News and Opinions

Why pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect,' and gets it totally wrong - The Boston Globe

PREVIEW: History's Back

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006810

Myth and Reality in the EU
"Europe" is dead. Long live Europe.
BY BRET STEPHENS
Sunday, June 12, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

In the spring of 2003, I was invited to meet a high-ranking European diplomat who was visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories on a fact-finding trip. I was then the editor of the Jerusalem Post, and the diplomat wanted to hear what representatives of "civil society" had to say about the intifada. I argued that the violence was of Yasser Arafat's making and would not go away until he did. In reply, the diplomat observed that Israelis and Palestinians alike could benefit from the example of France and Germany, which after centuries of conflict had wisely agreed to set differences aside and embark on a path of harmonious collaboration, the result being the European Union.

The soft nostrums of European diplomacy are always hard to take, especially when the people to whom they are offered are being blown up daily. But what struck me most about the diplomat's exhortation was his evident sincerity. He really seemed to believe that the EU was the product of some kind of spontaneous moment of enlightened European statesmanship, which by pure chance occurred sometime in the late 1940s, rather than of Germany's annihilation as a military power, American dominance in Western Europe and the Soviet menace. And it was through this prism of a mythologized past that he had come to the Middle East to offer his prescriptions for peace.

That encounter comes to mind following the successive rejections by French and Dutch voters of the proposed European Constitution. Already much has been written to explain the whys and whereofs of the result: the dismal condition of the European economy; popular disaffection with the elites that supported the constitution; fears it could lead to the dismantling of the welfare state and to Turkish membership in the EU; the incomprehensibility of the document itself.

But the deeper reason behind the "no" votes, I suspect, is that Europe's imagined past no longer provides relevant answers for its depressing present. This has happened elsewhere in the world: in the old communist countries, for instance, and in the Arab world today. Now it is the Europeans who have awakened to the fact that the great myths that have sustained their joint enterprise this far will sustain it no further. There are four such myths. The first of these--the founding myth--is that the root of Europe's historical problem is nationalism. Of course, Adolf Hitler was a nationalist, and Hitler was the cause of Europe's physical and moral implosion in World War II. But nationalism isn't Hitlerism, and Hitlerism wasn't merely nationalism; fundamentally, it was totalitarianism. By contrast, the communist countries imposed on Eastern Europe after World War II were explicitly "international" in their outlook. Europe, however, was not better off because of them.

The second myth is that, since nationalism is the problem, Europe must be the solution. "We need more Europe, not less," said Tony Blair in 2002, in a speech that stressed the need for a European Constitution. In Mr. Blair's view, wherever the EU has gone, good things have followed. Yet it would be closer to the truth to say that wherever good things have happened, the EU has followed.

After last year's enlargement of the EU by 10 new member states, European leaders congratulated themselves for the achievement of making Europe "whole and free." In fact, Europe had already been free for 15 years, an accomplishment that owed more to Ronald Reagan than to the timid European leaders of the day who sought accommodation with their eastern neighbors. Indeed, if the EU's enlargement was extraordinary in any respect, it was in its belatedness and the comparative miserliness of its terms.
The third myth is that the "European solution" actually solves anything. Turn again to Mr. Blair: "The way that EU membership has transformed Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece into prosperous economies in 20 years," he said, "should be tremendous encouragement to Central and Eastern Europeans."


The notion that it was EU membership that was primarily responsible for making these countries prosperous is demonstrably false. Switzerland and Norway, two of Europe's richest countries, are not in the EU. As for Ireland, it joined the EU in 1973, remained a backwater despite massive subsidies from Brussels, and only took off following radical free-market reforms in the late 1980s. Most EU leaders, however, have avoided serious domestic reforms--and the political risks they entail--in favor of grandiose pan-European schemes.

In the case of the euro, it's true, Europeans have been better served by a single well-managed currency than by a basket of sometimes poorly managed ones. Still, the same Maastricht Treaty that created the euro also imposed arbitrary budget-deficit caps that precluded tax cuts, and every year the EU comes closer to harmonizing its fiscal and regulatory regimes, with ruinous consequences for competition and job creation.


Finally, there is the myth that the EU has something larger to offer the world. In economic affairs, the offering has been corporatism and welfare, a model supposedly more humane than America's system of "cowboy capitalism." In foreign affairs Europe has stood for dialogue, development, human rights and multilateralism. Yet the soft-power methods of European diplomacy did nothing to stop the killing in the Balkans and have proved basically irrelevant in the war on terror. As for euronomics, it has delivered 15 consecutive years of laggard performance, culminating in some of the highest unemployment rates the Continent has seen since the 1930s. What does all this mean for "Europe"? Until the French and Dutch voters spoke, the quotation marks would have been unnecessary: A myth in which people believe has the moral, and often practical, force of fact. A myth in which people no longer believe is a trunkless statue in the desert. The EU has lost its trunk. Europe--no quotation marks this time--may now discover itself anew, and prosper.

Dear Mr. Webber: I appreciate your message of support and your insights into some of the problems in developing marijuana and marijuana extracts as a pharmaceutical. Following the money is always appropriate, as you have so clearly indicated. I am forwarding your letter to my colleagues for reading. Thanks again for your support.Lyle E. Craker

News and Opinions

Carl S. Webber
670 West Valley Road
Wayne PA 19087
June 6, 2005

Professor Lyle E. Craker
UMass Amherst

Dear Professor Craker:

I am writing in response to an article on today's Fox News website which makes references to you and your work. I am a retired Management Consultant (MBA Wharton 1959) and a former non-scientific manager in the pharmaceutical industry.

The diagnostic question about why research on THC medical use is discouraged is: who stands to loose the most if THC and its congeners showed useful medical properties and were legally permitted in the US for medical use? Let us "follow the money".

Acceptable medical use would obviously greatly increase demand for permitting the recreational use of THC based products.

THC based products would compete with alcohol whose sales volume might diminish and profit margins erode.

Federal and State Governments, who derive a large income from taxes on products containing alcohol, and businesses engaged in the manufacture and sale of alcohol containing products, would also loose income. (The liquor lobby contributes to many politicians.)

Governmental concern must also be increased by the fact that informal THC production is cheap and easy compared to brewing beer or fermenting grapes, or distilling spirits.

There are also the non-economic and very reasonable concerns of any society about easily produced products with the combined properties of inducing pleasure and reducing judgment and physical coordination.

These observations will probably not be new to you, but I hope that you may find their expression of some use - if only to mitigate frustration at the usual inability of a large and complicated democracy to deal with the issues described.

Sincerely,

Carl S. Webber







I

Verizon Online



http://powerlineblog.com/archives/010512.php

Unmitigated Galloway

Hmmmm...Our friend Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics has kindly alerted us to this mash note to George Galloway from Scott Ritter in Ritter's Guardian column [http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1489118,00.html]: "In the belly of the beast." Scott Ritter lauding George Galloway...perfect!

Fortunately, the new issue of the Weekly Standard carries the antidote. The Standard's featured articles this week are "Unmitigated Galloway" by Christopher Hitchens and "Saddam's business partners" by Stephen Hayes.

JOHN adds: Hayes's column is an absolutely superb short history of the oil for food program and the current revelations about Saddam's bribery of foreign politicians and, apparently, at least one U.N. official--the head of the oil for food program, Benon Sevan.


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Next up, the two referenced articles:




http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/641kyjkk.a
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Unmitigated Galloway
From the May 30, 2005 issue: Saddam's favorite MP goes to Washington.
by Christopher Hitchens
05/30/2005, Volume 010, Issue 35





EVERY JOURNALIST HAS A LIST of regrets: of stories that might have been. Somewhere on my personal list is an invitation I received several years ago, from a then-Labour member of parliament named George Galloway. Would I care, he inquired, to join him on a chartered plane to Baghdad? He was hoping to call attention to the sufferings of the Iraqi people under sanctions, and had long been an admirer of my staunch and muscular prose and my commitment to universal justice (I paraphrase only slightly). Indeed, in an article in a Communist party newspaper in 2001 he referred to me as "that great British man of letters" and "the greatest polemicist of our age."

