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His Husband, Her Wife December 12, 2013 If a word as spoken does not contain the entire history of its usages, neither does it offer any defense against them- state-nation as nation-state January 21, 2014 Its notion turns the whole world upside down, since the ideal state-nation is the universal homogeneous state, the world state or the democracy whose demos would be all of humankind, not any particular state within history but the action of history itself under a declared progressively "federative concept."
- A Collective Suicide Note February 22, 2014 So much to admire about this historical document, which came up yesterday on the excellent twitter feed of "Todo libro antiguo" (@Libroantiguo) with the following description: "Declaration of war from the German Empire 1914, starting WORLD WAR I. Signed by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II."
September 1, 2010
Many on the right think President Obama's Oval Office address last night should have credited "the Surge," and they would have preferred thanks to his predecessor for taking and implementing a decision that Senator Obama and others fiercely criticized. The left would have preferred a more ringing indictment of the Bush Administration, and a "never again" promise. The war's strongest supporters will, with notable exceptions, remain convinced that going to war was the right decision, that its positive effects are under-appreciated, and that the unknowable alternative history would likely have been at least as violent, and more difficult to influence. The war's strongest critics will remain convinced that going to war was undeniably the wrong decision, that any positive effects could have been achieved or even outbid by other means, and that the unknowable alternative history might have been much less violent and expensive, and have allowed America to retain much greater influence and freedom of action. No one knows for sure where actual history is leading, but everyone is prepared to blame someone else if things go poorly, and all will feel fully justified in their own eyes.
The President chose to let left and right cancel each other out:
As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.
It was his demeanor, called "half-hearted and detached" by one as-ever implacable critic, that expressed and may have resonated with a broader public sense of exhaustion regarding the whole subject. He seemed to be saying, "We're working hard to make the whole thing as boring and forgettable as possible." He did not promise "never again," possibly because he is not in a position to keep such a promise, otherwise because for the foreseeable future an Iraq Syndrome ought to handle the matter anyway. With 50,000 troops still in Iraq and in a re-negotiable position, with 100,000 troops in Afghanistan - and still an angry, self-righteous, globally committed, and incredibly well-armed nation - the U.S. will remain involved in wars and warfare, but we are, for now, exceedingly unlikely to undertake a new major military expedition except as a true last resort, and we are even less likely, next time, to assume an ability to change regimes and contain aftermaths. The experience of the '00s has erased the imperial hubris inherited from the '90s on both economic and military fronts. Call it our intellectual war dividend: Revolutions, we now recall, are not always, or even usually, velvet ones. Wars, we now recall, do not always, or even usually, end more quickly and at less cost than predicted. And, incidentally, incomes, revenues, and stock and property prices, we now recall, do not always, or even usually, rise continuously. In this sense Iraq was just one self-chastening among others.
My personal view remains that we were destined to become deeply, bloodily, and expensively engaged in and around Iraq: Too much unfinished business, too much political, economic, and moral involvement. Following 9/11,with both our fear and our blood still high, our confidence boosted by a seemingly easy victory in Afghanistan, we chose to act rather than react, to pre-empt rather than retaliate, to take the dice in our own hands rather than bet on someone else's throw. To indulge for a moment in a-what-might-have-been, if we had not acted when we did, then, sooner or later, by whatever concatenation of collapses or aggressions, we would have found ourselves on propinquitous ground, sea, and air taking and giving heavy fire anyway. The world economic and political system or "order" that we uphold and depend upon is itself too dependent on what flows out of the geographical Gulf for us to abide indefinitely all of those other gulfs: the gulf in our knowledge, troubling gaps in our sense of control and predictability, the increasingly intolerable moral chasm in our then existent policy. Nature abhors a gulf of gulfs, and "if we knew then what we know now" is a vain exercise, since we never would have learned what we now know except by having acted, suffered, and desperately fought to rescue ourselves. Compare what our armed forces, the political class, and the interested public now have learned about Iraq and environs, and all related issues, as compared to what we generally knew in the year 2000. Operation Iraqi Freedom was as much an exploratory expedition as a "real war" - for the country - if too real for our carefully counted soldiers and much less carefully counted budget.
