“And yes, PA is Jim Davidson. That’s hardly a secret.”

Why do BTP people spend large portions of their time on blogs whining about internal LP business? That’s just sad!! Those of you who have left the LP for the BTP, go run your own party, write your own newsletters, mind your own business at your own conventions. Why should we care what you think about how the LP is run? When you send nasty emails to LP activists and sign internet petitions about LP business, do you footnote it to point out that you’re not even a party member?

“Can somebody explain why the LPCA should be paying this guy $4000 a year to inflict his act on the LPCA membership?”

To which I answer, in full tongue-in-cheek snark:

“So Brian Holtz doesn’t bore us to death on the newsletter in his place, and to give Brian Holtz and Bruce Cohen something more to complain about.”

Take it up with Kevin, Brian. The rest of us hardly give a damn.

And yes, PA is Jim Davidson. That’s hardly a secret.

Nice work. As I recall Kuwait has a long standing relation with BP oil which is why Kuwait even exist. The Brits need the oil.

Also I haven’t had time to read your entire piece, but I have read that Saddam was willing to leave Iraq, but the details had not been worked out. I think the Swedes were part of those negotiations, so the war may not have happened had some time been given to the diplomats.

MW

I appreciate that you understand my perspective, even if it differs from yours…slightly.

I also err toward markets and voluntarism. At the moment, there’s no appreciable “market” for high-scale peacekeeping forces…moving troops and munitions requires large capital outlays. For the most part, governments already HAVE the capital equipment, so I can imagine using them for good (e.g., ending genocide).

The marginal cost to taxpayers would be rather low to quell mass murder.

I’d welcome the day when the Red Cross or something like that could be dispatched to places like Kosovo and Darfur to stop the slaughter.

That day hasn’t come. Now, the Red Cross can only make a dent in cleaning up the mess.

“Who’s to judge what’s a genocide or atrocity?; history of excesses and manipulation; inappropriate use of tax dollars; almost always unconstitutionally executed; blowback; triggers domestic State growth; a ruse for geopolitical machinations; etc.” (and adding the dangers of world government to the mix – yet another subject)

against

“I’ve no problem with Lincoln Brigades, but modern technology and transportation makes that approach less compelling for me.”

I tend to err heavily on the side of dealing with technology and transportation issues through market and voluntary cooperative means.

I think markets and other voluntary forms of organization are better equipped to solve any such problems than governments, anyway – even if governments can marshall overwhelming resources quickly through command and control, I think it comes at too high a price.

Ultimately, relying on coercive means such as monopoly government to solve problems increases aggregate amount of aggression. This is not always through direct effects, but often through secondary, tertiary, etc,. side effects.

Holtz:

“A libertarian is a person who believes that the role and incidence of aggression are to be minimized — i.e. that the role and incidence of liberty are to be maximized. Everyone is libertarian to the extent that they support decreases in the amount of aggression suffered, whether they realize it or not. Those who worry more about sources of aggression than the aggregate amount of aggression are suboptimally libertarian, regardless of what they may claim.”

Our difference is only in applying the system analysis of aggression, I think.

Me: I used to be persuaded by the Lincoln Brigade argument, but I now find it insufficient. I’ve no problem with Lincoln Brigades, but modern technology and transportation makes that approach less compelling for me.

If an overwhelming international force could be quickly deployed to stop verifiable atrocities, I’m for it. It won’t be perfect, but then nothing ever IS perfect. There’s a lot of gray areas for me.

So, call me an heavily biased toward non-intervention, but not a strict non-interventionist.

I will confirm that PA is not Brian Holtz, unless Holtz is using some hacker tricks. Jim Davidson also denies being PA, if I understood his email to me today correctly. He also says that I am a self centered worm and a butt munch.

My Waco exception for my friend Paulie is not bait and switch, it’s the opposite: I said I wouldn’t debate him on the topic, and then I conditionally changed my mind.