No thanks, was my reply. I had my own worries about the sanctions, but I had also already been on an officially guided visit to Saddam's Iraq and had decided that the next time I went to that terrorized slum it would be with either the Kurdish guerrillas or the U.S. Marines. (I've since fulfilled both ambitions.) Moreover, I knew a bit about Galloway. He had had to resign as the head of a charity called "War on Want," after repaying some disputed expenses for living the high life in dirt-poor countries. Indeed, he was a type well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing's too good for the working class: what the English call a "wide boy."

This was exactly his demeanor when I ran into him last Tuesday on the sidewalk of Constitution Avenue, outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building, where he was due to testify before the subcommittee that has been uncovering the looting of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. His short, cocky frame was enveloped in a thicket of recording equipment, and he was holding forth almost uninterrupted until I asked him about his endorsement of Saddam Hussein's payment for suicide-murderers in Israel and the occupied territories. He had evidently been admirably consistent in his attention to my humble work, because he changed tone and said that this was just what he'd expect from a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay." It takes a little more than this to wound your correspondent--I could still hold a martini without spilling it when I was "the greatest polemicist of our age" in 2001--but please note that the real thrust is contained in the word "Trotskyist." Galloway says that the worst day of his entire life was the day the Soviet Union fell. His existence since that dreadful event has involved the pathetic search for an alternative fatherland. He has recently written that, "just as Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq's own Great Leap Forward." I love the word "scale" in that sentence. I also admire the use of the word "plotted."

As it happens, I adore the street-fight and soap-box side of political life, so that when the cluster had moved inside, and when Galloway had taken his seat flanked by his aides and guards, I decided to deny him the 10 minutes of unmolested time that otherwise awaited him before the session began. Denouncing the hearings as a show-trial the previous week, he had claimed that he had written several times to the subcommittee (whose members he has publicly called "lickspittles") asking to be allowed to clear his name, and been ignored. The subcommittee staff denies possessing any record of such an overture. Taking a position near where he was sitting, I asked him loudly if he had brought a copy of his letter, or letters. A fresh hose of abuse was turned upon me, but I persisted in asking, and after awhile others joined in--receiving no answer--so at least he didn't get to sit gravely like a volunteer martyr.

Senators Norm Coleman and Carl Levin then began the proceedings, and staff members went through a meticulous presentation, with documents and boards, showing the paperwork of the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organization and the Iraqi Oil Ministry. These were augmented by testimony from an (unnamed) "senior Saddam regime official," who had vouched for the authenticity of the provenance and the signatures. The exhibits clearly showed that pro-Saddam political figures in France and Russia, and at least one American oil company, had earned the right to profit from illegal oil-trades, and had sweetened the pot by kicking back a percentage to Saddam's personal palace-building and mass grave-digging fund.

In several cases, the documents suggested that a man named Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian tycoon, had been intimately involved in these transactions. Galloway's name also appears in parentheses on the Zureikat papers--perhaps as an aide-memoire to those processing them--but you must keep in mind that the material does not show transfers directly to Galloway himself; only to Zureikat, his patron and partner and friend. In an analogous way, one cannot accuse Scott Ritter, who made a ferocious documentary attacking the Iraq war, of being in Iraqi pay. One may be aware, though, that the Iraqi-American businessman who financed that film, Shakir al-Khafaji, has since shown up in the captured Oil-for-Food correspondence.

After about 90 minutes of this cumulative testimony, Galloway was seated and sworn, and the humiliation began. The humiliation of the deliberative body, I mean. I once sat in the hearing room while a uniformed Oliver North hectored a Senate committee and instructed the legislative branch in its duties, and not since that day have I felt such alarm and frustration and disgust. Galloway has learned to master the word "neocon" and the acronym "AIPAC," and he insulted the subcommittee for its deference to both of these. He took up much of his time in a demagogic attack on the lie-generated war in Iraq. He announced that he had never traded in a single barrel of oil, and he declared that he had never been a public supporter of the Saddam Hussein regime. As I had guessed he would, he made the most of the anonymity of the "senior Saddam regime official," and protested at not knowing the identity of his accuser. He improved on this by suggesting that the person concerned might now be in a cell in Abu Ghraib.

In a small way--an exceedingly small way--this had the paradoxical effect of making me proud to be British. Parliament trains its sons in a hard school of debate and unscripted exchange, and so does the British Labour movement. You get your retaliation in first, you rise to a point of order, you heckle and you watch out for hecklers. The torpid majesty of a Senate proceeding does nothing to prepare you for a Galloway, who is in addition a man without embarrassment who has stayed just on the right side of many inquiries into his character and his accounting methods. He has, for example, temporarily won a libel case against the Daily Telegraph in London, which printed similar documents about him that were found in the Oil Ministry just after the fall of Baghdad. The newspaper claimed a public-interest defense, and did not explicitly state that the documents were genuine. Galloway, for his part, carefully did not state that they were false, either. The case has now gone to appeal.

When estimating the propensity of anyone to take money or gifts, one must also balance the propensity of a regime to offer them. I once had an Iraqi diplomat contact in London, who later became one of Saddam's ministers. After inviting him to dinner one night, I noticed that he had wordlessly left a handsome bag, which contained a small but nice rug, several boxes of Cuban cigars (which I don't smoke), and several bottles of single malt Scotch. I was at the time a fairly junior editor at a socialist weekly. More recently, I have interviewed a very senior and reliable U.N. arms inspector in Iraq, who was directly offered an enormous bribe by Tariq Aziz himself, and who duly reported the fact to the U.S. government. If the Baathists would risk approaching this particular man, it seems to me, they must have tried it with practically everybody. Quite possibly, though, the Saddam regime decided that Galloway was entirely incorruptible, and would consider such an inducement beneath him.

SUCH SPECULATION TO ONE SIDE, the subcommittee and its staff had a tranche of information on Galloway, and on his record for truthfulness. It would have been a simple matter for them to call him out on a number of things. First of all, and easiest, he had dared to state under oath that he had not been a defender of the Saddam regime. This, from the man who visited Baghdad after the first Gulf war and, addressing Saddam, said: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability." How's that for lickspittling? And even if you make allowances for emotional public moments, you can't argue with Galloway's own autobiography, blush-makingly entitled I'm Not the Only One, which was published last spring and from which I offer the following extracts:

The state of Kuwait is "clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole, stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion." (Kuwait existed long before Iraq had even been named.) "In my experience none of the Ba'ath leaders have displayed any hostility to Jews." The post-Gulf war massacres of Kurds and Shia in 1991 were part of "a civil war that involved massive violence on both sides." Asked about Saddam's palaces after one of his many fraternal visits, he remarked, "Our own head of state has a fair bit of real estate herself." Her Majesty the Queen and her awful brood may take up a lot of room, but it's hardly comparable to one palace per province, built during a time of famine. Discussing Saddam's direct payments to the families of suicide-murderers--the very question he had refused to answer when I asked him--he once again lapsed into accidental accuracy, as with the Stalin comparison, and said that "as the martyred know, he put Iraq's money where his mouth was." That's true enough: It was indeed Iraq's money, if a bit more than Saddam's mouth.

At the hearing, also, Galloway was half-correct in yelling at the subcommittee that he had been a critic of Saddam Hussein when Donald Rumsfeld was still making friendly visits to Baghdad. Here, a brief excursion into the aridities of left history may elucidate more than the Galloway phenomenon.

There came a time, in the late 1970s, when the Iraqi Communist party realized the horrific mistake it had made in joining the Baath party's Revolutionary Command Council. The Communists in Baghdad, as I can testify from personal experience and interviews at the time, began to protest--too late--at the unbelievable cruelty of Saddam's purge of the army and the
state: a prelude to his seizure of total power in a full-blown fascist coup. The consequence of this, in Britain, was the setting-up of a group named
CARDRI: the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq. Many democratic socialists and liberals supported this organization, but there was no doubting that its letterhead and its active staff were Communist volunteers. And Galloway joined it. At the time, it is at least half true to say, the United States distinctly preferred Saddam's Iraq to Khomeini's Iran, and acted accordingly. Thus a leftist could attack Saddam for being, among other things, an American client. We ought not to forget the shame of American policy at that time, because the preference for Saddam outlived the war with Iran, and continued into the postwar Anfal campaign to exterminate the Kurds. In today's "antiwar" movement, you may still hear the echoes of that filthy compromise, in the pseudo-ironic jibe that "we" used to be Saddam's ally.

