SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
March 2004
Volume 11, Number 3
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Rise and Fall of the War Nerds
-> National Security Notes
-> Here to Stay?
-> Doubts and Lies
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
{{ Emphasis is indicated by the presence of asterisks
around the emphasized words.}}
The Rise and Fall of the War Nerds
(page 1)
"O that mine enemy had written a book!" A quaint
complaint. Not only do my enemies write lots of books,
they always seem to get fat contracts from major
publishers for writing them.
Random House has now brought forth AN END TO EVIL:
HOW TO WIN THE WAR ON TERROR, by David Frum and Richard
Perle, two of America's foremost neoconservative war
nerds. Now I think I want to end evil as much as the next
man, but it strikes me that even winning the War on
Terror would be only a modest step in that direction,
since it would do little to end other forms of evil that
beset us, such as homophobia and mad cow disease.
I can't say I regard Richard Perle as a personal
enemy. About a dozen years ago I debated him on whether
the United States should go to war with Iraq (he was pro,
I was con), and found him polite and pleasant. Frum is
another matter. I have to count him as an enemy, I'm
afraid, since he keeps accusing me of "hating America."
He's rather free and easy with the word "hate"; as a
speechwriter for the current President Bush, he coined
the phrase "axis of hate," which someone upstairs at the
White House amended to the more famous and familiar "axis
of evil," but he was glad to take credit for the general
idea, presumably because to his way of thinking hate and
evil are pretty much the same thing.
Hence Frum has taken it upon himself to protect
America from the likes of me. And I have to hand it to
him. I'm an American only because I was born here;
whereas he was born in Canada, and chose to *become* an
American by immigrating and becoming naturalized, like
such other Canadian-born American patriots as Mortimer
Zuckerman and Charles Krauthammer, who, like him, find
America's democratic values most vividly realized in the
state of Israel.
Israel too is a target of terror, hate, and evil,
hence a natural ally for America. Criticizing either the
Bush administration or its Israeli twin the Likud
government is a form of hate. And so on.
AN END TO EVIL has received a scorching review in
the NEW YORK TIMES by Michiko Kakutani, who recognizes it
as the delusional effort it is: an attempt by a pair of
Jewish intellectual war nerds to justify the Iraq war and
extend it throughout the Middle East. Though she avoids
the word "Jewish," she sees exactly what's going on here,
and she also knows that to identify the ethnic interest
that unites Perle and Frum -- and Zuckerman and
Krauthammer, and dozens of others in the vociferous but
minuscule neoconservative "movement" -- is to court the
charge of anti-Semitism.
Her awareness is but one sign out of many that the
neocon "movement" has peaked. It got its war, but it also
got a lot more exposure than it wanted, and the game is
up. The neocons may as well stop pretending that they
stand for American interests, because they've long since
stopped fooling the kind of people they most need to
fool.
National Security Notes
(page 2)
Thinking big, President Bush has decided to revive
the ailing U.S. space program by putting men on the moon
by 2020, on Mars by 2030, and eventually "across our
solar system." It all began with Sputnik, back in 1957,
but just because we've won the Cold War is no reason to
stop waging it. We can't risk letting the Russians get to
Pluto before we do.
* * *
Gridlock in 2004? John Kerry, who has emerged as the
Democrats' front-runner, may test the electorate's
tolerance for priggish Massachusetts liberals. But Kerry
won't be the pushover Michael Dukakis was. He's a
toughie, and his military record as a decorated veteran
makes Bush's dodgy National Guard history a risible
contrast. Anyway, the voters may figure that he can't do
much harm if he takes office facing a largely Republican
Congress. Liberals, moderates, and serious conservatives
should agree that ending the GOP's political monopoly is
imperative.
* * *
Though this is undoubtedly the land of equal
opportunity, one can't help noticing that both Bush and
Kerry not only went to Yale, but belonged to the
exclusive and secretive Skull and Bones Society. Small
world!