No problem – take your time. I’ve said that I’m willing to use the wikipedia article as a good starting point for discussion. At the time I read it, it seemed pretty good. If you manage to edit it out of recognition before launching your argument, you might place me at an unexpected disadvantage, having stipulated to it already

Michael Wilson, you’re saying that a dispute about alleged slant drilling is grounds for annexation via a war of aggression,

I didn’t know that the slant drilling was disputed. War of aggression implies that the slant drilling was not an initiation of force, or that diplomacy had not already been attempted. Also, I understand it that Iraq claims Kuwait as part of its historical territory, carved out by British colonialists.

but that genocide and multiple wars of aggression aren’t grounds for liberating a nation from a madman?

Genocide is disputed. Multiple wars of aggression – well, there was the Iran-Iraq war, where the US encouraged and backed Saddam (or do you deny that as well?), provided material support, etc.; what other wars of aggression?

Meanwhile, the Euro theory is just funny — a perfect little unfalsifiable conspiracy theory, just the right size for the minds in the antiwar choir.

Seems to make sense. Motive, opportunity, etc.

Paulie, thanks for in effect admitting that you fear that I’d demolish any particular alleged Bush “lie”. That’s the only reason I can think of for you declining to embarrass me by picking any one lie out of your allegedly bulging arsenal.

I admitted no such thing. I just didn’t go through the extra work of selecting just one Bush lie.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040329/scheer

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/07/22_lies.html

http://www.bushlies.net/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz9Ew1UBBj0

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x249g4_cia-whistleblower-on-wmds-iraq-and_news

http://terrasol.home.igc.org/IraqLies.htm

http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline/

http://projects.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

http://www.bushwatch.com/bushlies.htm

http://www.alternet.org/story/16274/

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0716-12.htm

And that is just page one of the google search results.

Fear of retaliation by evil people against America for America doing the Right Thing just isn’t a big worry for me, sorry.

It’s not the right thing, and people avenging the killing, poisoning, robbing, raping, torturing, humiliation, rape, etc., etc. of their relatives, neighbors, friends and countrymen by foreigners is not necessarily evil – although it tends to beget a vicious cycle of escalating revenge by targeting innocent people. Other wonderful byproducts include increasing domestic surveillance, curtailing of civil liberties, and gradual conversion of the economy to a war footing, leading eventually to an imperialist global police garrison state, followed by collapse because such are economically unsustainable.

I guess I just am not as easy to intimidate as you.

I’m not easily intimidated.

Or maybe I have more confidence that a free and prosperous society can successfully defend itself.

You certainly have more confidence that it will continue to be anything which can in any way be characterized as free or prosperous as this process continues.

Here it comes, the trotting out of the past mistakes in America’s foreign policy. Yes, America has done some horrible and shameful things in its past. That’s just not a good argument for me that America shouldn’t do the Right Thing in the present or future.

Those who fail to heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

As for trotting our the past, I’ll repeat this unanswered list: England, Italy, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Greece, Germany, Austria, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo.

I’ll answer it after you explain what this list of countries represents to you.

Saddam’s bodycount is estimated at two million: http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/hussein.html.

That’s far on the high side of many other estimates.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/wanniski/wanniski11.html

Memo To: Sen. Pat Roberts [R KS]
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: More Bad Intelligence

As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Roberts, you have done the country a great service by issuing the committee’s report on the errors made by the Intelligence Community [IC] that led to the President’s decision to war against Iraq. You have also been good enough to acknowledge that if what is now known to be true – that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and no connection with 9-11 – there would not have been the votes in the Senate in November 2002 to authorize the use of force against Iraq should diplomacy fail. What seems to be the consensus view of the Intelligence Committee, especially its vice chairman Jay Rockefeller [D-WV], is that the IC came to believe the administration was bent on regime change in Iraq and the “group think” produced the erroneous intelligence. That is, the “process” was flawed, directing information up the ladder to the Oval Office in ways that would support a war decision and suppress counter arguments that would prevent that flawed information flow.