But mark the sequel. It must have been in full knowledge, then, of that repression, and that genocide, and of the invasion of Kuwait and all that ensued from it, that George Galloway shifted his position and became an outright partisan of the Iraqi Baath. There can be only two explanations for this, and they do not by any means exclude one another. The first explanation, which would apply to many leftists of different stripes, is that anti-Americanism simply trumps everything, and that once Saddam Hussein became an official enemy of Washington the whole case was altered. Given what Galloway has said at other times, in defense of Slobodan Milosevic for example, it is fair to assume that he would have taken such a position for
nothing: without, in other words, the hope of remuneration.

There was another faction, however, that was, relatively speaking, nonpolitical. During the imposition of international U.N. sanctions on Iraq, and the creation of the Oil-for-Food system, it swiftly became known to a class of middlemen that lavish pickings were to be had by anyone who could boast an insider contact in Baghdad. This much is well known and has been solidly established, by the Volcker report and by the Senate subcommittee. During the material time, George Galloway received hard-to-get visas for Iraq on multiple occasions, and admits to at least two personal meetings with Saddam Hussein and more than ten with his "dear friend" Tariq Aziz. But as far as is known by me, he confined his activity on these occasions to pro-regime propaganda, with Iraqi crowds often turned out by the authorities to applaud him, and provide a useful platform in both parliament and the press back home.

However, his friend and business partner, Fawaz Zureikat, didn't concern himself so much with ideological questions (though he did try to set up a broadcasting service for Saddam). He was, as Galloway happily testified, involved in a vast range of deals in Baghdad. But Galloway's admitted knowledge of this somehow does not extend to Zureikat's involvement in any Oil-for-Food transactions, which are now prima facie established in black and white by the subcommittee's report. Galloway, indeed, has arranged to be adequately uninformed about this for some time now: It is two years since he promised the BBC that he would establish and make known the facts about his Zureikat connection.

Here then are these facts, as we know them without his help. In 1998, Galloway founded something, easily confused with a charity, known as the Mariam Appeal. The ostensible aim of the appeal was to provide treatment in Britain for a 4-year-old Iraqi girl named Mariam Hamza, who suffered from leukemia. An announced secondary aim was to campaign against the sanctions then in force, and still a third, somewhat occluded, aim was to state that Mariam Hamza and many others like her had contracted cancer from the use of depleted-uranium shells by American forces in the first Gulf war. A letter exists, on House of Commons writing paper, signed by Galloway and appointing Fawaz Zureikat as his personal representative in Iraq, on any and all matters connected to the Mariam Appeal.

Although it was briefly claimed by one of its officers that the Appeal raised most of its money from ordinary citizens, Galloway has since testified that the bulk of the revenue came from the ruler of the United Arab Emirates and from a Saudi prince. He has also conceded that Zureikat was a very generous donor. The remainder of the funding is somewhat opaque, since the British Charity Commissioners, who monitor such things, began an investigation in 2003. This investigation was inconclusive. The commissioners were able to determine that the Mariam Appeal, which had used much of its revenue for political campaigning, had not but ought to have been legally registered as a charity. They were not able to determine much beyond this, because it was then announced that the account books of the Appeal had been removed, first to Amman, Jordan, and then to Baghdad. This is the first charity or proto-charity in history to have disposed of its records in that way.

TO THIS DAY, George Galloway defiantly insists, as he did before the senators, that he has "never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." As a Clintonian defense this has its admirable points: I myself have never seen a kilowatt, but I know that a barrel is also a unit and not an entity. For the rest, his defense would be more impressive if it answered any charge that has actually been made. Galloway is not supposed by anyone to have been an oil trader. He is asked, simply, to say what he knows about his chief fundraiser, nominee, and crony. And when asked this, he flatly declines to answer. We are therefore invited by him to assume that, having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of "charities," he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal.

Even if the matter of subornation and bribery had never arisen, there would remain the crucial question of Iraq itself. It was said during the time of sanctions on that long-suffering country that the embargo was killing, or had killed, as many as a million people, many of them infants. Give credit to the accusers here. Some of the gravamen of the charge must be true. Add the parasitic regime to the sanctions, over 12 years, and it is clear that the suffering of average Iraqis must have been inordinate.

There are only two ways this suffering could have been relieved. Either the sanctions could have been lifted, as Galloway and others demanded, or the regime could have been removed. The first policy, if followed without conditions, would have untied the hands of Saddam. The second policy would have had the dual effect of ending sanctions and terminating a hideous and lawless one-man rule. But when the second policy was proposed, the streets filled with people who absolutely opposed it. Saying farewell to the regime was, evidently, too high a price to pay for relief from sanctions.

Let me phrase this another way: Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam! This is repellent enough in itself. If the Saddam regime was cheating its terrified people of food and medicine in order to finance its own propaganda, that would perhaps be in character. But if it were to be discovered that any third parties had profited from the persistence of "sanctions plus regime," prolonging the agony and misery thanks to personal connections, then one would have to become quite judgmental.

The bad faith of a majority of the left is instanced by four things (apart, that is, from mass demonstrations in favor of prolonging the life of a fascist government). First, the antiwar forces never asked the Iraqi left what it wanted, because they would have heard very clearly that their comrades wanted the overthrow of Saddam. (President Jalal Talabani's party, for example, is a member in good standing of the Socialist International.) This is a betrayal of what used to be called internationalism. Second, the left decided to scab and blackleg on the Kurds, whose struggle is the oldest cause of the left in the Middle East. Third, many leftists and liberals stressed the cost of the Iraq intervention as against the cost of domestic expenditure, when if they had been looking for zero-sum comparisons they might have been expected to cite waste in certain military programs, or perhaps the cost of the "war on drugs." This, then, was mere cynicism. Fourth, and as mentioned, their humanitarian talk about the sanctions turned out to be the most inexpensive hypocrisy.

George Galloway--having been rightly expelled by the British Labour party for calling for "jihad" against British troops, and having since then hailed the nihilism and sadism and sectarianism that goes by the lazy name of the Iraqi "insurgency" or, in his circles, "resistance"--ran for election in a new seat in East London and was successful in unseating the Labour incumbent. His party calls itself RESPECT, which stands for "Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environment, Community, Trade Unionism." (So that really ought to be RESPECTU, except that it would then sound less like an Aretha Franklin song and more like an organ of the Romanian state under
Ceausescu.)

The defeated incumbent, Oona King, is of mixed African and Jewish heritage, and had to endure an appalling whispering campaign, based on her sex and her combined ethnicities. Who knows who started this torrent of abuse? Galloway certainly has, once again, remained adequately uninformed about it. His chief appeal was to the militant Islamist element among Asian immigrants who live in large numbers in his district, and his main organizational muscle was provided by a depraved sub-Leninist sect called the Socialist Workers party. The servants of the one god finally meet the votaries of the one-party state. Perfect. To this most opportunist of alliances, add some Tory and Liberal Democrat "tactical voters" whose hatred of Tony Blair eclipses everything else.

Perhaps I may be allowed a closing moment of sentiment here? To the left, the old East End of London was once near-sacred ground. It was here in 1936 that a massive demonstration of longshoremen, artisans, and Jewish refugees and migrants made a human wall and drove back a determined attempt by Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts to mount a march of intimidation. The event is still remembered locally as "The Battle of Cable Street." That part of London, in fact, was one of the few place in Europe where the attempt to raise the emblems of fascism was defeated by force.

And now, on the same turf, there struts a little popinjay who defends dictatorship abroad and who trades on religious sectarianism at home. Within a month of his triumph in a British election, he has flown to Washington and spat full in the face of the Senate. A megaphone media in London, and a hysterical fan-club of fundamentalists and political thugs, saw to it that he returned as a conquering hero and all-round celeb. If only the supporters of regime change, and the friends of the Afghan and Iraqi and Kurdish peoples, could manifest anything like the same resolve and determination.



Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor at the New School in New York. His new book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.



