe with the imposition of undeserved punishment. I can think of two such solutions .

We could develop a place to keep them that does not resemble prison except that it should be guarded from intrusion by outside forces. High-tech surveillance methods on the periphery of such a place connected to  missiles, for example come to mind. I am thinking of a sort of armed  Club Fed. It could even be a Guantanamo Two, a decent resort where the detainees could lead a life more closely approximating  normal life. Inside the resort, they would govern themselves as befit people who are not in jail or prison. There is no reason why they couldn’t have a normal family life with spouses and children. I can hear some already snickering about the cost of such a scheme. It’ s extremely unlikely that it would be more expensive to maintain than the highest security jail this country has ever had. It would also be less expensive than war, any kind of war.

There is another, a sort of libertarian solution to the problem of neutralizing those we suspect of wishing to do us harm.  We could try to free them  on bail. Let me explain: There are millions of individuals around the world and thousands of organizations who profess to be terminally disgusted by the very existence of Guantanamo prison. Among the latter are hundreds of Muslim non-government organizations (NGOs). Some of the latter have thousands and tens of thousands of  members. The US government could negotiate the transfer of custody to private NGOs of inmates who have been held for several years and who are not slated to be tried. The US government could ask for a vertiginous bail amount, millions or even billions of dollars per inmate so transferred. The bail money would be refunded after  a determined number of years (say, when the detainee reaches a certain age) if the detainee had not been killed or recaptured in the process of conducting or of supporting terrorist activities.

Either some would take up this offer of privatization of custody or not. If the offer were taken, we would at least have put some distance between us and the practical problems of dealing with people we think dangerous. (This includes, as I write, the horror of force-feeding.) Relapses of terrorists would become more publicized than they are now, less subject to the constant suspicion that the US is manipulating appearances.  At the very least, if there was no no rush to adopt Guantanamo detainees, it would be nice to point  out the hypocrisy of our critics.

The Global Cult

Today, Easter Day of 2013, I had to become embroiled in a religious controversy, of course. It arose from a a long discussion on my blog in the form of comments to my posting Bush’s War -2. It’s about the religion of global warming. Why the discussion comes from this particular short political posting is both complicated and uninteresting. My main adversary is Prof Terry who went to the same graduate school as I. He is a frequent liberal critic of this blog. Here are the last things he said in the Comments:

“Maybe they’re not like the flat-earthers of yore; maybe they have reasonable objections. Perhaps the collective wisdom of climate scientists is wrong about the causation of the planet growing warmer.”

The essence of science is gathering data to try to falsify tentative explanations. Do you and Jacques actually believe that the same science that generated evidence of fluctuations in global temperatures is somehow unaware of those fluctuations?

Let me put it this way. On the one hand there is a global collection of scientists in different disciplines that gather and analyze data of various kinds. And you’re right – they’ve reached a collective judgment. The world’s climate is growing warmer and it’s due to human activity changing the composition of the atmosphere.

What’s on the other hand? Jacques’ collection of teapublican conspiracy theorists. The data is false. Christian creationists. The data is not relevant because the bible says so. The occasional mouthpiece of energy companies.

I await the ‘reasonable objections’. I hope at least one is better than the ‘it used to be warmer so global warming can’t be happening’ non sequitor that our host is so fond of.

Wow. Not only was it warmer in Greenland a thousand years ago….wait….wait…. THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WARMER 40 MILLION YEARS AGO!!!! For millions of years!!!!

Which means nothing. I sometimes wonder if you actually read what you write.

I don’t need to read what I write. I think about what I write before I write it.

And Prof Terry does not seem to know that a “sequitor” is a specialized ranching tool used to castrate steers!

Prof. Terry has frequent nightmares about imaginary but really threatening “teapublicans” who often borrow my face ( my ravaged face) in his sleep. He thinks attributing to me statements he thinks they have made and which I am sure I have not made will make his utterances sound real.

Prof. Terry knows for sure that I am not a “Christian creationist” nor that I am tempted to follow such. He is childishly trying to shame me before the whole faculty club by using the “C” word in connection with my name. Well, I don’t shame easily and I don’t give much of a (Saxon copulation word) about the faculty club. In my long academic experience, the faculty club was usually a good place to go to find the wrong, the false, the absurd, the ridiculous.

It’s probably useful to to others, so I am again reacting to Prof. Terry’s nightmarish vision. (See also my other essays on the issue. Just search my blog for “global warming.”)

I don’t think the global warming  apocalyptic narrative results from a conspiracy. From time to time, I have made moderate statements I can easily resume, like this:

Global warming (now called something else) is a successful religious cult. Like new cults in general, it is sometimes served, but also possibly hurt by small-scale conspiracies. (Ask me for examples.) The mass of the people who think that there is a man-made significant trend of globally rising temperature that we must worry about now, or soon are not (NOT) conspirators. They are just not thinking. Many are misled by those who ought to know better, including college professors.

There are many examples in history of otherwise intelligent people who stop thinking in the service of their beliefs. Thus, the gold plates on which were written God’s New World revelations and that an angel gave Joseph Smith, the prophet of Mormonism. The plates were lost. Rotten luck!

Note: Mormonism is the common name for the faith of those in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Understand what I am not saying: Those who believe the plates existed and were lost are suspending disbelief, often forever. That makes them weak, not stupid. I know one who is a distinguished scholar in Prof. Terry’s and my discipline.

Prof. Terry invokes the authority of a category he calls “climate scientists” Two problems with this.

There is no such category with a fixed meaning if you are allowed to exclude anyone you don’t like: “What, Peter the Prophet says that there will be no Second Coming of Christ? Why, Peter is a false prophet!”

If there were such a category and if you admitted anyone into it without a consistent test of credentials, the category would also have no value. It would be irrelevant. You may not say: “Carpenters think that….” if anyone at all is a carpenter.

Additionally, if there were such category as “climate scientists” and if most of its members said that the earth is flat, it would not make the earth flat. What is professor Terry thinking? Did climate scientists take a vote? Did the warmists win by 99,6%, like in People’s Republic Chinese democracy, or did they win by a moderate and more believable 56%?

Small digression here: During the primaries, one Republican candidate declared point-blank that “97% “ of climate scientists asserted that there was climate change. In my mind he was out of the race that very second, not because I did not agree with him but because if the 97% figure were correct, there would be no way for anyone to know it. That man was not thinking. He lacked criticality. I am even glad Barack Obama was elected rather than he!

In general, I refuse to fall into the common trap of having to chose to argue with specialists about their specialty or of accepting uncritically what they declare to be true (or, in this case what they are said to have said, as asserted by people who are obviously in the throes of religious experience.) I find that I rarely have to make this kind of freedom-constricting choice. I know little about the internal combustion engine, for example, but I know damn well when the mechanic who is working on my car reeks of beer! If I find out that many people die after submitting to a small, supposedly benign operation to erase their wrinkles, I chose to keep my wrinkles, smart guy that I am! I don’t initiate a discussion with medical doctors.

Prof. Terry thus invokes the “collective wisdom” of an undefined category. I have often been confronted by collective wisdom like that, by the sententious declarations of various kinds of priesthood. When I was thirty, all the social scientists I knew who were interested in the topic but four or five affirmed that capitalism was finished. They affirmed that a revolt of the poor countries would finish it (the “Lin-Piao thesis”) What has happened instead is that some of the same poor countries are catching up with us and some are about to pass us because they implement capitalism better than the old capitalist countries have ever done. (Singapore, that happy flagship of unrestricted capitalism, has for several years enjoyed a higher GDP/capita than its former colonial owner, welfarist UK.)  So much for collective wisdom!

Prof Terry is also trying to suggest that I am wrong and that he is right by wrapping himself in the scintillating mantle of science like a grotesque version of the  statue of the Madonna in some Spanish processional.  N. S. ! In fact, he momentarily forgets what he surely knows about science. A small example of what one should know:

If you throw a ball in the air and it fails to come down, if you make sure it’s not on the roof somewhere, if some joker or an athletic dog did not catch it, what are you supposed to think?