As for the Iraqis, it is an index of our former naivete, insuperable except by experience, that we hoped to "give" them freedom, and, through their happy example, to spread it to the rest of the Arab and eventually the Islamic world. We simply allowed ourselves to forget what our own history would have taught us, if only anyone ever learned from history. Maybe deep down we remembered, but put it out of our minds -choosing to believe (not all of us, but easily enough of us) what we needed to believe. You can say we chose to trick ourselves into acting, and, even though we saw the bucket of water placed strategically above the partly open door, we decided to blunder forward anyway. Except the bucket was full of blood, and most of it Iraqi, the critics will say - and they are right. Yet can anyone with much knowledge of the history of the region pretend that the violence and destruction would likely have been avoided for very long? That they weren't bleeding out month by month already - with an ever-present option on the next catastrophe, against a background of misery and despair? That goes for the violence and destruction of the first liberation, the liberation from Saddam - it had to come someday; it goes for the violence and destruction of the second liberation - from foreign masters and would-be masters, including but not limited to us; it goes for the violence and destruction of the third liberation, from the "thousand Saddams" that now compete in Iraq for position.
By intervening as we did and how we did, we helped set the timetable of revolutionary violence and put ourselves in place to absorb and channel it, but it may be another form of hubris to assume anything more. Here is the simple summary that the President supplied, using terms that his predecessor might just as well have used, putting a hopeful emphasis on how Americans enabled Iraqis to take their fate into their own hands:
The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people. Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future. They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi Security Forces; and took out terrorist leaders. Because of our troops and civilians – and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people – Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.
The difficulty for Americans, especially for onetime proponents of the war like myself who hoped for a simpler, smoother, and much less costly transition - though who had been willing to contemplate a much costlier initial battle - was coming to understand why the Iraqis themselves were so resistant to seizing that historical opportunity and acting in their own collective interests.
So here is what I think we have re-learned, and had to re-learn: Prior to "Operation Iraqi Freedom," as the name emphasizes, the Iraqis were un-free. They were unprepared and perhaps unwilling to enter history as free human beings, and, though we removed one seemingly insuperable obstacle, the terror regime, we could not relieve them of the struggle that alone gives meaning and, potentially, durability to freedom. Without us, the Iraqis might have put off a new effort of self-liberation for many years. They might never have gone the final distance as a people (or set of captured peoples), but such a description ignores the extent to which they were held back and hemmed in, trapped by history at the cradle of civilization, at the crossroads of the world, on an ocean of oil, and at the same time pushed forward by larger forces - the same ones that gave Saddam his weapons and his dreams, the same ones that enslaved the Iraqis together in a "republic of fear," the same ones that made the world so interested.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom" could therefore only have ever meant a willed confrontation with catastrophe. We can take this knowledge with us on the next "operation," and there will very likely be a next one, different because of our additional knowledge and our new cautions, but sooner or later on the same terms.
Comment →
June 15, 2013
If we agree that we want a world in which nation-states do not use chemical weapons against their peoples, or a world in which chemical and other WMD use does not spread in interstate or other conflict situations, and the only way to ensure that worthy goal is to assert and enforce a transnational imperative, then we are neo-imperialists, and the only reason we do not confess as much is that we have inherited an ideological-terminological allergy.
Comment →
September 9, 2012
September 9, 2012
Foreign policy is theology by proxy, not merely because all important modern theories of the state are secularized theological concepts, nor merely because the relationship of the citizen to the modern nation-state is a sacrificial commitment, but because a stance implicitly on the fate of all humankind, on the world state of states and its possible purposes, and on the right relationship of each and all of us to each and all of us, is divined before it can be analyzed or expressed.
Comment →
I find that indulgence of verbal "license" almost invariably leads to deterioration of discussion, as the resort to words generally deemed offensive almost always marks [...]
I don't take such phrases as categorically poor writing, although I leave to your judgment in this case. Whether Chaucer in The Knight's Tale, describing [...]
I think I still have a copy of I and D in my book boxes, and haven't looked at it in a very long time, [...]
On “Wikileaks: Anti-Imperialist in the American Interest”
The State Department cables are kid stuff. If Assange ever gets close to the records of Saudi cash transfers to American politicians he'll be a dead man in two shakes of a drone's tail.