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http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/640mcodm.a
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Saddam's Business Partners
From the May 30, 2005 issue: How the Oil-for-Food scandal happened and why it matters.
by Stephen F. Hayes
05/30/2005, Volume 010, Issue 35





WHEN UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY GENERAL Kofi Annan quipped several years ago that he could "do business" with Saddam Hussein, he meant it figuratively. In light of the substantive charges coming out of the ever-expanding Oil-for-Food scandal, the throwaway line seems revealing or at least ironic.

"I think we have to take him literally," says Republican senator Norm Coleman, who is leading one of eight investigations into the corruption and mismanagement of the U.N.'s largest-ever humanitarian relief effort.

The basic outline of the scandal is simple: Saddam Hussein used the Oil-for-Food program to circumvent U.N. sanctions imposed after the Gulf war and to enrich himself and his allies. He did this by bribing leading journalists and diplomats and demanding kickbacks from those who profited from selling Iraqi oil. That he was able to do so indicates at least that the U.N. badly mismanaged the program it set up in December 1996. None of this is particularly astonishing. No one is surprised to learn that Saddam Hussein cheats, that politicians take bribes, and that the competence level of the U.N. bureaucracy is, well, suboptimal.

Nevertheless, the details of the Oil-for-Food scandal--who participated, and what they apparently did--are jaw-dropping. Vladimir Putin's chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, appears to have accepted millions of dollars in oil-soaked bribes from Saddam Hussein. The same appears to be true of the former interior minister of France, Charles Pasqua, a close friend of President Jacques Chirac. And the same appears to be true of three high-ranking U.N. executives including Benon Sevan, handpicked by Kofi Annan to administer the Oil-for-Food program. Oil-for-Food money even went to terrorist organizations supported by the Iraqi regime and, according to U.S. investigators, might be funding the insurgency today.

Through seven years' worth of deals that should never have been made, compromises that should never have been struck, and concessions that should never have been granted, Oil-for-Food strengthened Saddam Hussein. What we know about all of this now is a fraction of what will eventually be uncovered. But even this limited understanding should mean an end to Kofi Annan's term as secretary general. The sad history of U.N. incompetence on Iraq generally and in the Oil-for-Food program specifically is enough to make you wonder why George W. Bush settled for John Bolton rather than, say, John Rocker to push for reform at the world body.

AMONG THE MANY BIZARRE ASPECTS of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program is its
premise: If we, the international community, allow Saddam Hussein to take in more money by selling oil, we can end the suffering of the Iraqi people even while maintaining U.N. sanctions.

Saddam Hussein argued that Iraqis were dying because the sanctions deprived him of the money to save them. And while there is little doubt that the sanctions left Iraqis much poorer than they were before the Gulf war--annual incomes dropped nearly to a third of what they had been in 1990--it was less clear that Saddam Hussein was similarly destitute.

"Saddam's family profits from covert sales of Iraqi oil and dominance of the black market, where many of the donated medicines and food end up," said then-CIA director John Deutch in public testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on September 25, 1996. "Iraqi government funds are used to maintain lavish lifestyles. Baghdad, for example, has begun working on 48 new palaces and VIP residences during the past five years, increasing the total number of estates available to Saddam Hussein to at least 78."

Iraqis were dying because Saddam Hussein was killing them. He was actively killing them, Deutch said, by executing his political opponents and by draining the marshes of central Iraq that provided sustenance to hundreds of thousands of Shiites. And he was passively killing them by refusing to cooperate with U.N. inspectors and stealing food and medicine intended to ease their suffering.

None of this mattered to France and Russia, Hussein's chief backers on the Security Council. From virtually the beginning, they wanted the sanctions to end so that they could resume their robust, pre-Gulf war business with the Iraqi government. But Hussein made their argument difficult. For the first five years after the 1991 cease-fire, he had continually violated its terms. He had failed to account for his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. He had not cooperated fully with U.N. weapons inspectors. He had smuggled oil out of his country for sale on the black market. He had harbored a fugitive from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He had attempted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush. He had amassed troops on the Kuwaiti border, threatening a new attack. And he had dispatched 40,000 Iraqi soldiers to attack the Kurds in northern Iraq.

The United States and Britain, Hussein's chief opponents on the Security Council, wanted to maintain the sanctions. But by the mid-1990s it had become clear that Hussein was winning the public relations battle. Much of the world blamed the Americans and the British for the suffering of the Iraqi people. The Clinton administration wanted a compromise.

In April 1995, as U.N. inspectors traversed Iraq looking for proscribed weapons that Saddam was to have destroyed, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a proposal that would allow Iraq to sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months. The deal would be renewed after rigorous inspections by the Security Council to ensure that Hussein wasn't cheating. The money would go into an escrow account operated under U.N. scrutiny. Some of it would be used to compensate Kuwaiti victims of the Gulf war. Some of it would cover the cost of the U.N. weapons inspections. The bulk of the money, however, would go to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people under the U.N. sanctions. Of the $2 billion Iraq would earn from oil sales, approximately $1.3 billion would be spent on food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods. The money would be distributed from the escrow account to vendors across the globe, again with significant input from Saddam Hussein.

Iraq rejected the proposal as a violation of its sovereignty, as it had once before. The real reason was less high-minded: Hussein needed Iraqis to keep dying. He rightly interpreted as weakness the eagerness of the United States and others on the Security Council to ease the sanctions on his regime. Hussein "understood that if he exercised the option of exporting oil under the condition that only humanitarian aid could be delivered, then it would relieve the pressure on the [Security] Council to lift sanctions in their entirety," Charles Duelfer, a CIA special adviser on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, told a Senate panel last fall. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was the U.N. secretary general at the time, shrugged off Iraq's lack of cooperation with U.N. inspectors and promised Hussein that the new proposal would be a "first step toward the total lifting of the sanctions against Iraq."

When Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan on August 8, 1995, he effectively ended any hope for the total lifting of sanctions. Kamel, the nephew of Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as "Chemical Ali," was a senior regime official with responsibility for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. He revealed the elaborate schemes Hussein had put in place to hide his programs from U.N. inspectors. The Iraqi regime, not knowing what Kamel had disclosed to U.N. officials, was forced to admit a far greater level of WMD production and sophistication than had been known. The French and Russians, who had offered praise for the regime's alleged cooperation, were silenced. The drive to end sanctions was finished, or rather stalled.

Five months later, in December 1995, a U.N. agency known as the Food and Agriculture Organization produced a study that estimated 567,000 children had died as a result of the sanctions. The authors noted the seeming contradiction between the determination of U.N. humanitarian agencies to alleviate suffering and the efforts of the U.N. Security Council to enforce sanctions. The embargo, they concluded, threatened to undermine "the moral, financial, and political standing of the international community."

Another study by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) found that some 4,500 Iraqi children were dying each month from disease and starvation, and a third U.N. study, this one by the U.N. World Food Program, determined that approximately 180,000 Iraqi children under five were suffering from malnutrition. The pressure had returned.

The details of a U.N.-supervised program allowing Hussein to sell more oil in order to better provide for his people were debated for another year, with U.N. negotiators, encouraged by France and Russia, acceding to Hussein's many demands. One concession, little noticed at the time, was a provision that would allow Hussein to choose who bought and sold his oil, pending approval by the U.N. On December 10, 1996, the deal was struck.

"This is a victory for the poorest of the poor of Iraq, for the women, the children, the sick, and the disabled," said a very pleased Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The U.N. chief was not the only one who was happy. A triumphant Saddam Hussein traveled to oil-rich Kirkuk for a photo-op, where he smiled broadly as he opened a ceremonial spigot. Iraq held a nationwide celebration to mark the occasion.

Asked by a reporter about the likelihood that Hussein could circumvent or manipulate the restrictions, deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Edward Gnehm was dubious. "We designed our resolution for a cheater," he explained. "We know him. We know him well."

Looking at that formulation now--"we designed our resolution for a cheater"--Gnehm seems positively prophetic.

Whatever the intentions of its planners, the Oil-for-Food program actually worked like this: Iraq designated certain individuals or entities as potential purchasers of Iraqi oil. It gave them oil "allocations" or "vouchers" (not foreseen in the program as designed by the U.N.), which they could either use to purchase oil themselves or sell to third parties. Because the regime severely limited the number of recipients of these allocations, the recipients were able to resell the oil after attaching a surcharge--usually between 3 and 30 cents a barrel. Sales were usually a minimum of 1 million barrels, so the profits from the surcharges were significant.