* * *
The berserk supreme court of Kerry's state has now
decided that the legislature must legalize same-sex
marriage; mere "civil unions" won't meet the
constitutional standard. Is the court trying to give Bush
a red-hot campaign issue? It might as well order Kerry to
pick Barney Frank as his running mate.
* * *
Bush's proposal to let illegal aliens stay in this
country, provided they have jobs here, is hard to square
with his policy of screening out every potential
terrorist entering our borders, especially when he has
also ordered tightened checks on legal visitors, but you
have to remember that standards of consistency are always
relaxed during an election year.
* * *
Why are conspiracy theories supposed to be absurd,
when governments budget billions for intelligence
operations that conduct "covert activities" and keep
countless secrets from their own citizens? I guess we're
expected to assume that "our" conspirators are protecting
our freedom. This strikes me as the oddest conspiracy
theory of all.
* * *
Janet Jackson's strip act during the Super Bowl
halftime show roused Christian America to a rare and
astounding roar of protest. For once the media seemed to
get the message. Profuse apologies were tendered, and a
few old standards of broadcasting decency were restored.
Temporarily, at least. And naturally the Feds are getting
into the act, threatening to "protect" a public that has
just proven perfectly capable of protecting itself when
it wants to.
* * *
Jewish groups are still harassing Mel Gibson's
PASSION OF CHRIST in this country. Instead of quarreling
with the Gospel accounts, why not just urge their
Hollywood friends to film the Talmud's version of the
story?
Exclusive to the electronic version:
Only a Republican could, as Bush did in his State of
the Union speech, simultaneously attack Big Government
and propose a dozen new Federal programs. One of them
would assist imprisoned felons. Michael Kinsley, my
favorite liberal, said it best: "Willie Horton, thou
shouldst be on furlough at this hour!"
* * *
Now that Japanese troops have arrived to help in
Iraq, it's truly a quagmire. Fifty years from now, Jap
soldiers will still be holed up there, refusing to
believe the war is over.
Here to Stay?
(pages 3-4)
Can civilization exist without the State? No, says
Professor Randall G. Holcombe of Florida State
University, writing in the Winter 2004 issue of THE
INDEPENDENT REVIEW. Holcombe's position might be
described as one of thoughtful and pessimistic
libertarianism, summed up in the view that "although
government may not be desirable, it is inevitable because
if no government exists, predators have an incentive to
establish one."
By "government" he means the State, a legal monopoly
of power; let us accept these terms for the moment,
though many anarchists have argued that government, or a
rule of law, can exist without such a monopoly, through
voluntary protective organizations. The basic idea, I
take it, is that since force can never be eliminated from
human society, there must always be a Top Dog. It's an
idea that haunts me too. If the State as we know it were
somehow done away with, it seems likely that some gang
would eventually replace it.
On this view, the best we can hope for is to "tame"
the State, seeing to it that some form of limited
government prevents totalitarian rule. As Holcombe
plausibly puts it, "History has shown not only that
anarchy does not survive, but also that some governments
are better than others. Therein lies the libertarian
argument for a limited government."
But does history really teach such an unequivocal
lesson? Yes, states have been plentiful (after all, what
we call "history" is in large part the record of states),
some states are worse than others, and the differences
are important. Still, men have lived in many places and
for long periods without anything we would recognize as
the State. One may argue, a la Hobbes, that stateless
societies are doomed to be primitive, and life in them
"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"; hence the
need of men for a Top Dog "to keep them all in awe." Just
or not, the Top Dog -- king, chief, pharaoh, whatever --
decisively settles quarrels, prevents other quarrels, and
enables life to go on. Better Stalin than anarchy. Or
rather, anarchy (according to Holcombe's argument) will
in any case pave the way for a Stalin.
History as Americans have learned it is Locke's
answer to Hobbes: Jeffersonian limited government.
Unfortunately, even under the cunningly designed U.S.