To be fair and balanced, of course, it must be noted that Winston Churchill's views on the middle east may well have been, uh, influenced by Bernard Baruch's, uh, tangible expressions of enduring friendship in the 1930s; so one may well wonder if current day Israelis and their allies and agents of influence are completely innocent of, uh, relationship building efforts with politicians.
On “Hanging out in the sacrifice zone”
@ bob:
I'm feeling gracious and generous. Everybody else eligible should collect until it is impossible for whoever ends up with custody of my body to hide from the feds the fact that I am no longer eligible to collect.
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@ fuster:
That's covered under article 1:28
. . . fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
"
@ bob:
Am I far right or far far right for believing that the Fedal guvmint shouldn't be doing anything not plainly listed in black and white in the Constitution and its Amendments?
Aside from printing and mailing my monthly SSN check of course.
On “Portland narrowly non-escapes non-detonation of non-bomb by non-entity”
Congress needs to fully investigate why the FBI Terrorism Task Force was investigating a planned attack in a city that specifically rejected participation in the Terrorism Task Force. Who ordered the investigation to be continued once it was learned that the Somali Religion of Peace member specifically intended to attack in Portland?
Even if laws weren't broken, budget money was certainly wasted.
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@ miguel cervantes:
If that idiot is representative of the attendees at the tree lighting I have to agree with him that the FBI should not be hounding guys like that Somali.
"
I can't comment on this story until I learn the liberal versus conservative percentage breakdown of the typical tree lighting crowd in Portland.
On “New universe, just like the old universe”
An interesting article. We need to start looking closely at Penrose's rings to see if there's a message encoded in them; like the one out there beyond the nth billionth digit of pi.
On “One Last “Is Palin Running?” Book Boomlet Piece”
Based on her guest appearances on Fox News, Palin has convinced my wife and I that she's only marginally more competent and intelligent than Obama. We haven't watched the Alaska thing; but I take it as a sign she's not serious about running. Same thing goes for her daughter's appearance on Dancing with the stars.
Having seen what a shallow, flighty, inexperienced poseur can do since 2008 the country will go for someone with actual credentials in 2012, or at least I hope it will.
On “How to make money: James M Buchanan on completing the American Revolution”
@ CK MacLeod:
If that's what he's arguing I agree with him completely. Where I have an issue is his (I assume based on your piece and the foregoing discussion) belief that an "independent" group of bureaucrats can be expected to be more trustworthy and wise in managing the money supply than the market will be if the fiat currency has to be backed up with reserves of a commodity ala the gold standard.
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@ narciso:
The political class and the public "economists" still believed in the 1960's that government bureaucrats could better allocate resources than the market, hence the experiment with wage and price controls ala WW2.
Currently the political class and the public economists still believe that the money supply can be better managed by government bureaucrats than by the impersonal market; but the market keeps on keeping on biting them in the rear. Eventually it will bite them in the rear to the extent that it did during the Great Depression which was arguably worse by far than the panics and shorter sharper lesser depressions and inflations that plagued the gold and silver years.
One nice thing (for the political class, government bureaucrats and unscrupulous "investors" who subvert and ultimately own them) is that control of the money supply allows them to make such depressions and inflations relatively painless for themselves while they work to increase their power. Until common folks realize what is happening and rise up with pruning hooks to upset the whole system.
People in general come to have reason to hate it when that happens, of course.
"
The "bad" thing about the gold standard was/is that it prevented all wise and all just governmental experts from playing money value games. We've long been off the gold standard; but there it (gold) is still, inhibiting governmental experts from playing money value games, it's trading price serving as a check on the real value of fiat money.
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Control of the money supply corrupts. Absolute control of the money supply corrupts absolutely.
If I understand your understanding of Buchanan, he believes that a new "independent" controller of the money supply can be constituted which will be capable of resisting the political pressures that have corrupted the previously constituted "independent" controller of the money supply.
On “Who “they” is”
@ CK MacLeod:
The other day, unless I'm misremembering, you asserted that buyers of Middle Eastern crude share guilt by association since their money spawned and feeds the extremism.
And, in another thread you hold with the NAACP that Tea Party people are responsible for purging those who associate at their rallies without pure motives. And you appear to go further and argue that the mere holding of certain ideological beliefs about the size of government grants a group of people the right to believe that another whole group of people is guilty of meaning them harm.