The answer is that if you are certain there is no mundane explanation, you are obligated to think that the Theory of Gravity maybe faulty or seriously in question. My point is that in good science, it takes only one non-conforming event, if you are certain it’s a real event. ONE! Try it yourself: If a single object is shown to travel faster than the speed of light, then ….

The importance of the warm Greenland story that Prof Terry alludes to is that it’s one of the many possible single instances that must undermine the belief that industrial civilization, cars, manufacturing, heating houses have recently raised average world temperature. You decide how fatally the facts of the story undermine the warmist view.

For a sub-period of 1,000 to 1,300 , approximately, the Norse settlers of Greenland ate significant quantities of beef. Now there were only two possible sources for that beef. They imported cattle from Iceland or from Norway in their little boats to eat them. Or they raised cattle right in Greenland. The first explanation, I discount as technically and economically absurd. So, the Norse evidently raised cattle in a part of the world where you could not do it now. You could not because Greenland is too cold to produce the hay necessary to feed cattle during long winter season. Greenland was warmer then than it is after nearly two centuries of big, human CO2 emissions.

Incidentally the now famous “hockey-stick” fraud perpetrated by major environmentalist leaders was made necessary by the fact that there is abundant evidence that the average temperatures of the known world were higher than than they are now for centuries during the Middle -Ages. Solution for this disturbing problem: Don’t show the temperatures for that period even if you have data.

Changists either refuse to talk about this matter or worse, they insist on telling us that we must believe that the latest rise in temperature is uniquely due to human activity although the dozens of other rises that preceded it could not possibly have roots in human activity. It’s like this:

“It’s rained often, but this particular rain comes from the fact that you peed in the sky last week.”

Incidentally, I don’t think there is any significant rise in global temperatures except, everywhere, every day between seven am and noon. I am just playing along.

As I said any single instance would do. I like the particular instance of the warm Greenland story because of its source. I gleaned the basic facts from reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Mr Diamond is the same respected intellectual to whom we owe the masterfully told story of the ruin of Easter Island by its inhabitants’ unsound exploitation of their physical environment. Mr Diamond is no “denier”! If he knew me, I am pretty sure he would dislike me.

If I were in the name-dropping business, by the way, I would also recommend reading the very skeptical Bjorn Lomborg, an environmental activist who also has the merit of being a trained statistician. Prof. Terry’s friends confronted by such a heretic would like to burn him at the stake. As they don’t have the power to do so, they will resign themselves to gross calumny. (Also, they don’t want to contribute to more warming by burning fagots.) Anyone who disagrees with them and who sounds the least bit credible must be brought down at all costs. Just as you would imagine with a cult. As Prof. Terry himself suggests  in general, well-informed contrarians or heretics are  (with no specific reference to L Diamond)  merely the mouthpieces of (huge) “energy companies” Well, I am still awaiting my payment, damn it! What do I have to do?

Often, one is not sure of one’s competence to judge . That’s OK. You can usually assess, judge the credibility of a group, a tribe, a cult, by the company its members keep. It’s completely fair: Though you do not worship Satan yourself, if you regularly meet Satanists for drinks, you are probably evil. So, with changists.

This spring day, it’s snowing again in Brittany. It’s a peninsula bathed by the Gulf Stream and bordering the sea on three sides. Twenty years ago, local people would have told you that it “never” snowed in Brittany. The locals who never left their area could reach age fifty without ever seeing snow. What do I think the implications of the unusual abundant snow in Brittany now and earlier, in February, have for the global warming creed? Well, I keep telling you that I am a serious man. I think it’s interesting the way anecdotes can be interesting. I don’t think for a second that the unusual cold in Brittany and in much of Europe should ad anything to my incredulity. These events ad nothing (NOTHING).

Now conduct a mental experiment and imagine that it were today, Easter day, unusually hot in Brittany, or across the Channel, in England. Suppose it were 90 F in the shade. Do you have any doubt (ANY) that there would be many commentators, on the news and elsewhere, who would assert that, of course, the high temperature is another example of global warming (or something). Naturally, the scientific warmists would tell us that those are uneducated people who don’t know anything. Conduct another mental experiment. (It will hurt but it won’t take long.) How many credentialed, scientifically trained warmists, such as Prof. Terry, would raise their voice to tell the commentators that anecdotal evidence does not count, that it means nothing, that they should shut up? Would there be even one? Does it ever happen?

Warmists who ought to know better are passive but conscious accomplices to crimes of ignorance. Why should anyone in his right mind respect them?

I know there are warmists who would affirm that the unusually cold temperature in Brittany is a proof of warming. Likewise: the more neighbors my wife has affairs with, the more she must love me! I don’t have time for such nonsense until they describe with great clarity what kind of evidence would change their belief.  (Footnote 1, below)

Warmists routinely try two things against people like me, “deniers.” First, they attempt to intimidate me: Do you think you are smarter than anyone, JD? The answer I have given many times is that I am often smarter than most because I don’t believe much. I don’t think the gold plaques of Mormonism were lost. I don’t believe, on this Easter Day, that Jesus walked out of his tomb looking fresh as a rose. And, for good measure, the Hebrews were not “slaves” in Egypt. I am inclined to libertarianism but the best example of statelessness right now is Somalia where you can die for a used tire. Skeptical there too. And, I was anti-communist in academia before conservatism was cool. It’s in the record. Not being encumbered with creeds is a kind of intelligence; I am not embarrassed to admit to it.

Note: I like many of the people who believe those things. I don’t want to argue with them but I don’t want to hide my disbelief either.

The second way warmists try to fight me is by adopting the Jehova’s Witnesses’ switching and crowding strategy. They keep changing the subject and they make me dizzy with a flood of words. It does nothing to persuade me. It does not do much to influence witnesses. It helps them however cling to their unexamined beliefs. I respond by requesting that my opponents give it their one best shot. I don’t have all day. All kinds of unimportant things call my attention. Don’t ruin my life with the misconceived products of your weakened brain. Say one thing and make it count. It’s not difficult if you are clear in your own mind about what you want to say. I can do it in three sentences.

Today, as it happened, I met briefly a young stranger who majors in environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the environmentalist Rome and Mecca rolled in one. He volunteered that even a one inch rise in the ocean level is a serious matter. On the rare occasions when his fellows speak clearly, without detours, they seem always to demonstrate a lack of grip on reality. Or, they demonstrate that I lack a grip on reality. How can a one inch rise in the ocean be a serious matter? Until the advent of satellite measurement, we couldn ‘t even perceive changes with that degree of accuracy. It may have happened many times without anyone even noticing. A one inch rise is a small technical problem for the Dutch. Just call them!

The brief encounter was surprising. I liked the young man on sight and he also majors in history, a big plus in my book. I invited him to give it his best shot. His one best shot: tell me what terrible thing will happen if I am wrong. One! Of course, I promised him I would not censor him. What a strange request! What’s going on in his young mind? What mental world does he live in?

Any of you, patient readers, I hereby invite also to give it your best shot. Either, tell me of one thing about which I am wrong and why, one thing. Or, tell me also what horrible consequences there will be and when, if we do nothing, zilch. If you do, please begin with a sentence or two telling me why I should read you. Too many take my invitations as an offer to ramble on. I am not asking for much: “You should read this because….”

And don’t take any wooden nickels.

PS: The biggest rats leaving a sinking ship first:  Economist Magazine Now Admits It’s Unsure About Global Warming

Footnote 1 : The next day, there is a big title on MSNBC:

Global Warming Increases the Antarctica Ice Area.

Would I make this up? Would I even dare?

OK, it was April 1st but you know that MSNBC does not  joke with sacred matters. MSNBC does not joke, period!

Immigration: Legal and Otherwise

In the 3/11/13 issue of the WSJ, a former ambassador to Canada and a former diplomat to Mexico reproduce essentially most of the argument Sergei Nikiforov and I made clearly more than three years ago:

The solution to the problem of illegal immigration involves separating legal residency from citizenship.

The argument was developed in a 2009 issue of the libertarian Independent Review under the title: “If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely.”