Constitution, government didn't stay limited, thanks in
part to Thomas Jefferson himself (who, Constitution or
no, couldn't resist the Louisiana Purchase). Abraham
Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt greatly enlarged the power
of the U.S. Government -- and abandoned the Constitution
-- while emphatically proclaiming Jeffersonian pieties.
Under George W. Bush that government is ready to wage war
around the world and send men to Mars, without feeling
that the Land of the Free has changed in principle.
If this can happen to America, we are forced to
wonder: Can *any* state remain limited? In other words,
which is the real fantasy -- anarchy or limited
government? Maybe both are possible, at least for a
spell; maybe both are impossible, at least in the long
run. History, pace Holcombe, doesn't tell us. All it does
tell us is that men, at various times and in various
places, have lived with, and without, what we think of as
states.
What we do know is that in modern times the State
has grown to astounding dimensions, beyond any precedent
in recorded history. In the name of protecting its
subjects from innumerable alleged evils -- many of them
created by semantic ingenuity ("discrimination,"
"homophobia," and the like) -- it now invades every nook
and cranny of human life and society. To call it limited
is a bad joke.
The hypertrophy of the State over the last century
or so is something new under the sun. Whether you like it
or not, it's an enormous fact of life, comparable to,
say, the Industrial Revolution in scope, sweep, and
impact. Yet, unlike other great periods of change
(Feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation), it still
has no name! Many men are still unaware that it has
completely changed the nature of social life, though
everyone vaguely senses it. We notice, applaud, or
grumble about this or that new feature of State authority
-- a new tax, rule, or regulation -- without seeing such
things as part of a comprehensive transformation. We
accept them as inevitable. We assume not only that the
State is here to stay, but that it will keep growing,
expanding, commanding, taxing, and of course intruding.
That's what it does. That's the way we live now.
Orwell and others have noticed some of its
nightmarish features, but without seeing the completeness
of the change even in its seemingly benign details, its
"services" as well as its torments. The State's rhetoric
is, of course, benevolent: It offers to spare us every
imaginable evil, and its lexicon is full of words like
"defense," "security," "protection," and "safety" for
every liberty it strips away.
Once we naively assumed (at least I did) that the
best protection we could have was simply an impersonal,
objective rule of law. Then the State discovered a new
role for itself: *special* protections for particular
categories: racial minorities, farmers, laborers, old
people, women, the handicapped, children, even sexual
perverts. The roll call of accredited victims continues
to lengthen, and with it the powers of the State. It
isn't enough to treat people equally; they must be made
equal. (And not only people: animals too.) There is no
end to it. *Limited* government? Don't be silly. The only
argument now is over what new roles (and powers) the
State should appropriate. The change is stupendous, truly
revolutionary, more radical than the change from Tsarism
to Bolshevism. Terms like "big government" and "creeping
socialism" are only lazy, inadequate nicknames for it.
And nobody seems to see it! Hence two of my favorite
quotations. G.K. Chesterton: "Men can always be blind to
a thing, so long as it is big enough." And Hugh Kenner:
"The style of your own period is always invisible." Those
who do see, and still resist, the great change are said
to be "ideological," "ultraconservative," "right-wing."
That is, they have principles, which they realize that
the State is continually violating.
Is the great change inevitable? Those who think they
benefit by it naturally want us all to think so. But to
say that the State is "here to say" is to make a certain
prediction. The State is more than organized force; it is
force endowed with *legitimacy* -- that is, the approval
of its subjects. And can we say that, as the State keeps
expanding, its subjects will forever approve of it?
In the film MILLER'S CROSSING, the urban gangster
who rules the city is cautioned by his right-hand man:
"You don't hold elective office in this town, Leo. You
only run it because people think you run it. When they
stop thinkin' it, you stop runnin' it." That's legitimacy
for you. Even the State needs more than force alone. When
it appears nothing more than a gang, its days are
numbered.
More and more Americans are becoming deeply
skeptical of the State and its claims. Very few are
principled anarchists or even libertarians at this point.