How do those jibe with your position here?
"
@ Rex Caruthers:
I yield to very few in the intensity of my cynicism and the depth of my low opinion of the competence of politicians; but even I don't believe our politicians are stupid enough to have run the war since 9/11 the way they have if their objective is to fight "the Muslim countries" over oil.
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@ Rex Caruthers:
In a perfect world you would be able to distinguish between a minor police action and a significant war; but that turns out to be hard. I think congress tried to address this by putting a limit of 60 days or 120 days on the president's latitude to order troops into action without some sort of congressional action; but that has become a dead letter because in practice it's all but impossible in a political sense for congress to pull the funding plug while troops are in action.
So we're back to square one. Clearly the president needs the power to order something like the drone strikes in Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. on a real time basis without a declaration of war; but it's hard to stop whoever is president from turning that power into the power to enmesh us in a real war.
As to our current situation I think the problem is that even those of us who think we're at war because war has been made on us don't come close to agreeing on who we are at war with so I imagine it would be pretty hard to write a declaration.
I could write a declaration of who I think we are at war with; but I suspect that would launch CK into orbit even though it wouldn't necesarily surprise him.
I would actually be interested in seeing precisely who CK thinks we are at war with.
Who do you think we are at war with right now?
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@ Rex Caruthers:
I think it was pretty clear then and it's still clear now that Japan might run wild for a while; but it had no potential to achieve a position, production potential, etc. that could prevent us from winning over it whenever we chose. Germany, on the other hand, if it conquered Russia and drove Britain out of the war, had the potential to be unbeatable. Hence the Europe first decision, which had nothing (or at least very little) to do with what the Germans were doing to anyone in already conquered Europe.
And that was a right decision. Nation states should only fight major, full mobilization, wars for survival since the act of drafting a major portion of the population for purposes less than survival is itself an evil of large magnitude.
"
@ CK MacLeod:
Had I looked him up I would have been more respectful. And I should have looked him up based on Cato's publication of that piece.
On “All the little Tea Party Americans in the world”
General Order Number Sixty Seven - First Draft by Cornelius Thadeus MacLeod
General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau has brought it to the attention of this command that certain impetuous and even rough members of this force have been insufficiently respectful of the forces of His Hispanic Majesty Alfonso XIII. In addition there has been talk of charging up San Juan hill instead of proceeding at a stately walk as has been ordered. . .
"
@ CK MacLeod:
Actually I think a couple of grandmas did say they had turned back from that polling place after seeing the fellow with his club.
But you are right that it isn't a big deal. I'm sure there won't be more than a few thousand or so fellows packing heat on election day this year. Which may actually be why the Justice Department let that fellow off, since a violent incident would serve their leader's purposes.
On “Who “they” is”
@ Rex Caruthers:
That fellow Buchanan is clearly educated to a point so far beyond you that he's reached an ethereal realm almost completely detached from reality.
It's not you who should feel gratified that his conclusion matched yours (taking your word for it that he actually reached a conclusion). Rather he should feel gratified that his outpouring of hig blown academic semi-sense ended with a conclusion that matched your common sense analysis.
"
@ Rex Caruthers:
A very good question, but perhaps to be answered after pondering the fact that in the school and church I attended as a youth the primary object of veneration for the majority of the parishioners and some of the priests wasn't a member of the Trinity, or at least that's how it appeared to me.
On “All the little Tea Party Americans in the world”
@ CK MacLeod:
Declaration of Independence - final draft by Jedediah MacLeod KCB
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should first denounce any and all adherents to their cause and sympathizers with their objectives who are accused by their oppressors of failing the strictest tests of purity of heart and disinteredness of motives regardless of the flimsiness of evidence presented by their accusers and the ulterior motives of said accusers lest. . .
On “Who “they” is”
@ Rex Caruthers:
I wonder how many economists and writers CATO had to interview in order to find one who expresses his thoughts as crisply, clearly, concisely and grippingly as James Buchanan.
Can someone explain to me what he was getting at in one paragraph?
"
@ narciso:
You're wrong to refer back to that wholly pure of heart opposition to Lieberman as though it indicates any sort of bias. The left took out after all Democratic Senators who supported the war just as vociferously.