The article is linked to this blog.

I also wish to repeat what I have already said recently on this blog: There is not much demand for US citizenship among illegal immigrants. The demand comes almost entirely from cynical professional members of the Democratic Party.

Stoning and The Confirmation Bias

Note: this essay is presently published as a “Comment” in the relevant part of the buddy-blog Notes on Liberty.

I am glad Brandon has drawn attention to the confirmation bias in Notes on Liberty. (“Origins of Terrorism in the Middle East.”) The words refer to the universal tendency of human beings to notice and to remember facts that support what they already believe to be true to the detriment of information favoring different and opposing views. Thus someone who believes that human activity has been causing global warming will collect and recall unusually hot days and he will tend to discount unusually cool days.

The confirmation bias is the bane of casual discussion such as are conducted in coffee shops, around the kitchen table and, in immense numbers now, on the web. Unfortunately the confirmation bias also frequently affects adversely empirical research designed to protect against biases in general. Scholarly submissions that present disconfirming evidence regularly have to jump higher hurdles than scholarly papers that extend orthodoxy. Yet, good methods afford partial protection in the social sciences and systematic critique also limits the damage to truth caused by the confirmation bias and by other biases.

But well designed and well conducted social science is expensive and time consuming. In the meantime, we have to live; we must make decisions, we cannot avoid choices. We are not able to wait for everything to become the object of a good study and for the study to be published in a respected journal to do what we have to do. Exaggerated deference to rigorous empirical studies is tantamount to delivering the floor to the most emotional, to the least rational, to the blindest fanatics among us. Like it or not, we must rely on anecdotal evidence most of the time. Yet, anecdotal evidence must, in time, give way to good studies published in a respected scholarly journals.

So, what is to be done about the confirmation bias usually associated with the gathering of anecdotal evidence? First, obviously each commentator of any political fact or perception must exercise extreme self-discipline in this respect, knowing that confirmation bias is not an accident but a normal tendency of the human mind. It helps a great deal if the commentator knows he is addressing an audience, a public, that praises intellectual honesty.

Secondly and most importantly, arguments should be subjected to criticism. I may easily, and in all honesty, be blind to my own confirmation bias but disinterested observers, and especially, adversaries, will ferret it out in no time. It’s also important to have reasonably public venues where biases in general and the confirmation bias in particular can be called out. I believe that Notes on Liberty and my own personal blog, Factsmatter, are two such venues. They should not be taken for granted. They may be the few exceptions among hundreds or thousands of blogs.

The context that motivated Brandon, the founder and co-editor of Notes on Liberty, to denounce my alleged confirmation bias is a comment of mine on his essay: “Origins of Terrorism in the Middle East.” In my comment, I take exception to his dismissal of the idea of “Islam’s violent penchant.”

I believe that, in fact, Islam has inherently violent tendencies. (I recognize at the same time the overwhelming peacefulness of the overwhelming numbers of Muslims.) In support of an assertion to the effect that Islam has a violent penchant, I list a number of violent practices which I argue are especially associated with Islam. Incidentally, I always mean “Islam the culture.” I am not a theologian able to discuss what Islamic scriptures and Islamic doctrine “really mean.” I am only able to observe reality on the ground.

Since my observation is neither exhaustive nor randomly conducted, the risk of confirmation bias is quite real. There is danger that I assign unconsciously to practitioners of Islam objectionable practices that are just as common among followers of other religions. It would be like treating Christians, for example, as especially likely to abuse alcohol as compared to Muslims. (And how silly can one get!)

In the situation at hand, I made the claim, among many others, that the only people who condemn to death by stoning women they judge adulterous do it in the name of Islam, (in the name of Islamic law specifically), and that they have Muslim names. Incidentally, this is a good point to correct myself; I should have said, “ in the last one hundred years.” Going back to what I asserted above, the main corrective to selection bias is criticism. In this case, I expect Brandon – and anyone else who is so moved – to point out to me the group or groups unassociated with Islam in any way who affirm that public stoning to death is an appropriate way to deal with adulterous women.

I will be waiting.

It seems to me that there are three major vices that regularly interfere with intelligent people’s exercise of reason. One is political correctness. The second is the desire to simplify at all costs issues that are inherently complex. The other it a perverse wish to insist that things cannot be as simple as they seem on the surface, that observable reality only masks a deeper, more correct interpretation of real reality.

My qualifications toward discussing these issues are in my vita, linked to this blog.

The Iraq War: What It Gave Me (bis, smaller font)

In a debate taking place in a “Comment” of February 2nd 2013 “Liberal Scum’s Response to ‘Telling the Truth and Tarentino..’.” a faithful and consistent liberal critic of this blog challenged me to explain how I, as an American, had benefited from the Iraq war. I am glad to take up Prof. Terry’s challenge. The job is a little more complicated than that of my opposition who are often content to say, “I hate war.” (So do I!) The challenge is found on a comment posted Feb.12 and following.

I believe there are old, un-original general principles the application of which optimizes the probability of a peaceful world. Here are big illustrated excerpts of those beliefs. If you perceive that they remind you of stuff you learned in kindergarten, you are right.

If you attack those who are weaker than you, if you rob them, if you murder them, there is a good chance that the civilized nations of this earth will attack you. If you are lucky, it will be little Finland or little Denmark that will try to teach you a lesson. If you are bad enough, and if the US is in the grip of denial at the time, it will be the United Kingdom and France, or even France alone. If you are unlucky, America’s mighty, large, well-equipped armed forces will make you stop. If you piss off enough of us in a public enough fashion, the US and any number of its friends will go after you together and you will suffer a great deal.

If you attack America’s friends, it’s not completely sure we will go after you but you should worry a lot about it. If we do, you will never be the same again. Our response is likely to be disproportionate.

The Iraq War that exercises Prof. Terry so much is a direct result of the (first) Gulf War of 1990-1991. Here are the connections in their great lines:

After a bloody war of attrition, against his big neighbor Iran that he was unable to win, Saddam Hussein, the bloody dictator of Iraq for 24 years figured he could swallow its small rich neighbor Kuwait in one gulp. He did. There were good reasons to believe that he had plans also to take also Saudi Arabia, or at least, a good chunk of its many northern oil fields.

Now, don’t veil your face, there is a large amount of petroleum in the ground of Saudi Arabia. We, but mostly our suppliers and our customers, need it. We and they pay for it, we and they even pay a lot. We and they enter into long term arrangement to ensure that we and they will be able to buy the petroleum tomorrow and in ten years. So far (regrettably) it’s essential to our civilization.

If you were an irrigated agriculture farmer and your livelihood depended on water that someone else sold you and if he cut off the water or even, if he threatened to cut if off, that would be a good reason to hurt the supplier. Killing him wouldn’t even be out of the moral question if he wouldn’t listen. If someone else threatened to interfere with the flow water, the same principle would apply. There are few moral systems that require one to allow oneself to be strangled without resistance. Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in particular do not require such submissiveness. Petroleum has about the same importance for modern economies as water has for irrigated farms. (Let me say that I am not pronouncing on the advisability of having put ourselves, collectively, the developed countries, in that situation. The fact is that we were and we are.)

Saddam Hussein did not just threaten in that case, he demonstrated what he could do to Saudi Arabia with what he did to Kuwait.

Note that, at this point, I have said nothing in favor of the religious fascist Iranian republic, in favor of the kind of crudely democratic Kuwaiti monarchy, or in favor of the miserable obscurantist, backward throwback that is Saudi Arabia. When ordinary people string back the current elites in the first and last country, I too will celebrate.

Long story short, in 1990 and 1991, the US, with the help of forty or so allied nations, destroyed in a short time the hold of Saddam Hussein on Kuwait. We sent his armies fleeing through the desert. We all felt bad because we saw that our armies killed tens of thousands of poor Iraqi draftees in the process. Largely because of that, but also perhaps because of a misplaced concern for “international law” we did not finish the job. Big mistake! Anybody who reads knows that you don’t let a wounded hyena slink away.