It is human nature, Senator, that when you know the Boss wants information to justify an action he really wants to take, that’s the way the process will work. Even when “Ombudsmen” are put in place as a check on this human tendency, as already exist in the IC, the “truth” can always be subverted at the last minute at the very top of the information ladder – as it was when CIA Director George Tenet told President Bush it would be a “slam dunk” to prove Iraq had WMD, when Tenet knew full well that the IC could only speculate on that point.

The reason I write you today, Senator, is that a similar problem has come up with you. I’m afraid you are still relying on faulty intelligence in saying, as you did on the weekend talk shows, that the war could be justified because of Saddam’s cruelty to his own people. Here is how you put it on “Meet the Press,” in response to a question from Tim Russert:

SEN. ROBERTS: Well, that was then. This is now. I know I stood on a gravesite at Hillah in Iraq and looked at 18,000 bodies being unearthed, you know, one at a time; 500,000 were dead. I think we’re probably in better shape. I know the people in Iraq are in better shape, if we can achieve the stability, which is a very tough challenge over there. But I don’t think anybody in terms of threat to regional stability, to Israel, the possibility of reconstituting – he did have the capability of the weapons of mass destruction. I think we’re better off without Saddam there.

I was a bit puzzled, Senator, because I have been following the “genocide” issue in Iraq for several years and wondered how you could get these numbers. If you were not chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I wouldn’t bother you today, because most members of Congress have bought the genocide story that has become embedded in the national consciousness because it has been repeated too many times. As a result, I contacted your staff (your eyes and ears, so to speak), and asked: “Can you help me better understand where Senator Roberts gets the numbers of Iraqis killed by Saddam Hussein… particularly the number 500,000. He used it several times in the weekend talk shows. There have been reports of as many as 200,000 killed in the Anfal campaign of 1987–88, but so far no mass graves have been found in Kurdistan, none at all. The Senator also says he watched 18,000 bodies being unearthed at a gravesite at Hillah. The most recent number I’ve seen relating to that area is 2,200. The Senator’s inference is that these dead were victims of genocide, when all the accounts say the victims were Shiite rebels who were attempting to overthrow the government – and were of the belief the USA would come to protect them because they were incited to rebel by CIA agents.”

Your staff responded with an e-mail referring me to the now defunct website of the Coalition Provisional Authority, with the comment that my numbers were “way too low.”

I went to the website and found a press release of the CPA that referred to a press conference given March 17 by US AID director Andrew Natsios: “Iraqi and U.S. officials have prepared a long-range plan to excavate mass graves in Iraq and prepare forensic evidence of crimes against humanity…There are 300,000–400,000 bodies reported to lie in mass graves in Iraq.” The way Natsios put it: “How many died in these mass murders? Some say 300,000. Some say 400,000. We are helping the Iraqis as they begin the terrible task of counting.”

See what I mean, you have already added another 100,000 to the mass murders, and as far as I know from following these accounts, not one body has been unearthed that can be identified as a victim of genocide. There are gravesites all over Iraq, but the “forensic evidence of crimes against humanity” has yet to be presented. As I pointed out in my note to your staff, I had previously seen “reports” of as many as 200,000 Iraqi Kurds killed by the Iraqi army at the end of the Iraq/Iran war, but if you would now ask your staff to check, they will have to tell you that so far no bodies at all have been found in connection with that “Anfal” campaign. The original charge of mass murder by gassing of the Kurds was made by then Secretary of State George Shultz on September 8, 1988, but when the Iraqi foreign minister asked Shultz for proof, Shultz said he could not do so as it would compromise his sources. Sadoun Mahmoudi, the foreign minister, then asked: “Where are the victims?”

