NRO Supports National Socialism

But if it was still okay to have prayer in school, the Pledge of Allegiance, expulsions, non-self-esteem boosting curricula and the rest, a conservative would say, 'Don't touch the public schools. They're working just fine. Let's give them everything they need.

In other words, "conservatives" (of the National Review variety) believe that theft by the state is dandy as long as it supports their personal agenda. If an atheist, Buddhist, or Moslem is forced to pray a Christian prayer in school, that's OK with them. If a pacificist is forced to pledge allegiance to a flag (a symbol of militant nationalism), then that's OK too as long as a nominal "conservative" is calling the shots. If a childless couple is forced to pay for schooling the children on others, neocons believe that is just fine and dandy as long as their children are still in the school and they approve of the curriculum. If the curriculum is harsh and punishments are meted out regularly, then that is great, pacificists be damned. In other words, neocons, unlike libertarians, have no ethics.

What conservatives do believe in is hubristic/chauvinistic nationalism (which they misleadingly call patriotism). Because they are convinced (by fantastic historical distortion) of our moral superiority, they can justify wars of aggression by us against others, while condemning agression by one unallied party against another. Neocons look approvingly as their military slaughters thousands of innocent civilians, but scream in horror when their children die in war. Neocons support unconditonally those who serve their interests as they seek to create a unique national identity, which allows us to criticize and devalue/dehumanize non-Americans. Neocons are reviled by immigrants seeking to reach their shores and contaminate their unique and holy character. Neocons have no particular love or respect for Christianity, which preaches peace and fairness, but they embrace it simply because it is the dominant religion in the United States and, therefore, can be used to create our identity, our national myth. Similarly, neocons have no special love for English grammar, but they push English-only laws simply because it is the predominant language.

True libertarians can be distinguished from conservatives by their humility and objectivity, as opposed to the destructive power of pride. Libertarians are for individual "liberty" or, more precisely, as much liberty as is possible that does not infringe on the property or use of/access to that property of/by others:

Don't like English's hundreds of grammatical rules?
Choose Esperanto.

Don't like Christianity?
Try Buddhism.

Does the Catholic church charge too much for a Baptism?
No problem, become an Evangelical.

You don't want to wave the flag or support our troops in genocide?
No problem, you can wave whatever flag you want.

Libertarians (or at least real libertarians who do not support aggressive posturing or closed borders) allow the freedom for true morality and prosperity to exist. Neo-conservatism is the prescription for endless war.

Hunger for Dictatorship

The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all—that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.

If only the paleocons were as eloquent in their promotion of individual freedon as their opposition to American empire.

Defending the Indefensible War in Iraq

Because the war in Iraq is indefensible from virtually any moral perspective, it is fascinating to see the bizarre fabrications and twisted rationalization of the defenders of one of the most indefensible wars.

Let us review the facts as I see them:

1. Iraq was admitedly a rogue nation (Iran-Iraq war, Kuwait, repressing Shiites, ...) ten years prior to the war.
2. At one point during the Iran-Iraq war, which Iraq started, the US was actually supporting Iraq with satellite imagery and the precursors for chemical weapons!
   
3. Iraq had been beaten badly by those two wars, a de facto Kurdish separation, a Shia revolt, and nearly a decade of sanctions, safe zones, and rigorous inspections.
4. The sanctions on Iraq resulted in a a decline in the social and economic infrastructure or Iraq, resulting in food, water and medicine shortages that killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children according to UNICEF studies.
   
5. Iraq was complying fantastically well with the sanctions, presumably because they wanted the crippling sanctions lifted, but the Baath were legitimately concerned about the US spying on them.
6. Bush was extremely eager to go to war. He paid for false testimony against Saddam, used discredited "facts", invented the threat, and marginalized those in his adminstration who argued against war.
   
7. At the time of the invasion, several independent inspectors had confirmed that Saddam was completely defenseless.
8. George Bush sought even before becoming president to depose Saddam. This was based on three reasons:
   He regretted that his father did not overthrow Saddam and promised himself that if given the opportunity he would not flinch from attacking Saddam.
   He wanted to place a military base in the Middle East to ensure the flow of oil (as if they would not have sold it to us.)
   He wanted to reward his corporate sponsors (Richard Cheney, etc.) with lucrative "reconstruction" contracts
   
9. The United Nations did not wish us to go to war with Iraq.
10. The US bribed many countries to support the war.
    
11. Despite foreign aid bribes, very few countries supported the war, by the end almost all coalition states left.
    
12. The US easily conquered Iraq because Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
13. If Iraq had WMDs, it would have used them when it was attacked.
    
