Reason

Doherty making major sense on the middle east.

WSJ.com - Freedom's Friend

Friedman on Reagan -- further comments as times allow

The Great Persuader (washingtonpost.com)

Not Even a Hedgehog - The stupidity of Ronald Reagan. By Christopher?Hitchens

Novak is much more generous; but Hitchens, the dirty commie, has a point.

For the Great Communicator, presidency was about big dreams

Rumsfeld may have to ax an ally

Cambone, not Rumsfield, thought it a great idea to abuse innocents.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Low Rates, High Expectations

A freebie from Jim Grant. (The subscription for his newsletter goes for $760 per annum.)

Secretary Powell on Meet the Press

Apparently Powell has grown accustomed to lying.

War, the God That Failed by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Comments?

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Wars on drugs, guns, fathers goi...

Interesting updates on the state of the union.

Few friends rush to aid Rumsfeld

Novak with the latest scoop. Problem is there is every chance there will be no second term for Bush, and the Bush team doesn't know what hit them. On second thought, what a world!

Iraqi Prisoner Shamed by Experience

No comment needed.

How to slash your tax bills

Alan Reynolds on slowing down and enjoying leisure--a good which carries a negative tax rate.

The Quotable Bush

The Rev. Bush last night: "My job as the President is to lead this nation into making the world a better place. And that's exactly what we're doing." Who would have known that when Bush rejected "nation building" during his campaign for the presidency, what he really had in mind was remaking and shaping-up the whole world? -- not exactly one of the powers delegated to the federal executive.

"State Education: A Help or Hindrance?"

by Auberon Herbert (1880)

-- excerpts:

"At present we have one system of education applied to the whole of
England. The local character of school boards deceives us, and makes us
believe that some variety and freedom of action exist. In reality they have
only the power to apply an established system. They must use the same class
of teachers; they must submit to the same inspectors; the children must be
prepared for the same examination, and pass in the same standards. There
are some slight differences, but they are few and of little value. Now, if
any one wishes to realise the full mischief which this uniformity works,
let him think of what would be the result of a uniform method being
established everywhere -- in religion, art, science, or any trade or
profession. Let him remember that canon of Mr. Herbert Spencer, so pregnant
with meaning, that progress is difference. Therefore, if you desire
progress, you must not make it difficult for men to think and act
differently; you must not dull their senses with routine or stamp their
imagination with the official pattern of some great department. If you
desire progress, you must remove all obstacles that impede for each man the
exercise of his reasoning and imaginative faculties in his own way...

A great department must be by the law of its own condition unfavourable to
new ideas. To make a change it must make a revolution. Our Education
Department, for example, cannot issue an edict which applies to certain
school boards and not to others.... Follow still further the awkward
attempts of a department at improvement. Influenced by long-continued
public pressure, or moved by some new mind that has taken direction of it,
it determines to introduce a change, and it issues in consequence a
wholesale edict to its thousands of subordinates. But the conditions
required for the successful application of a new idea are, that it should
be only tentatively applied; that it should be applied by those persons who
have some mental or moral affinity with it, and who in applying it, work
intelligently and with the grain, not mechanically and against the
grain....

If only one wishes to realise why officialism is what it is, let him
imagine himself at the centre of some great department which directs an
operation in every part of the country. Whoever he was he must become
possessed with the idea of perfect regularity and uniformity. His waking
and sleeping thought would be the desire that each wheel should perform in
its own place exactly the same rotation in the same time. His life would
simply become intolerable to him if any of his thousands of wheels began to
show signs of consciousness, and to make independent movements of their
own.

But suppose that a man of fresh mind and personal energy were to be placed
at the head of our Education Department who perceived the mischievous
effect of uniformity, could not this official tendency be counteracted? It
might for a short space of time, just as some muscles of a strong man can
for some hours defeat the pull of gravitation, but gravitation wins in the
end. Such changes would only be spasmodic; they would not be the natural
outcome of the system, and therefore could not last. Moreover, for those
who understand the value of liberty and of responsibility, it is needless
to point out how utterly false the system must be which makes the nation
depend upon the intelligence of a minister, and not upon the free movement
of the different minds within itself....