Beginning in 1998, Hussein began to shift his allocations from oil companies to politicians, journalists, and terrorist groups. Mark Greenblatt, a lead investigator for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, described it this way. "His plan was simple. Rather than giving allocations to traditional oil purchasers, he gave allocations to foreign officials, journalists, even hostile terrorist entities, who then flipped their oil allocations to traditional oil companies in return for a sizable commission. In doing so, Saddam could give a foreign official or a journalist hundreds of thousands of dollars without ever paying a dime."

Officials at the highest levels of the Iraqi regime--including Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, and Oil Minister Amir Muhammad Rashid--chose the recipients.

The U.N. did not see any of this until the traditional oil companies contracted with Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization, known as SOMO. (One notable exception to this U.N. ignorance appears to have been Benon Sevan, the administrator of Oil-for-Food, who knew about the illegal allocations because he personally was receiving some. More on that later.) The Iraqis, however, kept scrupulous records of each step in their bribery scheme.

On September 1, 2000, at the direction of Saddam Hussein, SOMO began demanding a "surcharge" from each purchaser of Iraqi oil. According to the Coleman-Levin investigation, these surcharges ranged from 10 to 30 cents per barrel and were paid directly to the Iraqi regime, often through another party who, of course, took a cut. The scheme worked for two years until the United States and Britain insisted that it end. By that time, however, Hussein had made profits of nearly $230 million outside of the U.N. process, in one of several illegal mechanisms he devised to enrich himself.

Over roughly the same period, according to the Duelfer report, the Iraqi regime increased exponentially its spending on the country's Military Industrial Commission--from $7.8 million in 1998 to $500 million in 2003.

It is true that much of Iraq's illicit funding during the period of the Oil-for-Food program came from ordinary oil smuggling unrelated to the U.N. But the improvements to the oil production processes that allowed Iraq to produce and distribute oil legally also helped the illegal oil trade. The Duelfer Report estimates that Iraq's oil-smuggling profits from 1996-2003 were nearly triple those of the previous five years.

AT A SENATE HEARING LAST TUESDAY, the Coleman-Levin investigators highlighted the bribes the Iraqi regime paid to foreign officials from Britain, Russia, and France. The dramatic testimony of British member of parliament George Galloway, who unconvincingly denied knowledge of any Iraqi oil transactions, garnered most of the headlines. But Galloway is a well-known apologist for Saddam Hussein, and as a propagandist for the regime he was rather ineffective.

Two other men under investigation by the Coleman-Levin committee, however, were close advisers to the two chief opponents of the Iraq war--Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin.

One Coleman-Levin report concerns former French interior minister Charles Pasqua, who is described as a "long-time friend and political ally" of Chirac. The report says Pasqua "was a vocal supporter of restoring economic ties with the Hussein regime" as interior minister and charges him with receiving allocations for 11 million barrels of Iraqi oil. Pasqua has denied any involvement.

A second report focuses on oil allocations to the Russian Presidential Council. "Russia topped the list of nations from whom the Hussein regime wanted support at the Security Council. As a result, the Hussein regime granted allocations to Russian individuals, political parties, and others due to their good relationship with Iraq and their support for the lifting of sanctions. . . . The scale of the oil allocations given to Russian individuals and political parties was substantial, totaling approximately 30 percent of all the oil allocated during the course of the program."

Many of these allocations went to the Unity party, a predecessor of the Unified Russia party, which currently holds 37 percent of the seats in the Russian Duma. The report describes it as "a pro-Kremlin party associated with Russian president Vladimir Putin." In a prison interview last month with Senate investigators, Tariq Aziz said the Unity party was chosen for the allocations "because Russia was taking positions at the Security Council that were favorable to Iraq."

Alexander Voloshin was the head of the Russian Presidential Council and, until his resignation in 2003, the top adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin. He has been called the Russian Karl Rove for his close relationship to Putin, and, according to the Coleman-Levin report, "there is little debate over the magnitude of Mr. Voloshin's influence in Russian government during the Oil-for-Food Program." In all, the Russian Presidential Council is alleged to have received allocations for 90 million barrels of Iraqi oil. Another well-known but less influential Russian politician, the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, also received oil allocations under Oil-for-Food, good for more than 70 million barrels.

The Coleman-Levin reports base their conclusions on a wide variety of evidence including documents from the Iraqi Oil Ministry and the State Oil Marketing Organization that record the transactions in detail. Investigators also conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iraqi officials, including Aziz and Ramadan, who supported and in many cases expanded upon the documentation.

In early June, the Coleman-Levin committee will make available a similar report on the Iraqi regime's funding of terrorist entities. They will lay out a case study of the allocations provided to the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), a terrorist group Hussein funded to conduct operations against Iran. Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit and author of Imperial Hubris, described some of the work the MEK did for Hussein in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies' Eyes. Osama bin Laden "may have trained some fighters in Iraq at camps run by Saddam's anti-Iran force, the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK)," Scheuer writes. "The first group of bin Laden's fighters is reported to have been sent to MEK camps in June 1998; MEK cadre were also then providing technical and military training for Taliban forces and running the Taliban's anti-Iran propaganda."

THAT THE U.N. WAS APPARENTLY CLUELESS as this scheme unfolded is bad enough. What's worse, though, is that several high-ranking U.N. officials appear to have been involved in the illegality. Court documents related to the prosecution of Samir Vincent, the first American to be charged in the Oil-for-Food scandal, refer to Vincent's meetings with U.N. officials. Vincent was acting as an unregistered agent of the government of Iraq when he "and other individuals, including United Nations officials, met in Manhattan in an effort to secure terms favorable to the Government of Iraq in connection with the adoption and implementation of Resolution 986"--the resolution that created the Oil-for-Food program. Vincent is now cooperating with prosecutors.

And last month, a criminal complaint against South Korean Tongsun Park, who also acted on Hussein's behalf, mentions "U.N. Official #1" and "U.N. Official #2" as recipients of bribes from the former Iraqi regime. The two officials remain unnamed. Many news articles have pointed out that Park is a longtime friend of former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and a business associate of Maurice Strong, an adviser to Kofi Annan who currently serves as the U.N. envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea. Both men have denied any wrongdoing.

So has Kojo Annan, Kofi Annan's son. The younger Annan was consulting for the Swiss firm Cotecna while the firm was bidding to win a contract to monitor the Oil-for-Food program. Cotecna won the contract on December 31, 1998, the same day Kojo Annan's consultancy ended. Cotecna continued to pay Kojo some $2,500 per month as part of a "non-compete" clause. The payments continued until February 2004. Both Annans and Cotecna contend that Kojo's work had nothing to do with Oil-for-Food.

The same cannot be said for Benon Sevan, since he is the man Kofi Annan handpicked to run the Oil-for-Food program. According to an interim report from the Oil-for-Food investigation commissioned by the U.N. itself, Sevan "repeatedly solicited" oil allocations worth about $1 million for a company called African Middle East Petroleum. Paul Volcker, chairman of the U.N.-backed investigation, said, "The Iraqi government, in providing such allocations, certainly thought they were buying influence."

Volcker added: "Mr. Sevan placed himself in a grave and continuing conflict-of-interest situation that violated explicit U.N. rules and violated the standards of integrity essential to a high-level international civil servant."

I visited Norm Coleman in his Senate office last Wednesday. He spoke in measured terms until I asked him about Benon Sevan. "The first Volcker report concludes with a summary that this is a conflict of interest. It wasn't a conflict of interest. Sevan lied to investigators. Sevan lies. He lied to us about money that he has publicly declared. He lied to investigators. He lied about his relationship with a person who ultimately got the contract for the oil. We then get documentation that in fact Sevan lobbied for this guy to get Iraqi oil for his company. That's probable cause that he has committed a crime. And yet it was characterized as a conflict of interest?"

Coleman races through his list of grievances until that last sentence, at which point he pauses between each word. Conflict . . . of . . . interest? He shakes his head in disbelief, and then he's off again.