14. The US faced guerrilla warfare from ex-Baathist Sunnis.
15. Bush begrudgingly allowed elections to occur when Shiite leaders started big demonstrations for such elections. (The Shiites knew that they had the most population and would successfully gain power.)
16. Iraqi life became even harder for most Iraqis after the occupation, including shortages of gas, electricity, water, and kerosene.
    
17. Iraqis were in constant fear of being sent of to Abu Gharib or caught in the crossfire between insurgents and US-backed troops.
    
18. The initial euphoria over "liberation" by some Iraqis dissolved into a desire to end the occupation and have a normal government.
19. Vice president Richard Cheney's Halliburton made billions of dollars off of no bid contracts in Iraq. This was a sharp increase over the percentage of contracts in previous wars.
    
20. There never was any connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
21. George Bush's neocons did not even intend to go after Al Qaeda, but wanted to leverage 9/11 to engage in "nation (re)building".
    
22. W attacked Afghanistan with reluctance, knowing that he could then place the attack on Iraq/Iran/Syria/North Korea (and whoever else the administration wanted to eliminate) in the context of an abstract "war on terrorism".
23. The "war on terrorism" degenerated even further into "making the world democratic".
24. Iraq now has considerably less religious freedom (except for Muslims) than it had under Saddam and may well adopt Sharia law.
25. The US has built one of the world's largest permanent military bases in Iraq.
    
26. Saudi Arabia has asked us to remove the military base located there.
    
27. Terrorism has increased dramatically due to the Iraq war.
    
28. The middle east has been greatly destabilized as a result of the war.
    

Given these facts, it was obvious that the war was unjustified. You cannot attack someone for what they did 10 years ago, especially when the country had been severly punished, as was the case with Iraq. Nor did we even purport to do so. We claimed to be attacking them because they were not complying with sanctions; however, this was patently and knowingly false. Fabricating a case against someone is wrong, especially when doing so to wage war. If one can reasonably predict that such a lie will result in the deaths of thousands of innocents, then action is a war crime. This is the same crime for which the Nazis were executed at Nereumberg. George W Bush, Richard Cheney, Condolezza Rich, Ahmed Chalabi, Rumsfeld and others should be tried for war crimes.

Convicting these individuals would make the world a much safer place. In addition, Rumsfeld is guilty of torture and holding prisoners of war illegally, which are both serious war crimes.

Such justice is necessary not only for the survival of our nation, but probably for the survival of humanity. Nuclear war with the Soviet Union/China/Europe is today much more likely due to the United State's heavy-handed imperialism.

Beating a Dead Parrot - Why Iraq and Vietnam have nothing whatsoever in common. By Christopher Hitchens

There it was again, across half a page of the New York Times last Saturday, just as Iraqis and Kurds were nerving themselves to vote. "Flashback to the 60's: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam." The basis for the story, which featured a number of experts as lugubrious as they were imprecise, was the suggestion that South Vietnam had held an election in September 1967, and that this propaganda event had not staved off ultimate disaster.

Whatever the monstrosities of Asian communism may have been, Ho Chi Minh based his declaration of Vietnamese independence on a direct emulation of the words of Thomas Jefferson and was able to attract many non-Marxist nationalists to his camp. He had, moreover, been an ally of the West in the war against Japan. Nothing under this heading can be said of the Iraqi Baathists or jihadists, who are descended from those who angrily took the other side in the war against the Axis, and who opposed elections on principle. If today's Iraqi "insurgents" have any analogue at all in Southeast Asia it would be the Khmer Rouge.

Ho Chi Minh was a communist. So what if he was an ally of the West. Do you think that makes him good?

Vietnam as a state had not invaded any neighbor (even if it did infringe the neutrality of Cambodia) and did not do so until after the withdrawal of the United States when, with at least some claim to self-defense, it overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime. Contrast this, even briefly, to the record of Saddam Hussein in relation to Iran and Kuwait.