When we allowed Saddam to escape, we did it in conformity with modern customs of war. There were formal cease-fire talks where we told his representatives, “If you do X,Y and Z, we will stopped killing you.” He promised and we stopped killing his innocent soldiers, and also his less than innocent soldiers. That was in February 1991.

In the following twelve years the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein violated a large numbers of the conditions to which it had agreed in order that we should stop killing them. Not owning or developing weapons of mass destruction was only one of the many conditions. In a public relations disaster, the second Pres. Bush decided to sell the resumption of the war against Hussein’s Iraq on the basis of one particular violation that does not seem to have taken place on a serious scale: That’s the weapons of mass destruction issue. ( I have written at length about this matter on this blog. I don’t want to do it again. To put it briefly: There were not any or not significant quantities. No one lied except Saddam Hussein himself.)

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was simply a result of the Hussein government not respecting its promises from February 1991. The fact that there were many -such a myself- who were glad for a chance to correct the mistake of Feb. 1991 of not getting rid of Saddam, the fact that many wished his demise because of the mass atrocities he committed after the end of that war, these do not change this basic fact:

If you do X,Y and Z, we will stop killing you. If you resume doing X, or Y, or Z, we will start killing you again. Hussein dis not resume doing X but he resumed doing Y; we went after him. It’s as sound basis for the conduct of international relations. I believe any other policy is dangerous, that it invites attack from the unpunished themselves and from hostile spectators.

Many people are confused about this simple matter because, after Saddam disappeared, the US became involved in military occupation and in nation-building in Iraq. And it did not do it very well. Both could have been avoided. I think it was Secretary of Defense Colin Powell who emitted the poisonous doctrine: “If you break it, you own it.” I think our political elite had in mind the brilliant reconstruction under occupation of Japan after WWII. I think the elite was not paying attention. It’s an American problem: a high concentration of ADD. In the event, the long occupation was broadly perceived as a disaster.

The rancor of liberals in these pages and elsewhere comes much more from the clumsy occupation than from the three weeks campaign that preceded it, I think. Also from the tendency to blame the US for what Iraqis did to one another because we were there and stupidly pretended we were policing that multiple rings circus of hatreds. In fact, we could have broken the Saddam Hussein’s regime, we could have executed or taken to Guantanamo one hundred high officials and then, we could have made an agreement with Saudi Arabia to hold 100,000 of the Baathist cadres for ten years. And then, we could just have walked away.

Would it have been preferable to walk away with the possibility that Iran might gobble up a weakened Iraq? I don’t know. It’s possible to answer yes to that question. It would also have been possible to stand military guard around Iraq without meddling at all in the country’s internal politics.

Prof. Terry -who speaks for many other liberals who don’t dare speak to me – challenges me to explain what benefits I received for the costs in treasure and, more poignantly in lives for the Iraq war. I am glad to oblige. First, I want to put American costs in perspective using the numbers Prof. Terry himself provided to simplify matters. (This choice does not imply that I accept the numbers.) I begin with the easiest task, the economic cost of the war.

Prof. Terry cites leftist economist Joseph Stiglitz to the effect that the “indirect” costs of the Iraq war for the US was three trillion dollars and up (I assume this also includes direct costs).

My own share of that war would be that amount divided by 300 million Americans. That’s about $10,000. That amount spread equally between the eight years of war amounts to $1,250 annually on my personal war bill. Let’s put things in perspective: While, this is not insignificant money, it’s less than I spent on cigarettes during the same period. I would guess that in current dollars, that would be also considerably less than Prof. Terry spent on beer during his young years. My family could have saved that amount by driving a smaller car. The harbor fees for the small sailboat I owned during the whole period where higher.

Now, if the money had been thrown down the sewer, it would really annoy me but, it ‘s not what happened. Rather, of the total amount in taxes I was forced to pay during that period, the fraction going to the Iraq war was one of the easiest to accept. For one thing, it was constitutional. For another thing, I feel I got my money’s worth . That’s unlike, for example, the fraction of my confiscated money “invested” in education by a federal government who has constitutionally no business there at all. That’s unlike the vastly larger amounts going to support modestly qualified but unfireable federal civil servants. That’s unlike again, my share of (of the admittedly tiny) federal industrial investment in Solyndra. And common decency prevents me from mentioning at all tax-supported “light rail” projects, of course.

In general, I feel about federal spending the way I feel about my city’s spending: If you gave me a red pencil and a razor blade, I would quickly make big cuts. Few would notice the cuts except lazy bums in and out of government. Then, I would cut good services performed according to irrational standards: The fact that I have never waited longer in line than twenty seconds in my city library tells me that it’s overstaffed (aside from the fact that it should be a private venture or a coop.) Police and fire services would be examined, reformed and redirected but they would be low on my list of cuts. (Yes, I spend time fantasizing about cutting.) Military action would be last on my list of federal cuts because I respect the constitution.

Now, when liberals like Prof. Terry defy you to justify the death of Americans in a war, there is always implicit blackmail involved. That’s true even if they don’t do it consciously. Of course, how can you justify the death of a single American in the course of the pursuit of a threat that turns out not to have existed (or, existed only on a small scale)? There are two main ways to prevent liberals from trying to censor you in the connection of American deaths. The first, is to unmask them as closet pacifists, which many are. This stops the conversation, as far as I am concerned. Pacifism as a political philosophy lost all its credibility between 1939 and 1941.

The second way to stave off their attempt at terminal censorship is to highlight their implicit hypocrisy (which sometimes masquerades as gross forgetfulness). Since I don’t think that Prof. Terry is a pacifist, I will take the second path. I want to be precise. Unlike my adversaries, I don’t wish to hide behind a cloud of smoke. This will require a little attention, I am afraid.

Average annual deaths of American military in Iraq, combat plus non-combat deaths: 4487/8= 560

Mean annual deaths on American roads and highways for approximately the same period= 35,500 (Figures from National Highway Safety Traffic Administration on-line.)

The number of American deaths in Iraq to highway deaths is thus like: 5.6/355.0

The unthinking will exclaim that this is comparison is ridiculous because car accident deaths are “inevitable’ (unavoidable) while all the American deaths in Iraq were avoidable. But only the second part of the proposition is correct. In fact, those who study these things commonly state that half of car accident deaths involve alcohol. I believe that every one of those deaths is avoidable. They are easily avoidable because they depend entirely on Americans’ political will. (Ask me.) For the sake of appearing moderate, lets’ assume that half of traffic fatalities where alcohol is involved are avoidable, for an annual figure of about 8,900.

For the period of the Iraq war, avoidable American deaths due to traffic accidents were thus at least fifteen times more numerous that avoidable American deaths due to American military involvement.

Yet, did you ever hear any liberals critics of the Iraq war say anything about avoidable traffic deaths. Do you think Prof. Terry -who has volunteered for the dangerous mission of representing them- has ever done anything about that very large American problem, that he has ever done anything about preventing thousands of American deaths? ( I mean besides desisting driving under the influence, as I did myself.)

This being said, there is no doubt that being an American soldier or Marine in Iraq was quite dangerous. I believe it was something like three times more perilous to life than being a logger, for example, the most dangerous occupation in America. (My rough computation assumes that there were 200,000 American service personnel in Iraq annually on the average. Unfortunately I am unable to find the source for this figure that sticks to my mind. I will correct this estimate immediately if shown that it is wrong. If the number of military present in Iraq on the average is lower than 200,000, then the fatalities rate will be accordingly higher. This may be enough to disqualify the order of magnitude I present here.)

The most dangerous occupation in America in 2005 was logging with 92 deaths per 100,000 workers, according to “America’s most dangerous jobs “ CNN MONEY for 2006. (The numbers do not change enough year to year to affect the orders of magnitude I am presenting here.)

I would guess – and this is a guess – that the death rate of American military personnel in Iraq may have approximated the death rate of Chines miners, for example.

In absolute terms, the number of American military deaths in Iraq was small. Compare with 600, 000 for the American War Between the States and 38,500 for the Korean War (both fought in defense of a principle, I think.) World War Two, which was declared on the US after we were attacked by Japan, cost 405,000 American lives over a shorter period than the war in Iraq.