No kidding, Senator. It is now almost 16 years later and the victims have yet to be found. If you ask your top intelligence people on your committee to check, they will find articles in the contemporaneous press by journalists who traveled to Kurdistan during this uproar over genocide, and who could find no evidence of it. In fact, I think your committee staff will admit to you, if you asked, that the Intelligence Community has never been able to confirm these deaths. Indeed, if you read page 400 of your own committee’s report, you will find under. “Information sources,” the following: “According to comments from IC analysts who spoke to Committee staff, a large part of the information available to the IC concerning human rights abuses was from refugees, defectors and opposition groups. The IC also depended on the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). In all cases, verification of the reporting on human rights abuses was difficult… Unfortunately, the immigrant/refugee reporting usually could not be verified on the ground in Iraq.”

I hope you understand what’s going on here, Senator. The IC is telling you the same people who supplied the erroneous intelligence about WMD and Al Qaeda connections to Iraq are the people who cooked up the genocide stories. Of course it is human nature for you to want to believe our government can be ultimately vindicated by a trial of Saddam that proves he was the mass murderer you believe him to be. The Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee should not have been snookered, but you were, and it has to be an embarrassment to suspect as much. But as I indicated to your staff, it will be an even greater embarrassment for you to discover how to this day you are relying on bad intelligence in your public statements. There were, for example, no 18,000 bodies at Hillah, a number suggested at the time when bodies in this battlefield area were unearthed. The latest number after 14 months of counting before the forensic experts left the area was 2,200. That’s a lot of dead Iraqis, but they were encouraged to overthrow their government by our CIA, were they not? Kind of like the Bay of Pigs, yes? We can’t really accuse Fidel Castro of genocide when he put down the rebellion, or we would have to file charges against Abraham Lincoln.

In addition, Senator, there are fairly careful estimates that as many as 90,000 Iraqis – civilian and military – have died since we decided we had to save Iraq from Saddam and his genocidal impulses. That’s a lot of dead Iraqis.

You can go to Google as I did and run this down for yourself. It may not be a happy experience for you, but it should make you a better chairman.

Much, much more if you read the rest of Wanniski’s archive at

http://www.lewrockwell.com/wanniski/wanniski-arch.html

as I previously recommended. For instance,

http://www.lewrockwell.com/wanniski/wanniski32.html

Memo
To: David Broder, Washington Post

From:
Jude Wanniski
Re: Those Mass Graves

Remember, David, back on Sept. 27 I posted a memo
on the margin that I wrote to you, complimenting you on your column about how the news media had been “losing their way”? It had to do with your observation that the major news media was chasing sham stories while not asking serious questions about the most important topics of the day, including the war in Iraq – which both your newspaper and The New York Times acknowledged in price, apologizing for not being more aggressive in the months leading up to the President’s decision to go to war. In my note you, I suggested you look into the long-held conventional wisdom that Saddam Hussein committed genocide, a view largely propagated by Human Rights Watch. The organization estimated that as many as 290,000 Iraqis were killed by Saddam during his reign, with 100,000 Kurds slaughtered in 1988, in the last months of the Iran/Iraq war. Prime Minister Tony Blair at one point said as many as 400,000 Iraqis had been killed by Saddam’s regime.

Partly as a result of the HRW assertions, the Bush administration justified its use of force to replace the duly constituted government in Baghdad. The most recent estimates of the dead total 100,000 Iraqi civilians and 60,000 to 80,000 Iraqi military, plus the almost 1200 Americans who have died during the course of the war. We are currently bombing the 300,000 people of Falluja in hopes of pacifying the city and may wind up leveling it altogether. Is the sky the limit on what it will take to bring freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq? Don’t you wonder?

Meanwhile, this week Human Rights Watch issued its long-awaited conclusive report on Saddam’s genocidal record. As far as I know, the major news media has not picked up the report, which is available on the Internet at HRW’s website. I read about the report in the British press. It turns out that in 19 months HRW’s experts have not been able to find the missing 100,000 bodies it said were of Kurds who had been rounded up and trucked south of Kurdistan, machine-gunned to death and buried in mass graves. In fact, it now blames the U.S. coalition for not securing those mass graves containing smaller numbers of Iraqis or keeping looters from carrying off official Iraqi records of the genocide and the mass graves. You should read the report in its entirety, David, and maybe you will get your editors to take a look too. Here are two pertinent graphs from the summary:

In the case of both documents and mass graves, U.S.-led coalition forces failed to secure the relevant sites at the time of the overthrow of the former government. They subsequently failed to put in place the professional expertise and assistance necessary to ensure proper classification and exhumation procedures, with the result that key evidentiary materials have been lost or tainted. In the case of mass graves, these failures also have frustrated the goal of enabling families to know the fate of missing relatives. The findings of the report are all the more disturbing against the backdrop of a tribunal established to bring justice for serious past crimes, the Iraqi Special Tribunal. Human Rights Watch has serious concerns that the tribunal is fundamentally flawed and may be incapable of delivering justice.

[and]

The extent of the negligence with which key documentary and forensic evidence has been treated to date is surprising, given that the U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi authorities alike knew that trials of Hussein and key Ba’ath government officials would be important landmarks in Iraq’s political recovery, that successful trials require solid evidence, and that, as international experience has shown, preserving such trial-ready evidence is a difficult task. Some of the evidence has been destroyed, but it is not too late to assume custody of millions of additional pieces of evidence.

Some of this material, if it is given the urgent attention it needs and deserves, may prove critical in the proceedings of the upcoming trials. It will also play an important role as Iraqis attempt to construct an accurate historical record of their traumatic experiences under Ba’th Party rule.

Do you see what I mean? Saddam Hussein will soon be put on trial for crimes against humanity, and the Iraqi prosecutors will not have the goods on him.

Now that the election is over, maybe you will have more time to devote to this exercise. You should at least give a call to Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, the retired CIA analyst who has never believed in the genocide stories, but has awaited the report of Human Rights Watch to see what it has found. After reading the report in its entirety, he told me they had, as he expected, come up empty:

This claim of HRW that they haven’t got evidence that will stand up because the graves have been compromised, overlooks one key fact: they were claiming that the Ba’th killed hundreds of thousands. If these graves really contained all the bodies they’re supposed to contain, the numbers of dead alone would convict the Ba’th. If you read the report, they say over and over again they “believe” such-and-such a grave actually contains thousands of bodies; but all they’ve been able to find is a few score (at best). I think that’s what gives the scam away. They can’t produce the hundreds of thousands, or even the tens of thousands they promised they would.

I’ve tried to get lots and lots of reporters interested in the story, David, but in every case they have a reason why they just can’t do it at this time. They’ve lost their way, as you noted. As the dean of the Washington press corps, you should please help them find it.

Much, much more in the Wanniski archives – to speak nothing of all the other authors published at LRC and AWC over the years, among many other sites. But if you just read through the Wanniski archives alone, that would be a great start.

I don’t want your DU search terms; I want a credible estimate of demonstrably DU-caused deaths. If it’s not well into the thousands (when of course it’s more like zero), then by your own accounting it adds nothing — other than the unthinking sensationalism of shouting “uranium!” — to your case.

Sounds like you have a rather closed mind about the issue.

Of course?

Let’s start with wikipedia:

Normal functioning of the kidney, brain, liver, heart, and numerous other systems can be affected by uranium exposure, because in addition to being weakly radioactive, uranium is a toxic metal. …The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry states that: “to be exposed to radiation from uranium, you have to eat, drink, or breathe it, or get it on your skin.” However, the Institute of Nuclear Technology-Radiation Protection of Attiki, Greece has noted that “the aerosol produced during impact and combustion of depleted uranium munitions can potentially contaminate wide areas around the impact sites or can be inhaled by civilians and military personnel.” …studies using cultured cells and laboratory rodents continue to suggest the possibility of leukemogenic, genetic, reproductive, and neurological effects from chronic exposure. In addition, the UK Pensions Appeal Tribunal Service in early 2004 attributed birth defect claims from a February 1991 Gulf War combat veteran to depleted uranium poisoning. Also, a 2005 epidemiology review concluded: “In aggregate the human epidemiological evidence is consistent with increased risk of birth defects in offspring of persons exposed to DU.”