So, how are 10 and 20 year old wars relevant? Especially, considering that Saddam did not wish to make war with the US, bent over backwards for UN inspectors who certified his compliance with all of our inane requirements, and finally, did not even have the capability of defending itself.

Vietnam had not languished under international sanctions for its brazen contempt for international law, nor for its building or acquisition, let alone its use of, weapons of mass destruction.

Yes, Iraq did use chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq conflict; however, it obtained these weapons with the complicity of the US government at the time. Furthermore, it is likely that Iran also used such weapons. Obviously, Vietnam was reasonably well armed or they would not have won. Besides, chemical weapons only recently reclassified as "weapons of mass destruction" by the Bush administration. Previously, only nuclear weapons were characterized as WMD. Never before has the mere possession of any such weapons been an pretext for war.

Vietnam had never attempted, in whole or in part, to commit genocide, as was the case with the documented "Anfal" campaign waged by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds.

Good for them, but Saddam's treatment of the Kurds was an internal affair. This was not the main pretext of the war, nor would anyone have bought that as sufficient pretext for an invasion.

In Vietnam the deep-rooted Communist Party was against the partition of the country and against the American intervention. It called for a boycott of any election that was not an all-Vietnam affair. In Iraq, the deep-rooted Communist Party is in favor of the regime change and has been an enthusiastic participant in the elections as well as an opponent of any attempt to divide the country on ethnic or confessional lines. (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is not even an Iraqi, hates the Kurds and considers the religion of most Iraqis to be a detestable heresy: not a mistake that even the most inexperienced Viet Cong commander would have been likely to make.)

This is semantic nonsense. The communists are irrelevant in Iraq. The Sunnis were the one's who stood to lose from elections and opposed on this basis. It is perfectly reasonable that they would oppose elections without sufficient protections of minorities. Furthermore, the Viet Cong did discriminate against Cambodians.

No car bomb or hijacking or suicide-bombing or comparable atrocity was ever committed by the Vietnamese, on American or any other foreign soil. Nor has any wanted international gangster or murderer ever been sheltered in Vietnam.

Different military tactics. Is dropping a 500 pound bomb on civilians somehow more morally justifiable than a more targeted car bombing??!

American generals and policymakers could never agree as to whether the guerrillas in Vietnam were self-supporting or were sustained from the outside (namely the northern half of their own country). However one may now view that debate, it was certainly true that Hanoi, and the southern rebels, were regularly resupplied not by minor regional potentates but by serious superpowers such as the Warsaw Pact and China, and were able to challenge American forces in battlefield order. The Iraqi "insurgents" are based among a minority of a minority, and are localized geographically, and have no steady source of external supply. Here the better comparison would be with the dogmatic Communists in Malaya in the 1940s, organized principally among the Chinese minority and eventually defeated even by an exhausted postwar British empire. But even the die-hard Malayan Stalinists had a concept of "people's war" and a brave record in fighting Japanese imperialism. The Iraqi "insurgents" are dismal riff-raff by comparison.

Most Iraqi support the insurgency and understandably hate the torture-happy Americans. Futhermore, support for the insurgency grows continually.

Where it is not augmented by depraved Bin Ladenist imports, the leadership and structure of the Iraqi "insurgency" is formed from the elements of an already fallen regime, extensively discredited and detested in its own country and universally condemned. This could not be said of Ho Chin Minh or of the leaders and cadres of the National Liberation Front.

So, you are saying that a known communist is nicer than the ruler of a regime that (at the time of the attack) posed no credible threat to any outside power???

The option of accepting a unified and Communist Vietnam, which would have evolved toward some form of market liberalism even faster than China has since done, always existed. It was not until President Kennedy decided to make a stand there, in revenge for the reverses he had suffered in Cuba and Berlin, that quagmire became inevitable. The option of leaving Iraq to whatever successor regime might arise or be imposed does not look half so appetizing. One cannot quite see a round-table negotiation in Paris with Bin Laden or Zarqawi or Moqtada Sadr, nor a gradually negotiated hand-over to such people after a decent interval.