Liberals critics of the Iraq invasion, liberation, occupation, and re-establishment as a roughly representative state demonstrate strange moral preferences. They would have us believe that the utterly meaningless deaths of children in traffic accidents, for example, are more deplorable than the death in battle of young adults who have clearly volunteered for the risk and who usually think they do it for a worthwhile cause. Do I also detect a bit of ethnocentrism in their preferences? The deaths of 6,000 American professional soldiers appall them but the deaths of ten times that number of Syrian civilians in a much shorter time leaves them cold.

In addition, older liberals, such as Prof. Terry, often stubbornly if implicitly insist that Iraq is pretty much the continuation of the Vietnam war with its hundreds of thousands of hapless draftees. That is part of a simplistic narrative of American “imperialism.”

Incidentally, libertarians who are in the wake of Congressman Paul display the same kind of stubbornness. I think that’s because most old libertarians are incompletely reconstructed leftists with a vestigial predisposition to judge America wrong at every turn. Also, old libertarians of the Ron Paul generation miss their glory days and the corresponding testosterone charge. (I am a thoroughly re-constructed leftist myself, if you need to know. And the testosterone charge brought me nothing but trouble in its time!)

So, now, I answer Prof. Terry’s lib question. The war in Iraq and even to some extent, the occupation and reconstruction of that country have given me the following benefits:

First, a general principle has been safeguarded well enough to make future aggressors think again. Note that retribution does not need to come down on the perpetrators 100% of the time for the contemplators to edge their bets. In political time, there is usually an internal war party and a peace party. (These even existed in imperialist Japan and in National Socialist Germany.) A high likelihood of retribution will strengthen the hand of every peace party for a long time to come.

I think that if the Japanese extreme right had had any idea of the ruination awaiting their country after only three years, they would not have attempted Pearl Harbor. It was a bet placed on American weakness. Similarly, if Hitler had guessed right about the indomitable will of the British people, he would probably have avoided the invasion of Poland. Contrariwise, German generals were heard to say after the war that if they had known of the weakness of the French army in 1939, they would have attacked earlier.

Secondly, the Islamist terrorists, the violent jihadists who have targeted us as Americans had a chance to observed that Americans are not soft. This is important because fanatics always think that a desire to die for a cause is an indispensable ingredient of victory.

Thousands of Islamist terrorists actual and potential, had a chance to observe that Americans don’t especially want to die but that it does not prevent them from doing an excellent job of soldiering. Terrorists were stopped for a while from confusing unwillingness to commit suicide with softness. (You saw how far that belief took the Irish Republican Army, right, by the way?) Yet, it appears that the lesson has to be relearned every so often. In any case, people who think 72 virgins are awaiting them in Paradise probably don’t have high IQs, on the average; they need frequent relearning. (Incidentally, it’s really one seventy-two year old virgin.)

Note that I do not claim that the Iraq war rolled back Islamic terrorism in general. It’s possible that it stimulated it. (Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if the West’s war on terrorism lasted a hundred years. Fevered dreams of domination fed by religious fervor are hard to kill. The Crusades lasted longer.) However, quickly after the invasion of Iraq, the Islamist terrorists directed their attentions elsewhere. The 9/11 attack against the US was imaginative, well-designed and superbly executed. It was not even expensive. It was a masterpiece of terrorism. There has been nothing of this quality directed against the US since. Every attempt we know of seems amateurish, or even childish. (Think of the panty bomber.) Coincidence or timidity? I can’t decide for you but it does no seem reasonable to rule out the latter.

Incidentally, the fact that violent jihadists’ most numerous targets are not Americans is interesting but it’s another topic altogether. It just serves as a reminder that their hostility against the US in no way depends on American actions (or on Israeli actions!) That’s one of the reasons I think it will last a bit. I know that some try but you have to twist your shorts into an unseemly mess to argue that violent Sunni jihadists murder Shiite Muslims during religious services in Northern Pakistan because of American policies or because of Israeli actions.

Thirdly, the war in Iraq was good training for all branches of our military. We often forget it but war is the best training for war. Yes, it was expensive in treasure and especially in lives, but military personnel die during all training and it’s not cheap in general. The fact that the Iraq war was unusually costly training does not make it useless. Thanks in part to that war (in another part thanks, to the war in Afghanistan), the Unites States now probably has the most experienced officer corps in the world. This is itself a factor of safety for our troops in a future war.

Fourthly I believe that the timing of the beginning of the Arab Spring was not a coincidence. It seems ridiculous to argue that the now well-informed Arabs did not react to the spectacle of Iraqis brandishing a violet inked finger in the street exultingly in one of the very few real elections in the Arab world. Some Arabs, at least, must have said to themselves and to one another, “If these moron Iraqis can vote after 24 years of absolute tyranny, why not me?” And then, you will have to deal with the fact that Arabs did next to nothing for the fifty years preceding 2005 to defend their freedom and then, they suddenly woke up for no reason although at a time that coincides well with events in Iraq. OK, there are coincidences, but what do you really think?

Now, if you believe that that scenario is out of the question, if you believe that there is no way the establishment of representative institutions in Iraq under American auspices influenced the coming of the Arab Spring please, try to say it here clearly. And if you think the Arab Spring is actually a disaster, say that and don’t get it confused with the first proposition. Please! Myself, I think both that Iraq influenced the coming out of the Arab Spring and that it’s a good thing, on balance. I have written about the last topic elsewhere, I don’t want to repeat myself to much here.

In brief: I cannot bring myself to the cynicism required to wish endless despotism on others to protect my own tranquility. I don’t rightly know whether the secular, rational forces will gain the upper hand. I don’t know if Islamic moderates will eventually prevail democratically and rule like the current “Islamic” party in Turkey. Some signs are encouraging: Last week an Arab prime minster resigned of his own accord (in Tunisia). That’s new. In any case, I think Arabs were right to rise against stifling despotism. I wish them well, including the Communists among them. And, incidentally, none of the Arab countries involved is doing worse than did the French at the same stage. In the final analysis, the US and world peace stand to benefit eventually: The more democratic countries there are the safer Americans are. That is true although it’s also true that Iraq is not yet Switzerland.

Speaking of cynicism: My appreciation of the American war of choice in Iraq would be different if I though it had made the suffering of Iraqis worse. I think it has not. Based on Saddam Hussein’s record, I believe the American military intervention saved many more lives than it caused to be lost.

The hunger concentration camp that is North Korea, religious fascist Iran, nuclear and terminally unstable, miserable Pakistan, the Russian gangster regime, and the so-called “People’s,” so-called “Republic” of China watched the American Iraqi expedition with interest. I am glad that they were able to see the US military dispose of one of the largest armies in the world in two weeks flat plus a sand storm, and at the cost of fewer than one hundred American lives.

I realize that Russia poses no threat to the US right now. It will if and when the flow of petro-rubles dries up. China ‘s future behavior is predictable. Its whole history suggests that it will continue translating its astonishing economic success into geopolitical power. And then, one day, it will miscalculate. Or there will be a Communist mafia succession crisis best alleviated through a foreign adventure. Or, the Chinese economic elite will run scared of running out of raw materials such as petroleum and it will convince the People’s Liberation Army to start a fight.

(Technical note: I think the term “mafia” is technically correct to describe the Chinese regime simply because the governing Chinese Communist Party has lost the legitimacy it derived from its revolutionary task. China is the most successful mafia state in history. It has managed to trick and bribe millions, making the Jersey mob blush with embarrassment!)

As far as the future bellicose actions North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan are concerned, your guess is as good as mine but would you be willing to bet something substantial that we will not be forced to fight because of what happens in connection with those rabid dogs?

Weakness, real or merely perceived, invites attack or, at least, military adventurism. Occasional tangible demonstrations of strength fortify the forces of peace. The successful American military expedition of the fall 2003 in Iraq acted as a brake on the ambitions current and future of fanatical, gangsterish and totalitarian world actors. It gave them food for thought. In one well-publicized case, a grotesque and bloody dictator even volunteered to surrender his weapons of mass destruction (real ones) shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Either, he suddenly saw the light of peacefulness, by coincidence, or the effectiveness of American military action scared the s… out of him. What do you think? And, I don’t think that the unconvincing performance of the US as a military occupier that followed undermined significantly the impression the swift and merciless invasion itself created.