From boyhood to manhood the teacher himself is undergoing examinations; for
the rest of his life he is reproducing on others what he himself has gone
through. It is needless to say, that the higher aims of the teacher,
methods of arousing the imagination and developing the reasoning powers,
which only bear fruit slowly and cannot be tested by a yearly examination
of an inspector -- whose fly will be waiting at the school door during the
few hours at the disposal of himself or his subordinate -- new attempts to
connect the meaning of what is being learned with life itself, and to
create an interest in work for work's own sake instead of the inspector's
sake, ... all these things must be laid aside as subordinate to the one
great aim of driving large batches successfully through the standards and
making large hauls of public money...

And now, leaving much unsaid, I must ask what practical steps should be
taken by those workmen who suspect that state education is but a part of
that coercive drill which one half the human race delights to inflict upon
the other half. First of all get rid of compulsion. It has been made the
instrument of endless petty persecutions. It is fatal to the free growth of
an intelligent love of education; ...to a true respect of man for man; for
each man's right to judge what is morally best for himself and for those
entrusted to him. It is an attempt to make one of those shortcuts to
progress which end by making the goal recede from us.

...It is a copy of a continental institution, taken from a nation that,
living under a paternal government, has not yet learned to spell the
letters of the word *liberty*. The example of Germany and its highly
organised state education is not alluring. ... Where you subject people to
strong official restraint, you seem fated to produce on the one side
rigidity of thought and pedantry of feeling, on the other side those
violent schemes against the possessions and the personal rights of the rich
which we call socialism. Careful respect for the rights of others, vigorous
and consistent defence of one's own rights, a deeply rooted love of freedom
in thought, word, and action -- these things are simply impossible wherever
you entrust great powers to a government, and allow it to use them not
simply within a sphere of strictly defined rights, but as a supreme judge
of what the momentary convenience requires.

...It is always difficult to introduce freedom into a system that is
founded on authority and officialism."

Excerpts from "State Education: A Help or Hindrance?" *Fortnightly Review*,
1880; in *The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and other essays*
by Auberon Herbert, Copyright (c) 1978 by Liberty Fund Inc., Indianapolis,
Indiana. ISBN 0-913966-42-8

D.A. Could Be Disbarred Over Drug Prosecutions

This is certainly novel. I thought undercover cops were trained to lie.

Pre-9/11 doings are coming to light

Jim Pinkerton writes: "If you knew that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had received a memo a month before Pearl Harbor entitled, "Japanese Determined to Attack the United States in the Pacific," and that he had done nothing about that information, would that knowledge change your perception of FDR as a wise war leader?

Roosevelt received no such memo, of course, but President George W. Bush got a blunt warning five weeks before 9/11 and he did little or nothing. He even presided over a stand- down in preparations, concentrating on other concerns."

Of course FDR could have written the Peal Harbor memo to himself, as he was determined to bully the Japanese into attacking U.S. bases somewhere in the Pacific.

Another Ayatollah

A million mistakes come home to roost:


Sistani’s Shia refuse to play their assigned role.


By Eric S. Margolis


In a remarkable example of historical irony, a scowling, black-turbaned Shia ayatollah has emerged from obscurity for the second time in a quarter century to vex and confound America’s plans for the Mideast.

Twenty-four years ago, the U.S. encouraged Iraq’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, to invade Iran and overthrow the new revolutionary Islamic government of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The U.S. and Britain secretly aided Iraq with arms, finance, chemical and biological weapons, intelligence, military advisors, and diplomatic support in its bloody war against Iran that lasted eight years and caused one million casualties. But when Saddam Hussein grew too big for his boots, his former U.S. and British patrons brought him down. Now, over two decades later, another powerful Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali el-Sistani, is challenging America’s Mideast Raj, and Washington has reacted to this perfectly predictable event with deep consternation and confusion.

The Bush administration was assured by the neoconservatives who engineered the Iraq War that a co-operative, turban-free regime of pro-U.S. Iraqis would quickly be installed in Baghdad, led by convicted swindler Ahmad Chalabi. However, if Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress cronies failed, so much the better, went neocon thinking. Their primary objective was to destroy Iraq, not to rebuild it; for Iraq, once the Arab world’s best educated, most industrialized nation, had to be expunged as a potential military and strategic challenge to Israel. So now the U.S. has its own West Bank in Iraq.