Yes, Vietnam would probably have evolved into market Capitalism at about the rate of China; however, you are making a rediculous slur again: There has NEVER been any connection between Baathist Sunnis and fundamentalist Shiites such as Bin Laden. Perhaps, you could never envision such round table discussions with the likes of Arafat or Ariel Sharon, both heads of terrorist groups.

In Vietnam, the most appalling excesses were committed by U.S. forces. Not all of these can be blamed on the conduct of bored, resentful, frightened conscripts. The worst atrocities—free-fire zones, carpet-bombing, forced relocation, and chemical defoliation—were committed as a direct consequence of orders from above. In Iraq, the crimes of mass killing, aerial bombardment, ethnic deportation, and scorched earth had already been committed by the ruling Baath Party, everywhere from northern Kurdistan to the drained and burned-out wetlands of the southern marshes. Coalition forces in Iraq have done what they can to repair some of this state-sponsored vandalism.

In what bizarre fantasy world do you live?! Is that why Iraqis still do not have reliable electricity and can no longer afford gasoline or even kerosene. Obviously, they were much better off before the war despite enormously destructive sanctions.

In Vietnam, the United States relied too much on a pre-existing military caste that often changed the local administration by means of a few tanks around the presidential palace. In the instance of Iraq, the provisional government was criticized, perhaps more than for any other decision, for disbanding the armed forces of the ancien regime, and for declining to use a proxy army as the United States had previously done in Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, and Greece. Unlike the South Vietnamese, the Iraqi forces are being recruited from scratch.

Who cares?? After we had completerly disbanded the military we had to reband it with many of the same ex-Baathists. A simple tactical error.

In Vietnam, the policy of the United States was—especially during the Kennedy years—a sectarian one that favored the Roman Catholic minority. In Iraq, it is obvious even to the coldest eye that the administration is if anything too anxious to compose religious differences without any reference to confessional bias.

Seems to be that the bias is strongly in favor of Shiites as any majoritarian rule must be.

I suppose it's obvious that I was not a supporter of the Vietnam War. Indeed, the principles of the antiwar movement of that epoch still mean a good deal to me. That's why I retch every time I hear these principles recycled, by narrow minds or in a shallow manner, in order to pass off third-rate excuses for Baathism or jihadism. But one must also be capable of being offended objectively. The Vietnam/Iraq babble is, from any point of view, a busted flush. It's no good. It's a stiff. It's passed on. It has ceased to be. It's joined the choir invisible. It's turned up its toes. It's gone. It's an ex-analogy.

Time will tell that your fantasy bears no relation to reality. Iraq will be your next Viet Nam, fool.

Socialism Versus Libertarianism

Socialism (advocacy of socialized costs) necessarily entails regulation and enforcement in order to control costs (necessarily low incentive for conserving socialized or subsidized assets). If one desires personal freedom (libertarianism) from social control, then one has to accept personal responsibility without a social safety net. This is also a very consistent system because costs are very controlled (natural incentive level for conservation) and they are borne by the individuals so the society cannot use that as an excuse for regulating the lives of the individuals.

The consequences of the two systems are as follows (trying to be as fair as possible):

Socialism:
neutral: low personal choice, high social choice

good: scientific, many public/subsidized services (parks, museums, monuments, sculpture, roads, libraries, fountains, light rails, sidewalks, beaches, ...), few decisions required, high amount of public information (potentially) available, decent pollution control

bad: requires a powerful centralized goverment, which leads to totalitarianism, over-reliance on the integrity of scientists, high social regulation, intrusive amounts of information collected, high control (fines, jail terms, licenses, ID cards, censuses,..), high taxation (to pay for the regulation and enforcement), high poverty (due to socialized incentives), and inflation

Libertarianism (Paleoconservatism): high personal choice, minimal social choice (only to the extent that one agresses another's property)

bad: lack of public places (parks, roads, fountains, monuments), lots of important decisions required, lots of personal regulation required, no social choice, lots of undirected marketing, lots of temptations (addictive drugs, pornography, ....), requires arming or contracting with a protection agency

good: distributed contracted power, lots of personal choice, no monopoly on regulations, a plethora of private services (security services, road services, private transportation vehicles, legal services, brokerage services, variety of religious services.), private roads, shopping malls, insurance companies, a choice of spiritual facilities, relatively inexpensive/attractive goods, coffee shops, clubs, gated communities with communal facilities, private research facilities, etc.