Finally, I stayed carefully away from a topic that was not part of the question: There are sometimes humanitarian reasons in favor of military intervention. When the US does not move, often (not always) you get a Rwanda. You get Syria today with 70,000 dead for no particular reason for the outcome is all but certain. When the US stays on the sideline but on the wrong sideline, you get the massive Khmer Rouge massacre (that was in Cambodia between 1970 and 1975). The US supported the genocidal regime in the UN then out of spite at the Vietnamese Communists who opposed it. About two million died or were killed in an astounding act of self-genocide. I think there were good humanitarian reasons to intervene to protect Iraqis but I don’t need to call on this belief to justify the war.

In conclusion: War is not the solution, of course, except to slavery, Japanese aggression, fascism, Nazism, and in its most poetic form ever, ( the threat of “stars war”) to the armed colossus, communism itself.

Every good thing that has happened in my lifetime (possibly including life itself) happened under the umbrella of the pax americana. Any liberty-bearing development in the near future will take place under the pax americana. Right now, the alternative is Somalia. Of course, there lies a paradox, a major contradiction. War is the single main contributor to the extension of government over civil society. Yet, in the world such as it is, lovers of freedom sometimes have to support war to preserve the conditions leading to greater autonomy for individuals.

Right now, I don’t see any other candidate willing and able to supply a substitute pax. Sometimes, I wish someone would persuade Finland or Denmark to step in but it’s not happening. At other times, I wish I could observe liberals and pacifists shame blood-thirsty beasts like Saddam Hussein or Moamar Quadafi into mending their ways. Vigorous finger-waving might do it. Or maybe talk therapy, or acupuncture, or green tea. Who knows?

The Iraq War: What It Gave Me

In a debate taking place in a “Comment” of February 2nd 2013 “Liberal Scum’s Response to ‘Telling the Truth and Tarentino..’.”

a faithful and consistent liberal critic of this blog challenged me to explain how I, as an American, had benefited from the Iraq war. I am glad to take up Prof. Terry’s challenge. The job is a little more complicated than that of my opposition who are often content to say, “I hate war.” (So do I!) The challenge is found on a comment posted Feb.12 and following.

I believe there are old, un-original general principles the application of which optimizes the probability of a peaceful world. Here are big illustrated excerpts of those beliefs. If you perceive that they remind you of stuff you learned in kindergarten, you are right.

If you attack those who are weaker than you, if you rob them, if you murder them, there is a good chance that the civilized nations of this earth will attack you. If you are lucky, it will be little Finland or little Denmark that will try to teach you a lesson. If you are bad enough, and if the US is in the grip of denial at the time, it will be the United Kingdom and France, or even France alone. If you are unlucky, America’s mighty, large, well-equipped armed forces will make you stop. If you piss off enough of us in a public enough fashion, the US and any number of its friends will go after you together and you will suffer a great deal.

If you attack America’s friends, it’s not completely sure we will go after you but you should worry a lot about it. If we do, you will never be the same again. Our response is likely to be disproportionate.

The Iraq War that exercises Prof. Terry so much is a direct result of the (first) Gulf War of 1990-1991. Here are the connections in their great lines:

After a bloody war of attrition, against his big neighbor Iran that he was unable to win, Saddam Hussein, the bloody dictator of Iraq for 24 years figured he could swallow its small rich neighbor Kuwait in one gulp. He did. There were good reasons to believe that he had plans also to take also Saudi Arabia, or at least, a good chunk of its many northern oil fields.

Now, don’t veil your face, there is a large amount of petroleum in the ground of Saudi Arabia. We, but mostly our suppliers and our customers, need it. We and they pay for it, we and they even pay a lot. We and they enter into long term arrangement to ensure that we and they will be able to buy the petroleum tomorrow and in ten years. So far (regrettably) it’s essential to our civilization.

If you were an irrigated agriculture farmer and your livelihood depended on water that someone else sold you and if he cut off the water or even, if he threatened to cut if off, that would be a good reason to hurt the supplier. Killing him wouldn’t even be out of the moral question if he wouldn’t listen. If someone else threatened to interfere with the flow water, the same principle would apply. There are few moral systems that require one to allow oneself to be strangled without resistance. Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in particular do not require such submissiveness. Petroleum has about the same importance for modern economies as water has for irrigated farms. (Let me say that I am not pronouncing on the advisability of having put ourselves, collectively, the developed countries, in that situation. The fact is that we were and we are.)

Saddam Hussein did not just threaten in that case, he demonstrated what he could do to Saudi Arabia with what he did to Kuwait.

Note that, at this point, I have said nothing in favor of the religious fascist Iranian republic, in favor of the kind of crudely democratic Kuwaiti monarchy, or in favor of the miserable obscurantist, backward throwback that is Saudi Arabia. When ordinary people string back the current elites in the first and last country, I too will celebrate.

Long story short, in 1990 and 1991, the US, with the help of forty or so allied nations, destroyed in a short time the hold of Saddam Hussein on Kuwait. We sent his armies fleeing through the desert. We all felt bad because we saw that our armies killed tens of thousands of poor Iraqi draftees in the process. Largely because of that, but also perhaps because of a misplaced concern for “international law” we did not finish the job. Big mistake! Anybody who reads knows that you don’t let a wounded hyena slink away.

When we allowed Saddam to escape, we did it in conformity with modern customs of war. There were formal cease-fire talks where we told his representatives, “If you do X,Y and Z, we will stopped killing you.” He promised and we stopped killing his innocent soldiers, and also his less than innocent soldiers. That was in February 1991.

In the following twelve years the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein violated a large numbers of the conditions to which it had agreed in order that we should stop killing them. Not owning or developing weapons of mass destruction was only one of the many conditions. In a public relations disaster, the second Pres. Bush decided to sell the resumption of the war against Hussein’s Iraq on the basis of one particular violation that does not seem to have taken place on a serious scale: That’s the weapons of mass destruction issue. ( I have written at length about this matter on this blog. I don’t want to do it again. To put it briefly: There were not any or not significant quantities. No one lied except Saddam Hussein himself.)

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was simply a result of the Hussein government not respecting its promises from February 1991. The fact that there were many -such a myself- who were glad for a chance to correct the mistake of Feb. 1991 of not getting rid of Saddam, the fact that many wished his demise because of the mass atrocities he committed after the end of that war, these do not change this basic fact:

If you do X,Y and Z, we will stop killing you. If you resume doing X, or Y, or Z, we will start killing you again. Hussein dis not resume doing X but he resumed doing Y; we went after him. It’s as sound basis for the conduct of international relations. I believe any other policy is dangerous, that it invites attack from the unpunished themselves and from hostile spectators.

Many people are confused about this simple matter because, after Saddam disappeared, the US became involved in military occupation and in nation-building in Iraq. And it did not do it very well. Both could have been avoided. I think it was Secretary of Defense Colin Powell who emitted the poisonous doctrine: “If you break it, you own it.” I think our political elite had in mind the brilliant reconstruction under occupation of Japan after WWII. I think the elite was not paying attention. It’s an American problem: a high concentration of ADD. In the event, the long occupation was broadly perceived as a disaster.

The rancor of liberals in these pages and elsewhere comes much more from the clumsy occupation than from the three weeks campaign that preceded it, I think. Also from the tendency to blame the US for what Iraqis did to one another because we were there and stupidly pretended we were policing that multiple rings circus of hatreds. In fact, we could have broken the Saddam Hussein’s regime, we could have executed or taken to Guantanamo one hundred high officials and then, we could have made an agreement with Saudi Arabia to hold 100,000 of the Baathist cadres for ten years. And then, we could just have walked away.

Would it have been preferable to walk away with the possibility that Iran might gobble up a weakened Iraq? I don’t know. It’s possible to answer yes to that question. It would also have been possible to stand military guard around Iraq without meddling at all in the country’s internal politics.