"That's not a conflict of interest. Sevan should be available--he shouldn't have immunity. I'm kind of on a rant here, but Sevan--up until we raised the issue, the U.N. was paying his legal fees. With Oil-for-Food money! Here's a guy who has lied to investigators--probable cause to believe he has committed a crime--and Kofi was going to pay his legal fees until we raised the issue!"

In recent weeks, the Volcker committee itself has come under scrutiny after two of its top investigators, former FBI agent Robert Parton and his deputy, Miranda Duncan, quit the probe. The Volcker committee originally explained their departures by claiming simply that the pair had finished their work. Shortly thereafter, the committee cited "personal reasons." Eventually, the truth emerged. Both Parton and Duncan believed that the Volcker committee's report on Kofi and Kojo Annan was too forgiving of the U.N. secretary general. In the days since, Parton has accused the Volcker committee of violating the confidentiality agreement it had with a witness, and that witness himself has accused the Annans of witness tampering.

Is it any wonder that Coleman wants to investigate whether Kofi Annan was--quite literally--doing business with Saddam Hussein?



Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

Sheer hysteria.

It is certainly very disagreeable and quite dangerousto live at a time when the adoption of a national identity card seems necessary. Can 100 senators be wrong? What's to prevent that? Are there better alternatives? Is uncontrolled immigration for political gain a good move? Is this a perfect world?

I see no reason to expect anything but the usual lumbering about by the politicians, teachers and other leaders whom we have so carelessly elected or selected and who are therefore just what we deserve.

Carl S. Webber
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.newswithviews.com/iserbyt/iserbyt24.htm

UNANIMOUS TREASON
By Charlotte Iserbyt
May 12, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

The U.S Senate's unanimous vote on the REAL ID card is a tragedy for ournation. What an abuse of the U.S. Constitution! Ghastly news. This neat little package says we won't be able to open a bank account, boarda plane or bus or drive a car. And just wait until the deliberately dumbeddown socialist bureaucrats have finished with writing the regulations!!!!!! The unanimous vote by the Senate shows they have been "unanimously" dumbeddown.

"Deliberately" in order to take our country down. The majority of ourelected officials have never read the Constitution and its Bill of Rights,and, sadly enough, if one even mentions that old relic to them, they don'tseem to care or take it seriously. Had this legislation been voted on separately, there is a big possibility itwould not have passed since the vote on it was close in the House. How is itpossible that such a very important piece of legislation, designed to affectall Americans and their offspring forever, had little or no discussion? Howdeceitful, disgusting, manipulative for the Senate to have attached it to amilitary appropriations bill which dealt with the important issue of fundingthe needs of our servicemen and women. Do we really believe our young peopleserving abroad are going to be happy when they return to a country thattracks its citizens as is done in totalitarian countries? Surely they willask "exactly what have we been fighting for?" Why couldn't the Senators who opposed this totalitarian internal passport,and there were quite a few, have said they were going to vote "no" on thewhole package unless the internal passport provision was removed from themilitary appropriation? That might have forced the Senate's hand and allowedtwo separate votes on these two very separate issues. This writer heard viaC-SPAN two Democrat Senators, Reid from Nevada and Nelson from Florida,speak strongly against the sneaky way it was going to be voted on, butunfortunately they went along and voted with the rest of the dumbed down. Is it any wonder Senators Snowe and Collins, ME, have refused to tell me,over a period of two years, the truth about exactly who helped design thisinternal passport? Former KGB Chiefs Primakov and Karpov, who were involved,must be laughing on their way to the international socialist governmentplanned by Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev, et al. If these Senators (all 100 of them!) represent the views of theirconstituents, one must assume that our nation has gone stark, raving, mad.

C 2004 Charlotte T. Iserbyt - All Rights Reserved

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,129
9,DRMN_86_3547736,00.html

Campos: Freedom unused is abused
February 15, 2005

Over the past few days I've been bombarded with e-mails regarding the Ward Churchill scandal. Many have expressed astonishment at how someone like Churchill could have been hired in the first place, let alone tenured and made chair of a department.
It's a good question, but it's not one that any of the academics who've written me have asked. We already know the answer.

One of the many ironies of this scandal that threatens to undermine academic freedom is that it couldn't have happened if those who decided to hire, tenure and promote Churchill had taken advantage of academic freedom themselves.

The privileges created by tenure are supposed to insulate faculty from political pressures in general and censorship in particular. Yet those of us in the academy, if we were candid, would have to admit that few places are more riddled with the distorting effects of politics and censorship than university faculties.

Academics claim to despise censorship, but the truth is we do a remarkably good job of censoring ourselves. This is especially true in regard to affirmative action. Who among us can claim to have spoken up every time a job candidate almost as preposterous as Churchill was submitted for our consideration? Things like the Churchill fiasco are made possible by a web of lies kept intact by a conspiracy of silence.

The University of Colorado hired Churchill onto its faculty because he claimed to be an American Indian. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with research universities can glance at his résumé and state this with something close to complete confidence.

Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university's willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom. Or at least we can hope so.

As someone of generally liberal political inclinations, I support affirmative action in principle. (And I have surely benefited from it in practice: My parents came to this country from Mexico in the year of my birth, and I spoke no English when I started school.) In theory, the argument that aggressively seeking out persons of diverse backgrounds can enrich the intellectual life of the university has great force.

Affirmative action is based, in part, on the idea that it will help us understand the viewpoints of the conquered as well as those of the conqueror, of the weak as well as the strong, of those far from power as well as those who wield it.

Too often, these sentiments are abused by those who sacrifice intellectual integrity while engaging in the most extreme forms of preferential hiring. Ward Churchill's career provides a lurid illustration of what can happen - indeed, of what we know will happen - when academic standards are prostituted in the name of increasing diversity.

Tenure and academic freedom are hard to defend if they don't provide us who benefit from them with the minimal degree of courage necessary to say, when confronted by someone like Churchill, enough is enough.

If even the extraordinary protections of tenure don't lead us to condemn a fraud of this magnitude in unmistakable and unapologetic terms, then we don't deserve them. What else is academic freedom for?


Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

Most of the the arguments for or against something in the Libertarian article quoted below seem to rest upon the assumtion that anything they find contrary to the US Consititution is by that sole fact wrong.

I love our Constitution and have sworn to defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. However, that document is neither eternal nor universal. There was a time before it was written; and there probably will be time when its message will exist in other forms amd formats. There is room in the world for differences of perspectives - if that thought be not too strange a thought for Libertarians - and even in present times, the document requires interpretation. Yes, interpretation, about which there must always be discussion, disagreement, and even as we have seen, civil war.

"Liberty" is a fine concept, but its application requires continuous monitoring. Milton remearked: "Licence they mean when they cry Liberty, for who love that must first be wise and good". Of course, all those words beg the issue. But words always do.

With best wishes,
Carl S. Webber
http://artbycsw.blogspot.com/
http://4veritas.blogspot.com/


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-cas@v2.listbox.com [mailto:owner-cas@v2.listbox.com] On Behalf Of Howard Bleicher
Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2005 3:57 PM
To: cas
Subject: CAS: Defeating the Republican Police State Mandate

http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle306-20050213-04.html
THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 306, February 13, 2005
Happy Anniversary!
Defeating the Republican Police State Mandate
by Sergei Borglum Hoff
sparwood@ifriendly.com

Admittedly, I have a tendency to become a bit severe while
addressing police state atrocities, life taking betrayals, apathy, and widespread ignorance. Though I am desirous of mending this tiny personality flaw, I cannot find compelling reasons to retract even one castigating word. If, while in the defense of our founding principles and human rights I also manage to shame a few quasi and pseudo-patriots into defending the Constitution, an unpleasant yet needed victory will be declared. For possible consolation, any bruised egos may loosely relate such unflattering counsel to my expression of "Tough Love." We can no longer survive our national crisis with timid responses. Americans are now engaged in a
civil war!

They Irresponsibly and Immorally Wasted Their Votes
As an illuminating consequence of the November elections, liberty-committed Americans, those who live by the founding principles of nonintervention, personal responsibility, and self-ownership, can clearly identify the Republican Party as their enemy. The Grand Old Party or if
you prefer The Party of Lincoln has stepped forward to become the majority 'Party' of legislated imperialism, aggression, and servitude. Never again can the Republicans pretentiously carry the Torch of Liberty, and delude honorable Americans.