In the 1920s, Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky called for Israel to rule “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” as the famous slogan went, by smashing the fragile mosaic of its Arab neighbors into ethnic fragments, then seizing the oil riches of Arabia. So Israel’s far Right and its American neocon fellow travelers are perfectly happy to see Iraq divided de facto into its three component ethnic parts: Shia, Sunni Arab, and Kurd. Better a feeble Iraq broken into weak cantons, like post-1975 Lebanon, than a nation united, even under a U.S.-run regime.

But while Likudniks rejoice at the destruction of their ancient enemy, the United States faces the conundrum of how to forge a seemingly democratic government in Iraq in the face of the nation’s impossible ethnic-religious calculus. Installing a brutal general to run Iraq would be far more convenient. But having found no weapons of mass destruction, the embarrassed Bush administration is now touting creation of democracy as its casus belli and so must go through the motions of democratization.

Enter Grand Ayatollah Sistani. After his rival, Ayatollah Hakim al-Bakr, was blown to bits by a huge bomb, Sistani emerged as the leading voice of Iraq’s Shia. He has so far played a cautious game, urging elections but rejecting calls by his followers for a more overtly anti-American line or armed resistance. Any fair election will give power to Iraq’s Shia, who are 60 percent of the population. If this does not happen, there will be a possible recourse to arms.

Washington has now inherited the identical problem faced by imperial Britain when, in order to control the region’s recently discovered oil, it stitched together three disparate Ottoman vilyats to create the Frankenstein state of Iraq.

Britain, following its usual colonial practice of putting compliant ethnic or religious minorities in power, filled the army, police, and government with Sunni Arabs, who made up only 20 percent of the population. Sunnis ruled Iraq from the 1920s until the U.S. overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Shia were repressed, often savagely, and economically deprived. Iraq’s ever-rebellious Kurds were kept under control by frequent punitive expeditions and regular bombing of insurgents by the RAF from its main base at Habibanyah. Iraq’s post-1958 regimes followed this practice. Today, U.S. occupation forces in Iraq are also conducting air pacification, this time against rebellious Sunni Arabs.

Interestingly, Britain’s arch-imperialist, Winston Churchill, authorized the RAF to drop poison gas on “primitive tribesmen,” meaning Iraq’s Kurds and Afghanistan’s Pashtun, a fact conveniently forgotten by Tony Blair and George W. Bush when they excoriated Saddam Hussein for “gassing his own people.”

Having been excluded from political power, Iraq’s well-organized Shia are understandably clamoring for empowerment. Most, though not all, appear to desire what they call Islamic democracy: an Iranian-style combination of elective and consultative assemblies with strong checks and balances, overseen by a supreme religious leader—Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

For Washington, which seeks to run Iraq through a small group of handpicked satraps, an Islamic government is anathema. But the Bush administration is very eager to proclaim some sort of “democratic” Iraqi government after a “handover of power” next June—in time for U.S. fall elections.

U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer’s attempt to cobble together a Rube Goldberg system of political caucuses designed to check Shia power, assure Sunni, Kurd, and Turkoman minority rights, and keep the regime under U.S. control, has failed. Ayatollah Sistani has rejected this clumsy, unworkable plan and calls for direct elections as soon as possible. UN advisors, brought in by the U.S. in an effort to paper over differences with the Shia, have backed Sistani’s call for direct elections. Ironically, after proclaiming the dawn of democracy in Iraq, the U.S. is now trying to block direct elections, thwart any form of Islamic government, and deny office to Iraqis opposed to U.S. occupation.

At the same time, Iraq’s Kurds, who now have two virtually independent mini-states in the north, are determined to create an independent nation in northern Iraq that controls the rich Kirkuk oilfields. They are dead set against losing their newfound political and economic autonomy and refuse to place themselves under either Shia or Sunni Arab rule. And having waged a bloody, two-decade struggle against their own independence-seeking Kurds, the increasingly angry Turks are not about to countenance the emergence of a Kurdish state right across the border that controls major oil fields that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire. But Kurds are America’s closest allies in Iraq, and their voices ring loud in Washington. While Kurds may agree to pay lip service to some powerless national body in Baghdad, they are unlikely to cede political rights or control of customs and oil revenues or to cease driving ethnic Arabs from the northern regions. They may also fall to tribal feuding at any time, as so often in their past.