For anyone unafraid of following links, see:

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=594

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4207.htm

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4439.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xjvl1Rk_jE

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Rokke-Depleted-Uranium-DU21apr03.htm

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/95178_du12.shtml

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/DU/DRonDU2000.html

http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=149495;article=119614;title=APFN

As some good starting points, among many others.

Madeleine Albright making an idiotic off-the-cuff statement on camera doesn’t rebut what I wrote above: “UNSC Resolution 706 of 1991 offered to allow Saddam to sell oil to buy food and medicine for his people while he was under UN Security Council disarmament sanctions for his blatant war of aggression. He refused for five years. Reason magazine says that the estimate of 1 million deaths is inflated, but whatever the number, Saddam was responsible for every single one.”

When you have the perpetrators admitting war guilt, and justifying it, it is rather difficult to keep pointing the finger somewhere else.

The Wanniski article you chose to highlight is worthless.

Actually, I did not choose to highlight it. I just used it as one example of the vast materials in the Wanniski archives at LRC, which I recommended you read in full. I’m including just a few of the better ones here.

What you apparently don’t know is that, two years after Wanniski wrote, Saddam was indeed put on trial for the genocide of the Anfal military campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq

Read Wanniski’s archives to learn more about Anfal.

And that, Paulie, is what you get for relying uncritically on sources (like LewRockwell.com) writing stuff you already knew you’d agree with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Thanks, I know what confirmation bias is. I don’t rely on anything uncritically. However, you seem to dismiss Wanniski’s entire body of work because you have an inverse confirmation bias about his publisher, or something. At best, I can conclude you didn’t read the archives, as suggested.

No, it’s not accurate to say that Saddam was a “U.S. client”.

Wikipedia:

In 1958, a year after Saddam had joined the Ba’ath party, army officers led by General Abdul Karim Qassim overthrew Faisal II of Iraq. The Ba’athists opposed the new government, and in 1959, Saddam was involved in the attempted United States-backed plot to assassinate Qassim.

Back to Holtz:

Paulie, I said the “war!” _topic_ had hijacked this article, not any one person. I didn’t even mention Iraq or war as “divisive” — I just included “no obsession with a single internally divisive issue” in a list of reasons why a previous editor did a better job than Sipos. My earlier mention of “multiple antiwar articles per issue” would be a valid complaint even if I agreed with Sipos on the war. It was Sipos who thought that flaunting his antiwar LP outreach would bother me, but he was so mistaken that I didn’t even notice that he did so. What then happened was that Susan Hogarth, Rob Power, and Tom Knapp in quick succession all jumped in to beat their antiwar chests — while Sipos slinked away instead of answering my point that he obfuscated the eight most charges against Angela.

So, in other words, the focus of this thread turning to the war issue started with you, continued with people replying to you, you replying to them, etc.

Hey, no worries, it’s fun to klunk some antiwar skulls together every once in a while. My time here is pretty much up, but I’ll be back in a few days to make sure I get the last word.

Unfortunately, I too am afflicted with lastworditis. A dreadful condition, I must say.

Bonus track:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/wanniski/wanniski8.html

Memo To: Political Reporters
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Refresh Your Memories on Iraq

In watching the Sunday talk shows today I was astonished at how everyone – interviewers and guests – seems to have forgotten that in the last month before President Bush pulled the trigger on Iraq it was clear we all should have known Saddam had NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. I’m posting below a memo I ran in this space 30 days before the war began entitled, “Finally, A Disarmed Iraq.” When everyone who supports the war continues to say that EVERYONE believed Saddam had WMD, including the French, the Germans, the Russians, etc. That is true only BEFORE the UN inspectors returned and spent months going over all the possibilities. A full month before the President decided that diplomacy had failed, Baghdad addressed the only issue still outstanding on the UNMOVIC and IAEA report cards: Proving the negative.