Prof. Terry -who speaks for many other liberals who don’t dare speak to me – challenges me to explain what benefits I received for the costs in treasure and, more poignantly in lives for the Iraq war. I am glad to oblige. First, I want to put American costs in perspective using the numbers Prof. Terry himself provided to simplify matters. (This choice does not imply that I accept the numbers.) I begin with the easiest task, the economic cost of the war.

Prof. Terry cites leftist economist Joseph Stiglitz to the effect that the “indirect” costs of the Iraq war for the US was three trillion dollars and up (I assume this also includes direct costs).

My own share of that war would be that amount divided by 300 million Americans. That’s about $10,000. That amount spread equally between the eight years of war amounts to $1,250 annually on my personal war bill. Let’s put things in perspective: While, this is not insignificant money, it’s less than I spent on cigarettes during the same period. I would guess that in current dollars, that would be also considerably less than Prof. Terry spent on beer during his young years. My family could have saved that amount by driving a smaller car. The harbor fees for the small sailboat I owned during the whole period where higher.

Now, if the money had been thrown down the sewer, it would really annoy me but, it ‘s not what happened. Rather, of the total amount in taxes I was forced to pay during that period, the fraction going to the Iraq war was one of the easiest to accept. For one thing, it was constitutional. For another thing, I feel I got my money’s worth . That’s unlike, for example, the fraction of my confiscated money “invested” in education by a federal government who has constitutionally no business there at all. That’s unlike the vastly larger amounts going to support modestly qualified but unfireable federal civil servants. That’s unlike again, my share of (of the admittedly tiny) federal industrial investment in Solyndra. And common decency prevents me from mentioning at all tax-supported “light rail” projects, of course.

In general, I feel about federal spending the way I feel about my city’s spending: If you gave me a red pencil and a razor blade, I would quickly make big cuts. Few would notice the cuts except lazy bums in and out of government. Then, I would cut good services performed according to irrational standards: The fact that I have never waited longer in line than twenty seconds in my city library tells me that it’s overstaffed (aside from the fact that it should be a private venture or a coop.) Police and fire services would be examined, reformed and redirected but they would be low on my list of cuts. (Yes, I spend time fantasizing about cutting.) Military action would be last on my list of federal cuts because I respect the constitution.

Now, when liberals like Prof. Terry defy you to justify the death of Americans in a war, there is always implicit blackmail involved. That’s true even if they don’t do it consciously. Of course, how can you justify the death of a single American in the course of the pursuit of a threat that turns out not to have existed (or, existed only on a small scale)? There are two main ways to prevent liberals from trying to censor you in the connection of American deaths. The first, is to unmask them as closet pacifists, which many are. This stops the conversation, as far as I am concerned. Pacifism as a political philosophy lost all its credibility between 1939 and 1941.

The second way to stave off their attempt at terminal censorship is to highlight their implicit hypocrisy (which sometimes masquerades as gross forgetfulness). Since I don’t think that Prof. Terry is a pacifist, I will take the second path. I want to be precise. Unlike my adversaries, I don’t wish to hide behind a cloud of smoke. This will require a little attention, I am afraid.

Average annual deaths of American military in Iraq, combat plus non-combat deaths: 4487/8= 560

Mean annual deaths on American roads and highways for approximately the same period= 35,500 (Figures from National Highway Safety Traffic Administration on-line.)

The number of American deaths in Iraq to highway deaths is thus like: 5.6/355.0

The unthinking will exclaim that this is comparison is ridiculous because car accident deaths are “inevitable’ (unavoidable) while all the American deaths in Iraq were avoidable. But only the second part of the proposition is correct. In fact, those who study these things commonly state that half of car accident deaths involve alcohol. I believe that every one of those deaths is avoidable. They are easily avoidable because they depend entirely on Americans’ political will. (Ask me.) For the sake of appearing moderate, lets’ assume that half of traffic fatalities where alcohol is involved are avoidable, for an annual figure of about 8,900.

For the period of the Iraq war, avoidable American deaths due to traffic accidents were thus at least fifteen times more numerous that avoidable American deaths due to American military involvement.

Yet, did you ever hear any liberals critics of the Iraq war say anything about avoidable traffic deaths. Do you think Prof. Terry -who has volunteered for the dangerous mission of representing them- has ever done anything about that very large American problem, that he has ever done anything about preventing thousands of American deaths? ( I mean besides desisting driving under the influence, as I did myself.)

This being said, there is no doubt that being an American soldier or Marine in Iraq was quite dangerous. I believe it was something like three times more perilous to life than being a logger, for example, the most dangerous occupation in America. (My rough computation assumes that there were 200,000 American service personnel in Iraq annually on the average. Unfortunately I am unable to find the source for this figure that sticks to my mind. I will correct this estimate immediately if shown that it is wrong. If the number of military present in Iraq on the average is lower than 200,000, then the fatalities rate will be accordingly higher. This may be enough to disqualify the order of magnitude I present here.)

The most dangerous occupation in America in 2005 was logging with 92 deaths per 100,000 workers, according to “America’s most dangerous jobs “ CNN MONEY for 2006. (The numbers do not change enough year to year to affect the orders of magnitude I am presenting here.)

I would guess – and this is a guess – that the death rate of American military personnel in Iraq may have approximated the death rate of Chines miners, for example.

In absolute terms, the number of American military deaths in Iraq was small. Compare with 600, 000 for the American War Between the States and 38,500 for the Korean War (both fought in defense of a principle, I think.) World War Two, which was declared on the US after we were attacked by Japan, cost 405,000 American lives over a shorter period than the war in Iraq.

Liberals critics of the Iraq invasion, liberation, occupation, and re-establishment as a roughly representative state demonstrate strange moral preferences. They would have us believe that the utterly meaningless deaths of children in traffic accidents, for example, are more deplorable than the death in battle of young adults who have clearly volunteered for the risk and who usually think they do it for a worthwhile cause. Do I also detect a bit of ethnocentrism in their preferences? The deaths of 6,000 American professional soldiers appall them but the deaths of ten times that number of Syrian civilians in a much shorter time leaves them cold.

In addition, older liberals, such as Prof. Terry, often stubbornly if implicitly insist that Iraq is pretty much the continuation of the Vietnam war with its hundreds of thousands of hapless draftees. That is part of a simplistic narrative of American “imperialism.”

Incidentally, libertarians who are in the wake of Congressman Paul display the same kind of stubbornness. I think that’s because most old libertarians are incompletely reconstructed leftists with a vestigial predisposition to judge America wrong at every turn. Also, old libertarians of the Ron Paul generation miss their glory days and the corresponding testosterone charge. (I am a thoroughly re-constructed leftist myself, if you need to know. And the testosterone charge brought me nothing but trouble in its time!)

So, now, I answer Prof. Terry’s lib question. The war in Iraq and even to some extent, the occupation and reconstruction of that country have given me the following benefits:

First, a general principle has been safeguarded well enough to make future aggressors think again. Note that retribution does not need to come down on the perpetrators 100% of the time for the contemplators to edge their bets. In political time, there is usually an internal war party and a peace party. (These even existed in imperialist Japan and in National Socialist Germany.) A high likelihood of retribution will strengthen the hand of every peace party for a long time to come.

I think that if the Japanese extreme right had had any idea of the ruination awaiting their country after only three years, they would not have attempted Pearl Harbor. It was a bet placed on American weakness. Similarly, if Hitler had guessed right about the indomitable will of the British people, he would probably have avoided the invasion of Poland. Contrariwise, German generals were heard to say after the war that if they had known of the weakness of the French army in 1939, they would have attacked earlier.

Secondly, the Islamist terrorists, the violent jihadists who have targeted us as Americans had a chance to observed that Americans are not soft. This is important because fanatics always think that a desire to die for a cause is an indispensable ingredient of victory.