This leaves the Sunni Arabs, who are waging a robust insurgency against occupation forces. A new cadre of Sunni Arab nationalist leaders is emerging in the anti-U.S. underground, in tandem with small but lethal numbers of militant Islamic jihadists. They, not the old, discredited Ba’ath Party, will challenge U.S. rule of Iraq. If the insurgency continues—and it shows no signs of abating—Iraq could become a second Afghanistan, an incubator for a new generation of anti-Western militants from across the Muslim World.

A resolution to Iraq’s ethnic problems defies easy answers. A Swiss-style system, with a weak central government and powerful cantons, is probably the best solution. But long-term, Iraq’s dissolution into three nations may be inevitable.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration is faced with a basic contradiction between its claims of forging a truly democratic Iraq and U.S. strategic ambitions in the region. A free vote in Iraq will produce a Shia-dominated government sympathetic to neighboring Iran. And the ultimate test of any genuine democracy in Iraq will be its ability to order U.S. forces out of Iraq, something the Bush administration will not allow.

The Pentagon plans three major military bases in Iraq from which to control the oil-producing Mideast and to protect the new “Imperial Lifeline,” the pipelines bringing crude westward from the Caspian Basin. Britain used Iraq for the same purpose. In all but name, the U.S. has become heir of the old British Empire.

Washington wants a compliant regime of Iraqi yes-men, what Algerians used to call, “beni oui-ouis,” running internal affairs under the stern gaze of American garrison troops, who will intervene, like the British imperialists, whenever the locals get out of hand or Iraqi politicians grow too independent-minded.

But Ayatollah Sistani and the Shia will not accept a Vichy Iraqi government that excludes them from running Iraq’s foreign and domestic affairs, though that is precisely what Washington plans in June when it “hands over power to Iraqis”—most likely by expanding the existing U.S.-appointed Governing Council of Iraqi collaborators or by staging a rigged national tribal assembly, as was done in Afghanistan. Unfortunately for the Bush administration, it has not yet located in Iraq a glib figurehead like former CIA “asset” in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.

So Iraq’s Shia will likely find themselves on a collision course with the U.S. occupation. Younger Shi’ites may disregard their elders’ calls for caution and, not to be outdone by their Sunni rivals, take up arms. If this happens, the current insurgency in the Sunni Triangle (actually a rectangle) will appear modest by comparison. In fact, as Shia anger and frustration surge, Iraq is increasingly resembling Lebanon during its long civil war, and there appears an inexorable slide towards both a wider insurgency and inter-ethnic strife.

What should the U.S. do? The most sensible course: hand Iraq to the UN and pull out. This would produce intense neocon wailing about loss of credibility and giving in to terrorism. But in fact, the longer the U.S. stays in Iraq, the more credibility it loses, and the more it stokes terrorism.

If a total pullout is not in the cards, then the best option is to co-operate with Iraq’s Shia majority and show that the U.S. can work fruitfully with an Islamic regime. Co-operation with Islamists in Baghdad opens the way to good relations with Tehran and a major lessening of anti-American feelings across the Muslim World. But of course, the neocons will do their best to thwart such détente.

The United States has not enough men, treasure, nor intellectual energy to struggle through the morass of Mesopotamian politics and ethnic strife. Governments can usually only think of two or three things at a time, and the mess in Iraq should not be one of them. Otherwise, it will come to bedevil us and sap our energies, just as Iran did in the late 1970s and ’80s. Unless we learn from our errors and work to co-operate with the latest problematic mullah, Ayatollah Sistani, he could well be come the nemesis his predecessor, Imam Khomeini, did just two decades ago.
___________________________________________________


Eric S. Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan and Asia and a columnist, commentator, and war correspondent.

March 29, 2004 issue
Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative

Refusal by justices thwarts developer

More on the Wetlands issue, and the Supreme Court's failure to clarify the law. Notice the remarks of the local mealy-mouth statist:

Local conservation groups, such as Wetlands Watch, feared that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of Newdunn, giving developers a "free-for-all" to destroy wetlands, said John Blandin, the group's president. Wetlands are never truly isolated, Blandin said, because they connect to other waters via groundwater.

"Wetlands should be protected," he said, "and the Corps should have jurisdiction."

He likes wetlands on other people's property and thinks they should be protected. Therefore, the Feds should have jurisdiction, the Constitution, the statute, and the intention of Congress to the contrary notwithstanding.

Private Guards Repel Attack on U.S. Headquarters (washingtonpost.com)