Strip away all gabble we hear today and you should remember the US position was that it was NOT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE INSPECTORS to locate WMD, it was Iraq’s responsibility to ‘fess up and take the inspectors to the locations where they were hiding WMD!! To be quite correct, this was essentially the thrust of the 1991 UN resolution, which required Baghdad to own up to any unconventional weapons they had, show them to the inspectors, and have them destroyed. The record now indicates Iraq did EXACTLY that in 1991, but none of that mattered as the US did not want to lift the sanctions that were crippling the Iraqi economy. The neo-cons had their hidden agenda of occupying Iraq, which is where we are now.

Senator John Kerry should be making the most of this, but his “helpers” are not doing much to help him. On “Meet the Press,” Tim Russert asked former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Chief of Staff John Podesta how Kerry could really complain about the war when he “voted for it.” Russert asked: What is the difference between Kerry and Bush? Both Albright and Podesta parroted the party line that Kerry would have allowed the UN inspectors “to finish their work,” but then slipped into the line that a President Kerry could then have assembled an international coalition to take out Saddam. Huh?

Their assumption is that if the inspectors finished their work, they would have found the WMD!! Why do they say this? Because if they do not, they will have to come to the conclusion that the United Nations would announce, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” and submit that the sanctions against Iraq should finally be lifted. It is now still politically incorrect to say the world would be better off if we had not gone to war and removed Saddam. We know the Bush team wanted war and their smartest players knew Iraq had been effectively disarmed. But why do you reporters to this day run film clips and cite quotes of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry from the Senate floor supporting the use of force against Iraq? Of course, at the time EVERYONE thought WMD would be found (except Scott Ritter, the UNSCOM inspector who ran around telling everyone he knew that this wasn’t the case.)

To repeat, political reporters (you too, Tim), should refresh your memories. Go back and watch the UNSC sessions and read the daily accounts of how diplomacy was working, except the major media at the time did not seem to notice.

Memo on the Margin
Finally, A Disarmed Iraq

Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients, Feb. 17, 2003
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Closing the Last Gaps

If you watched the proceedings of the UN Security Council last Friday, you had to be paying special attention when UNMOVIC’s Hans Blix mentioned in passing a list of 83 names he had gotten from Baghdad in the last few days. US Secretary of State Colin Powell clearly missed the point or was thinking about something else at that moment. So were the editorialists at The New York Times, which led me to write a letter to the Times explaining the importance of what Blix had mentioned. You may recall that in his remarks which followed, Powell again and again made the point that while it was clear Iraq had been cooperating on “process,” it was still not cooperating on “substance.” He also hammered away on the point that UNSC Resolution #1441 was not about “inspections,” but about “disarmament.” In its lead editorial Saturday, the Times made the same point, that Iraq was still doing nothing to deal with the “substance” of the disarmament issue that has dragged on since the summer of 1991.

What was that list of 83 names and why is it so crucial? It is the only way Iraq has of proving the negative, an otherwise impossible demand by the hawks in the Bush administration. As Iraq’s UN Ambassador Mohammed Aldouri put it in his remarks Friday, “You cannot give with an empty hand,” an old Arab saying. What Blix finds promising on “substance” in the list is that these are the men who actually carried out the destruction of materials that could be assembled into weapons of mass destruction if Iraqi scientists knew how to do so. When the UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they had accounted for 95% of the chemical and biological programs, which led Scott Ritter to say Iraq had been “qualitatively” disarmed. What was left were these “gaps” in the records, which UNSCOM’s Richard Butler insisted was the responsibility of Iraq to prove did not exist. I don’t know if he ever asked Baghdad for a list of names of the workers who destroyed the missing materials, but now Baghdad has supplied the list without being asked for it. If the interviews get started now, Blix will be able to report to the Security Council on March 14 that Iraq has been “quantitatively” disarmed, removing any reason for war.