Having witnessed for almost four years the President's assault on our
Constitution through his foreign policies, the Republicans should have
been well aware if his imperialist ambitions. The strategy for the
attainment of his un-American goal has become apparent, the unlawful use of depleted uranium bullets and bombs along with the application of torture. The aiming
and loss of lives resulting from this unconstitutional and unjustified
war ith Iraq is unconscionable. There is no foreseeable end to his war
crimes.

And, the financial burden to be endured by American taxpayers will be
in the hundreds of billions. Additionally: Let us not ignore his failed domestic programs and selective suspensions of "habeas corpus" [the people's protection against
unlawful imprisonment] along with the guaranteed protections of the
Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Tenth Amendments within the Bill of Rights. The
results of his treachery should be obvious to all. Nonetheless, the Republicans
have spoken with their votes, and in doing so they overwhelmingly gave the President an additional four years of opportunities to invade other sovereign nations and further assault the unalienable rights of all Americans.

The President was humbled by the people's confidence in him; he said
as much. Humbled? I can understand that the President might enjoy a
sense of satisfaction if his reelection victory had been a reflection of the
people's confidence in his sound foreign and domestic policies, his unrivaled abilities, or his unshakeable loyalty to our nation as a sovereign Constitutional Republic.

Tragically for this nation and probably the entire world, the President was certainly not reelected because of confidence. Alas, confidence-unrecognizable in Republicans today-was not the governing factor in his reelection. The observable causes of his victory were 'Party' loyalty, widespread renunciation of our founding principles, fear of personal responsibility and the potential hazards of liberty, and a willingness to be oppressed by one who they perceive as their own [Christian?].


However, a few Republicans did provide reasons for their votes.
The reasons given were the defense of Second Amendment rights and the restoration of family values. While others reasoned that George Bush is less evil than John Kerry.

Such reasoning was unsound; the Libertarian Party was nationally available as a viable alternative. In a Libertarian society, the people either sustain traditional
family values or live by their own. Parents set the example for their
children, and instill their chosen values without legislated bureaucratic guidance.
So as not to burden fellow Americans with the responsibility, conscientious parents shelter their own children from what they deem as morally reprehensible programming, materials, and lifestyles. Parents select religious, private, locally regulated public, or home schooling without federal government interference. Along with many federal agencies, the Department of Education lacks constitutional authority; therefore, it is abolished. Parents take responsibility! Regarding Second Amendment rights, they are absolutely defended by the Libertarian Party. As for which candidate is the lesser of two evils, I will not waste my time on that
path.

On Inauguration Day, let the Republicans contemplate what they have
sacrificed for their ill-fated victory. Instead of patriotically considering
the elections as a means to return liberty, honor, integrity, and justice to
our nation, they irresponsibly and immorally wasted their votes.

Indeed, the Republicans handed George Bush what he has been striving for from the beginning; perpetual warfare and a police state mandate. The Republican Party has become the vanguard of degenerative Socialism, and further provided safe harbor for a tyrant.
The Republicans have forgotten that while adopting the fundamentals
for the creation of this nation, the Founding Fathers did not guarantee
our education, health, prosperity, retirement, comfort, or personal safety. Wisely, as the predominant founding principle they instead guaranteed our
liberty, which holds far greater potentials for the dignity and
advancement of mankind.

Out of ignorance, 'Party' loyalty, or fear, the Republicans are willing to submit, and give George Bush more control over their personal and professional lives. Bread, along with the well-deserved performing end of a circus will be their only rewards for submission. Will it really make any difference to these 'Party' loyalist whether their freedoms have been stolen
by Communists, the United Nations, Democrats, or a fellow Republican?


Defeating the Republican police state mandate will require courage and confidence in the founding principles of our nation. Our Society Does Not Inspire True Patriotism
It is vital that the socially and politically informed men and women
of our nation defend the constitutional principles of self-governance
and liberty. Obviously, this critical undertaking cannot be left to the
rank and file of today's feckless and cosmetic society, where mediocrity is
widely perceived as a rewardable goal. Having scorned the enlightening potentialities of liberty, thus, mastering nothing beyond competitive pretentiousness, behavioral excellence is of little interest to the American masses.

With the exception of a few self-reliant thinkers, we have degraded
into a people of frills and thrills, spurning everything remotely
resembling authenticity, personal responsibility, wisdom, and virtue. The majority
of Americans now exist in a state of intellectual hibernation.
Superficiality and emotionalism have become our medals of honor; they are displayed as exemplary measures of achievement. Dare if you can, one hour of
primetime television-reflecting the national standards of today-and draw your own conclusions.
Although discouraging for the fair-weather-patriots of "Teletubby" land, genuine patriotism will require far more than participation in emotionally arousing political events, loyally overspending at the neighborhood shopping mall, dutifully enduring the indignities of airport
security molestations, the frenzied waving of flags, or childish jubilation
each time this wanting President fortifies their feeble spirits with a
few rehearsed words of bravado. Such behavior is nothing more than emotional indulgence, which might be suitable for the annual Fourth of July parade but
is certainly no more than useless in the defense of our nation and freedoms.

Having no desire to belabor this subject, we have three basic categories of people who claim to identify with American patriotism. The liberty-committed-patriots are to be honored, as they will endure sacrifices if and when necessary in defense of this nation and human rights.
Following with a confused purpose are the pseudo-patriots, habitually
displaying intense loyalty to political factions and their leaders but
not to our nation and Constitution. They cannot conceive or appreciate ideologies beyond the confines of 'Party' indoctrination, and are willing pawns of the elite. Their usefulness as instruments of tyranny is obvious.

Such no-questions-asked loyalties were necessary for enslaving the peoples
of Communist China, Soviet Russia, and Nazi Germany. More recently, loyal Democrats enthusiastically either denied or justified the treasonous and criminal activities of the Clinton duo. Obedient Rush Limbaugh ditto-heads are doing likewise regarding George Bush's treasonous encroachments upon our liberties and nonexistent defense
of constitutional principles.


The unenlightened responses from both feuding clans are equally detrimental to liberty and the stability of our nation. Their blind loyalty has gained nothing more than contempt from genuine American patriots.

These gladiators are responsible for the police state consequences now
endured by so many, resulting from their support of the "USA Patriot Act" and the "Department of Homeland Security." Other than to add that they will
receive a thorough thrashing from the hands of reality and wisdom after
everything s lost, further comments would be pointless.
Lastly, we have the dependency-motivated-patriots who are a
sizeable and burdensome crowd indeed. People of this mentality were never the builders of our sovereign and prosperous nation, nor will they ever be its
defenders. If not suckling at the nanny-state teat, they are whining for more bureaucratic guidance and emotional support. They lack personal responsibility, practicality, and dependability. Their goal is to enlist leaders who will fulfill all needs without requiring a sacrifice in exchange. They also deserve to be enslaved by the socialist oppressor.


Do not look to these parasites for patriotic support. Nationally televised emotionalism may validate their fanciful visions of patriotism or arouse enough sensations of self-esteem to drag them through the day, but as their primary endeavor, cannot lead to a noble or victorious end.
Unless patriotism embraces truth and stimulates honorable, thoughtful,
and practical action, it will recklessly seduce us into feel-good or factional legislation, which renders regret and places all Americans in unnecessary positions of vulnerability.
Defeating the Republican police state mandate will require patriotism
based upon truth.

Liberty Must Be Enjoyed and Defended By Everyone "Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others."-William Allen White In accordance with traditional Western religions, God's gift of free will is given to all human beings. If this tenet is held as truth by the faithful, is not our interference in the lives of others hypocritical and a
renunciation of God's plan for humanity? Why then, do we assume the right to
control the lives others? Why do we tell our neighbor what he can and cannot
do with his own body or property? Why must we assert moral superiority and
impose our choice of lifestyles onto fellow Americans? Does our need to frustrate the lives of those who pursue their own vision of happiness arise from intellectual or spiritual immaturity? Instead of earnestly seeking harmonious interaction, thereby following the path of wisdom, are we lazily relying upon the discordant or prejudicial counsel from those who feign spiritual insight? Are we allowing the Jerry Falwells, Pat Robertsons, and Jimmy Swaggarts of this world to program our minds?