Not many have read or understood the Constitution. But
mistrust of the government and the two major parties is
already widespread. More and more people sense that the
problem isn't just the Republicans or the Democrats, but
the whole system of organized force. The government
doesn't even respect or observe its own fundamental law
as codified in the Constitution. Its legitimacy is
wearing thin.
Before 1860 the Abolitionists never remotely
approached a majority of even the Northern population,
yet they severely damaged the legitimacy of slavery
merely by challenging it. Norman Thomas's Socialist Party
likewise never won an election, but it exerted a strong
influence on the two major parties. In the seemingly
invincible Soviet Union, a tiny number of courageous
dissidents helped bring about the eventual collapse of
the whole system, which even the most anti-Communist
Westerners hardly thought possible.
In the same way, even a small body of articulate
anti-Statist opinion could change the entire American
political climate and eventually destroy the legitimacy
of Leviathan. The State is a human institution, sustained
by human will. It isn't a given of nature, though it may
at times seem so. There can be no moral "right" to a
monopoly of force.
Once significant numbers of men see that this is
self-evident, the State will be in real trouble. By the
standards of the Founding Fathers themselves, the U.S.
Government has long since crossed the line into tyranny.
Most Americans prefer not to think it possible. George W.
Bush himself thinks he is merely carrying on the unbroken
tradition of 1776. Just as a complacent old party hack
like Leonid Brezhnev could see himself as the avatar of
the Marxist faith, so Bush may suppose that by leading
the American Leviathan into the Middle East and outer
space he is only doing Jefferson's work.
There was a time when most people imagined that some
men could be free only if other men were slaves. Even
more fantastically, most people still imagine that
without the State there could be no freedom at all.
Professor Holcombe is far too rational to believe that;
but his subtler error, the notion that the State is
"inevitable," could do its part to keep the State in
business. It puts him in bad company where he doesn't
belong.
Doubts and Lies
(pages 5-6)
{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets.
Emphasis is indicated by the presence of asterisks around
the emphasized words.}}
Well, well. The dust is settling, the shouting has
died down, and the Bush administration's great pretext
for war has been all but annihilated. President Bush
himself, and Secretary of State Colin Powell as well,
have backed away from their flat insistence that Saddam
Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction" that could
threaten the United States and its "friends."
This tacit but crucial concession comes after the
sober liberal Brookings Institution issued a study
concluding that the administration had "systematically
misrepresented" the supposed Iraqi threat in order to
herd us into supporting the war. Paul O'Neill, Bush's
former treasury secretary, has also disclosed that Bush
wanted war with Iraq even before the 9/11 attacks and
that he, O'Neill, never saw evidence of the notorious
weapons.
And of course, Bush's own weapons inspector, David
Kay, has concluded that the weapons most probably didn't
exist. Kay still favors the war and qualified his
findings as much as he could, but there was no evading
the central fact: the Bush administration misled the
country about the supposedly menacing Iraqi arsenal in
order to wage war with popular support.
{{ After the quick U.S. victory, Bush doggedly
repeated his prediction that those weapons would be
found. They haven't been, and Bush has quit saying that
too, though he still says the war was justified --
without explaining what war on Iraq had to do with "war
on terror." }}
Now the intelligence services are being blamed for
misleading poor Bush. Here the head spins. Was the
Central Intelligence Agency the driving force behind the
war fever? That's hardly the impression we got at the
time. (And did the CIA mislead the poor neocons too? It
appears that the administration's "intelligence" included
disinformation supplied by the neocon-Mossad cabal.)
In order to get the monkey off his own back, Bush
has appointed a bipartisan panel to investigate the
"failure" of the intelligence services. CIA director
George Tenet, meanwhile, has defended his agency's
performance with the seemingly reasonable plea that
intelligence is seldom "completely right or completely
wrong." But that only undercuts the unwavering claim of
the administration that it had infallible *knowledge* of
an Iraqi threat -- even a threat of nuclear incineration!