Here is the letter to the Times, which the paper chose not to run:

Letter to the Editor:

Both the Times in its 2/15 editorial, “Disarming Iraq,” and Secretary of State Powell in his remarks to the UN the day before missed the most substantive offer made by Iraq last week, as recounted in the report of UNMOVIC’s Hans Blix. It has never been possible for Baghdad to prove with documentation that some of the missing chemical/biological materials were destroyed as claimed in the summer of 1991. Documents had been able to account for almost all the materials, but after inspections from 1991 to 1998 there remained these gaps. Mr. Blix told the UN that Iraq’s National Monitoring Directorate has presented a list of 83 names of participants in the destruction process. “The presentation of a list of persons who can be interviewed about the actions appears useful and pertains to cooperation on substance,” he said, adding the hope that a similar list be proffered for proscribed items in the biological field.

There has never been credible evidence that Iraq ever produced “weapons of mass destruction” in the chemical, biological or nuclear fields. The gasses the Iraqi army used in the Iran/Iraq war were deadly to those caught in the vicinity of an incoming shell, but were mainly used not to kill but to disorient the human-wave attacks employed by the Iranians.

Iraq clearly tried to “weaponize” anthrax, VX, and biological agents in the ’80s, but failed and abandoned the efforts. What remains missing are records of some the ingredients that would be needed for such weapons. The most encouraging part of the positive report by Mr. Blix is that a method is being worked out to close those gaps to the satisfaction of the inspection teams.

June 29, 2004

Jude Wanniski

The Coalition of the Willing didn’t cut it for me. Iraq fails my test. Vietnam, too.

I’m hard pressed to think of any case that overcomes the factors in your second paragraph – or why the US government is the correct, or best, way for Americans who care about injustices around the world to address them. Repealing the neutrality act which forbids Americans to take action as individuals and/or groups which are voluntarily organized seems like a better idea to me.

Some others: the Democrats continued lack of progress on ending the drug war after the baby boomers got to the top leadership posts.

Learning about the work of Julian Simon and other dissenting voices on free market approaches to environmental problems.

Support for the Second Amendment and individual and community self-defense as a better alternative to relying on the police, and as a bulwark against tyranny – I came around on that one and matched my theory to my practice several years earlier (late 80s, whereas I held out on the economic issues until ’92-’94).

Taxes and spending: I always hated bureaucracy personally, but for a long time I though social programs were necessary. A combination of reading through and debating Libertarianism in One Lesson and books “for further reading” in the index in ’92-4, plus personal experience in the bite income tax withholding has on the low paid wage worker, and I came to see that there were better voluntary alternatives on issues such as poverty and education to coercive government solutions, just as I was learning that there are on environmental issues.

Really, it was just a case of systematizing the same arguments I was already making as a drug peace activist: just because something is bad does not mean it should be illegal, and just because something is good does not mean it should be mandatory.

Here you go:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/radicalcaucus

Completely uncensored.

On the downside, almost entirely dominated by off-topic cross-posted articles (mostly by Bruce Powell).

Holtz occasionally (and IMO credibly) claims to be a “radical,” albeit not of the Rothbard-influenced variety usually associated with LP radicalism.

I do regard myself as a radical, and tend to think that it’s the extremists who are most likely to eventually accomplish something for freedom.

The draft issue, and the Vietnam war in general…yes, that was why a lot of 1960s libertarians split off from the young conservatives. That, and sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. This was the milieu from which the LP emerged.

When the Republicans embraced wage and price controls, that was the last straw. But well before that, there was the split at YAF in St. Louis in 1969. So, the antiwar issue has always been a key part of libertarian politics.

Yes, the anti-war issue brings a lot of people to libertarian politics. People actually don’t like to be drafted to serve in the military and fight wars so that rich contractor company shareholders can sell garbage to the military that blows up in the faces of conscripts. Many people don’t like to see men and women sent to distant countries to be killed by angry locals. Some people are even unhappy to see their tax dollars spent butchering foreigners for no good cause.

Come clean, Holtz. You own lots of stock in big defense contractor companies, don’t you? You get wood every time another bomb goes off over a village in Afghanistan because you get dividends from bomb makers, don’t you?