I have a truism that is worthy of imparting to the zealous
members of religious and special-interest factions who lament when their freedoms
have been stolen, yet unhesitatingly encroach upon the unalienable rights of others. Accept as a certainty that unless we can allow our neighbor to live in freedom, we will eventually sacrifice our own liberties. Sooner or later, with the assistance of government, someone will determine that a few of your unalienable rights are unnecessary in our common pursuit of happiness.
We are all guilty in some degree for using the all-powerful bureaucrat
machine to impose our will upon fellow Americans. Most of us have also
been unjustly controlled by such actions of others. Yet, identifying with
their resistance is beyond our ability. Our way is absolute; we remain
doggedly convinced of our own correctness. Regardless of the misery that we
create for people of dissimilar ideologies, we are compelled to secure our ill-gotten position at the top.

Do what you will, but encroach upon no other. Instead of traveling this judicious path of human interaction, we assault everyone's principles and lifestyles with our religious beliefs, social preferences, and political ideals, arrogantly demanding that they be grateful for our meddling
ways.

And, we do so in the most ruthless of manners; partisan legislation ultimately enforced by the guns of government. We are unwittingly placing the shackles of slavery on our
children. Be certain that for every piece of special-interest legislation, someone
other than the proponents will pay the price and bear the additional burden throughout life. When we stand committed to liberty and unified with the Constitution, further refusing to interfere with the lives of others, there will be liberty for all. Not until! Liberty must be enjoyed and defended by everyone.

Defeating the Republican police state mandate will require allowing
our neighbor the liberty to pursue his personal vision of happiness.
Which Party Will Defend Liberty For All?

The Republican and Democrat parties have a stranglehold on
government, and they are destroying our nation. Neither obeys constitutional law,
nor are they constrained by the Bill of Rights. And, both advance socialist
"New World Order" programs. It has become evident to every aware person that
they intend to use aggression towards other sovereign nations and domestic oppression whenever and wherever needed in order to achieve their nefarious
goals. For them, there are no limitations placed on acceptable
collateral damage. Both parties are self-serving, and care nothing about the
stability of our sovereign Constitutional Republic. They have subverted our Constitution, and their behavior is nothing less than treason. The Republican and Democrat parties must be abolished.

The following segment will more than likely be responsible for my loss
of a few friendships. Be that as it may, my preference has never been to seek approval from others but rather to live and speak truth as I perceive
it, and enjoy support from my conscience.

Several sincere patriots have responded to my past articles by suggesting that I become a member of the Constitution Party. The principles defined in their predominantly Protestant-based political platform are exemplary and sustainable for those who are of like faith. Also an undeniable reality, America is now a nation of diverse beliefs and ideologies-some of which are critical of others-including a multitude of denominations and factions stemming from the Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Buddhistic, Hindu, and Wiccan creeds. Although incessantly argued, every religion embraces a spiritual truth which is cherished by the faithful, and
not one is more or less meaningful than another.

The nonreligious agnostics and atheists must not be excluded; they are
also citizens of this nation. What is socially unacceptable or sinful for a
Christian, Jew, and Muslim, might be socially and morally acceptable to
a Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, or a nonreligious person. Some individuals
select their actions and lifestyles based upon pragmatic determinations of 'survival' [guiltless/moral/good] and 'non-survival' [sinful/immoral/evil]
of self or others. Absent of pietistic influence, their life sustaining decisions are also meaningful for them. Contrary to commonly held sentiments, religious adherents do not have exclusive possession of sincerity, compassion, or trustworthiness. Nor is love of country and
good citizenship always attributed to religious/spiritual teachings.

Though I acknowledge the well-meaning efforts of the Constitution Party, I must endorse the freethinking Libertarians due to their unambiguous position in defense of 'individual' liberty. While the patriotic participation of Constitution Party members in government is essential,
it is reasonable to dissuade followers of ecclesiastically-based political movements from enacting their version of God's Word [morality] into federal or state law.

Partisan legislation in this socially and religiously diverse nation
is polarizing; it runs afoul of the equal protections guaranteed by our Founding Fathers. Discrimination from or towards anyone must not be a temptation in our Constitutional Republic, where liberty is recognized for every 'individual,' regardless of beliefs or lifestyle.

The Libertarian Party is a defender of free will and victimless association. It is founded upon the principles of personal responsibility and self-ownership. The individual [consenting adult] determines what is morally acceptable or appropriate for his/her own body, further bearing
the consequences of actions taken.

Libertarians are committed to a constitutional government, where the
Constitution and Bill of Rights are obeyed to the letter. Libertarianism does not promote one religion or lifestyle over another. And, Libertarians will restrain government from giving social or religious preference to anyone.

Our focus should be to elect candidates with constitutional principles
into office. If the Libertarian Party becomes the governing 'Party,' we
will be able to pursue our spiritual or worldly goals as we deem fit. The
free exercise of all religions will be equally protected.

Objectionable actions and lifestyles will always be with us, but choice of association will be ours, and not imposed by government. Special rights will be given to no one. Defending self or family from unnatural and offensive behavior will again be possible. Bureaucrats will never again
tell the people how to conduct their lives.

The Libertarian Party will defend constitutional law; that is the fundamental purpose for its existence. Unless we foolishly presume that entitlements-paid for by fellow Americans-are a constitutional right, that more does a religious or nonreligious person need in our daily pursuit
of happiness?

Defeating the Republican police state mandate will require
electing candidates with unwavering constitutional principles.
Liberty-Committed-Solidarity I call upon all Americans of good heart to unite for the purpose
of liberty. Eradicate tyranny from our land. If we are unable to
effectively unite in this noble cause, I fear that our sovereign Constitutional
Republic will be lost to the ages. For the preservation of our nation, human
rights, family, and self, please give the following advisory due consideration.
Perhaps it is beyond our capabilities or perceived individual interests to express unconditional love to all of humanity. It is a goal that I personally find difficult to achieve. I do know, however, that it is well within our grasp to unite in defense of national freedom.

Have we not yet endured enough bureaucratic molestation? How much
more abuse will be necessary before the blood of our fragmented fellow
Americans begins to boil in unison? When will we the people of this nation stand
in agreement and with full force in our common struggle for liberty?
We can ill-afford to waste our time, resources, and energies by dwelling upon inequities of the past. My appeal extends to genuine conservatives who have been betrayed by their Republican Party, liberals who are principally concerned for their personal freedoms, members of the Constitution Party, non-committed independents, and Libertarians, to rise
above our conflicts. Do not be distracted by matters that are
irrelevant to the unified defense of liberty. Focus instead upon the most malignant of cancers in our nation. "New World Order" Socialism! Our illness is grave,
and we can no longer ignore the difficult yet certain cure of liberty-committed-solidarity.
I realize that a call for the unity of opposing factions will appear
extreme to many readers. Until the government atrocities at Ruby Ridge
and Waco occurred, I would have agreed. These police state massacres were
like tanks proceeding in my direction, and they ignited my everlasting
attention.

On those calamitous days, all Americans along with the Bill of Rights
became victims of our rebellious government. The innocent men, women, and
children murdered by the FBI and BATF were acceptable collateral damage in the government's war on individualism and nonconformity.

Our government, which is indeed dominated by the Republican and Democrat parties, is determined to enforce bureaucratically prescribed social and political standards regardless of lost lives. Three short statements by President Bush are absolutely true: "This is a new age."

"We are at war." "We must be vigilant." The responsibility falls upon the
people to determine the true identity and strategy of their enemy.
Unless we unite for the 'singular' purpose of restoring liberty,
the ugliest effects of extremism will soon become major distractions in our daily lives. Without decisive action, prayer and hope will not deliver us.
The people can either accept or refute the soundness
of this advice.

Defeating the Republican police state mandate will require liberty-committed-solidarity.
"We must, indeed, all hang together or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
-Benjamin Franklin

© 2005-Sergei Borglum Hoff
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/liberty_outlook
howardb4@earthlink.net