Were Bush, Powell, Dick Cheney, and the rest of the
cast consciously lying? Probably. But even if not, they
were baldly claiming a certainty that in their
circumstances couldn't possibly have been warranted. And
they were counting, quite realistically, on the popular
faith that they "knew something" the rest of us couldn't
know and that they could be trusted not to abuse their
privileged information.
One phrase was repeated in the Bush crowd's emphatic
war propaganda. Vice President Dick Cheney told us,
"Stated simply, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has
weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is
amassing them to use against our friends, against our
allies, and against us." Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld assured us, "There's no doubt in my mind that
they currently have chemical and biological weapons."
Bush himself said that "intelligence ... leaves no doubt
that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal
some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." No doubt
... no doubt ... no doubt.
There were slight variants, no less dogmatic: Ari
Fleischer told the White House press corps that "we know
for a fact that there are weapons there." Cheney was
being relatively tentative when he said merely that "we
believe" that Saddam "has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear
weapons."
Bush himself drove the point home by warning that
"the smoking gun may take the form of a mushroom cloud"
-- a line well calculated to terrify a jumpy populace who
couldn't imagine that a president would say such a thing
irresponsibly.
Surely the intelligence agencies, even knowing what
their boss wanted to hear, didn't make such absolute
assertions about Iraq's arsenal. It's grotesque for our
"democratic leaders" to pass the buck to the unelected
bureaucrats who serve them.
And speaking of those weapons, why are they
euphemistically called weapons of mass "destruction"?
They are weapons of mass *murder.* But Bush can't afford
to call them that, because the U.S. Government and its
little pals in Europe and the Middle East have them too.
This fact always made it preposterous, in the minds of
sober people, to assume that if Saddam Hussein got a
single nuclear weapon, he would immediately drop it on
someone (or genially pass it along to his enemy Osama bin
Laden, to use it as he saw fit).
So it turns out that Bush went to war over a very
big maybe. But "perhaps" and "probably" were absent from
his pre-war vocabulary. Yet neither he nor his team nor
the journalistic flaks for the war concede that Kay's
findings in any way alter the war's justification, the
principal justification they themselves offered!
How can people be so brazenly self-contradictory? I
posed this question to a friend, who offered an apt and
amusing parallel. When Bill Clinton denied having had
"sexual relations with that woman," nearly everyone,
including top officials of his administration who
professed to believe him, agreed that if he turned out to
be lying, he was finished. But when it turned out -- when
Clinton himself admitted -- that he had indeed been
lying, it simply *made no difference* to his supporters
(or to "objective" journalists who had held that such a
lie to the country would ruin him).
So it is here, though lying about war is a far
graver deceit than any lie Clinton told. Virtually no
supporters of the Iraq war have changed their minds in
light of Kay's finding that the chief reason given for
that war was as bogus as millions of people around the
world had suspected. Never mind the "lessons" of Vietnam
and Watergate: Much of the American public simply takes
presidential lying in stride, as long as they consider
the liar to be lying in behalf of their side.
The part that shocks me personally is how corrupt
much of the "conservative" electorate is. During the
pre-war debate, and even now, I've often been accused by
pro-war readers of being a "liberal." I trust that my
whole career has sufficiently acquitted me of this
charge. But many Americans now assume that any opposition
to *any* war -- at least a war launched by a nominally
conservative president -- can only spring from partisan
or sectarian motives.
In any war, many innocent people die. An unjust war
-- a war fought without serious and solid reasons -- is
therefore mass murder. Hardly anyone denies this in
principle, yet by now it's widely accepted that
"conservatism" means the routine approval of war, and
that to harbor doubts about a war is the mark of a
liberal whose very patriotism is doubtful. Opponents of
the Iraq war have even been roundly accused of
"anti-Americanism." Neoconservative Catholics have even
criticized Pope John Paul II for opposing the war.