Thousands of Islamist terrorists actual and potential, had a chance to observe that Americans don’t especially want to die but that it does not prevent them from doing an excellent job of soldiering. Terrorists were stopped for a while from confusing unwillingness to commit suicide with softness. (You saw how far that belief took the Irish Republican Army, right, by the way?) Yet, it appears that the lesson has to be relearned every so often. In any case, people who think 72 virgins are awaiting them in Paradise probably don’t have high IQs, on the average; they need frequent relearning. (Incidentally, it’s really one seventy-two year old virgin.)

Note that I do not claim that the Iraq war rolled back Islamic terrorism in general. It’s possible that it stimulated it. (Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if the West’s war on terrorism lasted a hundred years. Fevered dreams of domination fed by religious fervor are hard to kill. The Crusades lasted longer.) However, quickly after the invasion of Iraq, the Islamist terrorists directed their attentions elsewhere. The 9/11 attack against the US was imaginative, well-designed and superbly executed. It was not even expensive. It was a masterpiece of terrorism. There has been nothing of this quality directed against the US since. Every attempt we know of seems amateurish, or even childish. (Think of the panty bomber.) Coincidence or timidity? I can’t decide for you but it does no seem reasonable to rule out the latter.

Incidentally, the fact that violent jihadists’ most numerous targets are not Americans is interesting but it’s another topic altogether. It just serves as a reminder that their hostility against the US in no way depends on American actions (or on Israeli actions!) That’s one of the reasons I think it will last a bit. I know that some try but you have to twist your shorts into an unseemly mess to argue that violent Sunni jihadists murder Shiite Muslims during religious services in Northern Pakistan because of American policies or because of Israeli actions.

Thirdly, the war in Iraq was good training for all branches of our military. We often forget it but war is the best training for war. Yes, it was expensive in treasure and especially in lives, but military personnel die during all training and it’s not cheap in general. The fact that the Iraq war was unusually costly training does not make it useless. Thanks in part to that war (in another part thanks, to the war in Afghanistan), the Unites States now probably has the most experienced officer corps in the world. This is itself a factor of safety for our troops in a future war.

Fourthly I believe that the timing of the beginning of the Arab Spring was not a coincidence. It seems ridiculous to argue that the now well-informed Arabs did not react to the spectacle of Iraqis brandishing a violet inked finger in the street exultingly in one of the very few real elections in the Arab world. Some Arabs, at least, must have said to themselves and to one another, “If these moron Iraqis can vote after 24 years of absolute tyranny, why not me?” And then, you will have to deal with the fact that Arabs did next to nothing for the fifty years preceding 2005 to defend their freedom and then, they suddenly woke up for no reason although at a time that coincides well with events in Iraq. OK, there are coincidences, but what do you really think?

Now, if you believe that that scenario is out of the question, if you believe that there is no way the establishment of representative institutions in Iraq under American auspices influenced the coming of the Arab Spring please, try to say it here clearly. And if you think the Arab Spring is actually a disaster, say that and don’t get it confused with the first proposition. Please! Myself, I think both that Iraq influenced the coming out of the Arab Spring and that it’s a good thing, on balance. I have written about the last topic elsewhere, I don’t want to repeat myself to much here.

In brief: I cannot bring myself to the cynicism required to wish endless despotism on others to protect my own tranquility. I don’t rightly know whether the secular, rational forces will gain the upper hand. I don’t know if Islamic moderates will eventually prevail democratically and rule like the current “Islamic” party in Turkey. Some signs are encouraging: Last week an Arab prime minster resigned of his own accord (in Tunisia). That’s new. In any case, I think Arabs were right to rise against stifling despotism. I wish them well, including the Communists among them. And, incidentally, none of the Arab countries involved is doing worse than did the French at the same stage. In the final analysis, the US and world peace stand to benefit eventually: The more democratic countries there are the safer Americans are. That is true although it’s also true that Iraq is not yet Switzerland.

Speaking of cynicism: My appreciation of the American war of choice in Iraq would be different if I though it had made the suffering of Iraqis worse. I think it has not. Based on Saddam Hussein’s record, I believe the American military intervention saved many more lives than it caused to be lost.

The hunger concentration camp that is North Korea, religious fascist Iran, nuclear and terminally unstable, miserable Pakistan, the Russian gangster regime, and the so-called “People’s,” so-called “Republic” of China watched the American Iraqi expedition with interest. I am glad that they were able to see the US military dispose of one of the largest armies in the world in two weeks flat plus a sand storm, and at the cost of fewer than one hundred American lives.

I realize that Russia poses no threat to the US right now. It will if and when the flow of petro-rubles dries up. China ‘s future behavior is predictable. Its whole history suggests that it will continue translating its astonishing economic success into geopolitical power. And then, one day, it will miscalculate. Or there will be a Communist mafia succession crisis best alleviated through a foreign adventure. Or, the Chinese economic elite will run scared of running out of raw materials such as petroleum and it will convince the People’s Liberation Army to start a fight.

(Technical note: I think the term “mafia” is technically correct to describe the Chinese regime simply because the governing Chinese Communist Party has lost the legitimacy it derived from its revolutionary task. China is the most successful mafia state in history. It has managed to trick and bribe millions, making the Jersey mob blush with embarrassment!)

As far as the future bellicose actions North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan are concerned, your guess is as good as mine but would you be willing to bet something substantial that we will not be forced to fight because of what happens in connection with those rabid dogs?

Weakness, real or merely perceived, invites attack or, at least, military adventurism. Occasional tangible demonstrations of strength fortify the forces of peace. The successful American military expedition of the fall 2003 in Iraq acted as a brake on the ambitions current and future of fanatical, gangsterish and totalitarian world actors. It gave them food for thought. In one well-publicized case, a grotesque and bloody dictator even volunteered to surrender his weapons of mass destruction (real ones) shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Either, he suddenly saw the light of peacefulness, by coincidence, or the effectiveness of American military action scared the s… out of him. What do you think? And, I don’t think that the unconvincing performance of the US as a military occupier that followed undermined significantly the impression the swift and merciless invasion itself created.

Finally, I stayed carefully away from a topic that was not part of the question: There are sometimes humanitarian reasons in favor of military intervention. When the US does not move, often (not always) you get a Rwanda. You get Syria today with 70,000 dead for no particular reason for the outcome is all but certain. When the US stays on the sideline but on the wrong sideline, you get the massive Khmer Rouge massacre (that was in Cambodia between 1970 and 1975). The US supported the genocidal regime in the UN then out of spite at the Vietnamese Communists who opposed it. About two million died or were killed in an astounding act of self-genocide. I think there were good humanitarian reasons to intervene to protect Iraqis but I don’t need to call on this belief to justify the war.

In conclusion: War is not the solution, of course, except to slavery, Japanese aggression, fascism, Nazism, and in its most poetic form ever, ( the threat of “stars war”) to the armed colossus, communism itself.

Every good thing that has happened in my lifetime (possibly including life itself) happened under the umbrella of the pax americana. Any liberty-bearing development in the near future will take place under the pax americana. Right now, the alternative is Somalia. Of course, there lies a paradox, a major contradiction. War is the single main contributor to the extension of government over civil society. Yet, in the world such as it is, lovers of freedom sometimes have to support war to preserve the conditions leading to greater autonomy for individuals.

Right now, I don’t see any other candidate willing and able to supply a substitute pax. Sometimes, I wish someone would persuade Finland or Denmark to step in but it’s not happening. At other times, I wish I could observe liberals and pacifists shame blood-thirsty beasts like Saddam Hussein or Moamar Quadafi into mending their ways. Vigorous finger-waving might do it. Or maybe talk therapy, or acupuncture, or green tea. Who knows?

Meteorites and Climate Change

President Obama told us us during his State of the Union address: There are more and more droughts and hurricanes, and stuff. He said those are a real proof of global warming. Why would anyone disbelieve the president? He is an eminent scientist, right?

Well, Mother Nature gave us yet another warning. A couple of days ago a meteorite landed in Russia, injuring a thousand people. At the same time, another, bigger meteorite came close to hitting the planet. That’s two in one single day. If that’s not proof of climate change, I don’t know what will convince you.; you are just a denier, that’s all!