Sic transit gloria Bushi. The great war president,
successor of Roosevelt and Churchill, suddenly looks like
a fool who duped not only himself but his country. He
roused, and exploited, the most basic instinct of
self-preservation in the American people, so that he
could pose as their courageous protector. In addition to
a huge military deployment, he created an enormous, and
no doubt permanent, new domestic bureaucracy, the
Department of Homeland Security, armed with the new
powers contained in the USA PATRIOT Act. (Which Bush
still wants Congress to renew this year.)
The whole situation may fairly be called, to adapt a
phrase of Saddam Hussein himself, the mother of all
snafus. It should stand as the supreme object lesson in
how the State operates. Every possible resource was
mobilized to meet a phantom "threat." Alarms were
sounded, propaganda clanged relentlessly, freedoms were
curtailed, and of course the tax burden swelled -- as
Bush meanwhile vastly increased the size, scope, and cost
of the welfare state.
And "conservatives" fervently support his
reelection! When they finish conserving this country,
there won't be much left of it. Without irony, it can be
said that if the Democrats replace Bush in the White
House, especially with the Republicans retaining
dominance in Congress, the results, however annoying,
will be less comprehensively damaging than under Bush.
In himself, Bush doesn't appear to be egregiously
wicked. He's merely a mediocre man in a literally
superhuman job, wielding far more power over others than
any man should ever have, and charged with an impossible
number of responsibilities for that very reason. Given
what the U.S. presidency has become, this would be true
of anyone in his place. The trouble is that Bush is
actually eager to exercise that power, with no sense of
his unfitness for it. He suffers from delusions of
adequacy.
Megalomania might as well be part of the job
description of the presidency. Nobody of normal humility
would seek the office and all of what is reverently
called its "awesome power" -- a regrettably apt term.
This means we are doomed to be ruled by veritable madmen.
You needn't worship the Constitution and its Framers
in order to appreciate that they did, after all, attempt
to design a federal system in which political authority
would be widely dispersed, and no "great" man would be
required for its proper functioning. In their view,
government -- and particularly the Federal Government --
would play only a modest role in the daily life of
Americans. The chief executive would simply execute laws
passed by Congress, without assuming royal airs.
Even so, the difference in quality between the early
presidents and recent ones is astonishing. It's
inconceivable that a Bush could have been elected two
centuries ago, just as it's inconceivable that a
Jefferson or a Madison could be elected today. In fact
it's impossible even to imagine Bush, a Yale graduate,
conversing intelligently with such men.
NUGGETS
SUGGESTION: Maybe John Kerry's campaign slogan should be
"Kill babies, not Arabs!" What a dismal choice voters
face this fall. The two-party system has really outdone
itself. (page 4)
DEFINING DEVIANCY WAY DOWNWARD: Bill Clinton seriously
lowered the moral threshold for American presidents; Bush
has also lowered the intellectual threshold -- without
raising the moral one. (page 8)
O YE OF LITTLE FAITH! As dogs trust their masters and
children their parents, so Americans trust their
government. Why? Well, as Gary North observes, simply and
profoundly, people want to trust those they are dependent
on. The alternative is disturbing. And the more we depend
on the state, the harder it is to face the fact that it
habitually deceives us. So the believers turn angrily on
the doubters. (page 9)
RELIABLE SOURCES: Some of Bush's pre-war "faulty
intelligence" may have come not only from the CIA, but
from our "allies" (Mossad's slogan, remember, is "By way
of deception you shall make war") and/or hairy
pseudo-Biblical prophecies about the Middle East. Want to
bet the Robb inquiry will go into these things?
Exclusive to the electronic version:
THE FIRST AMENDMENT IN ACTION: Janet Jackson's latest
stunt on network television highlights a fact of life.
Once upon a time you had to pay for porn. In this
liberated age, you have to pay extra to avoid it.
Porn-shunners have become a niche market.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* Brown Reconsidered (January 13, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040113.shtml
* Election-Year Forecast (January 15, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040115.shtml
* Burton's Lost Hamlet (January 22, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040122.shtml
* A Strategy for Kerry (January 29, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040129.shtml
* An Honest Mistake (February 3, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040203.shtml
* War and Crime (February 5, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040205.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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