There are a number of versions of the now-infamous Ann Coulter interview with Diane Sawyer on the subject of Ann’s new book - I’ve taken this version from PoliPundit.

Diane: You are going to be on the New York Times bestseller list slugging it out with Hillary Clinton.

Ann: Yes, if that is your phraseology.

Now, if I were a depraved person with no sense of responsibility to No Treason, I would whip up (so to speak) a long salacious post about this interview. I would use deplorable words and terms like “Wesson oil”, “plastic tarp”, “full-frontal nudity” and “facesitting finish”.

But since I believe that even an anarcho-capitalist website like No Treason has an obligation to stand foursquare against the coarsening of public discourse, I will exercise self-restraint and good taste in this instance.

I will observe, however, that Hillary is probably not quite in Ms. Coulter’s class, either athletically or nudistically. Since there don’t seem to be any really good-looking liberal female public figures anymore, I nominate a certain paleo-libertarian anti-war female commentator to be Coulter’s opponent - it would make the match less of a foregone conclusion, and considerably easier on the eyes. (Other suggestions can be made in the handy Comments section.)

(The photo is provided by the excellent Apartment House Wrestling Gallery. Warning - nakedness ahead! Fans of 60’s girls with tan lines and natural attributes - and what rational, moral human being isn’t? - are advised to check out the Theo Erhet Gallery in the Misc. section.)

Brian Micklethwait posed the question over on samizdata.net of whether for-profit military service companies could bring peace to Africa where Governmental Organizations (GOs) have failed. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that they already have. Unfortunately, their success wasn’t allowed to last.

In Angola, the now-defunct private military service firm Executive Outcomes (EO) recruited a bunch of veterans of the Buffalo Battalion of the South African Defense Force (SADF) who were no longer needed after the SADF stopped intervening in the Angolan Civil War, but who knew the territory and knew Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, since they’d fought with UNITA against the MPLA during the 1980s. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Marxists of the MPLA conveniently switched their allegiance to the West, and UNITA was left out in the cold - but with plenty of diamond fields under its control, and a guerilla army that had reached the third stage of guerilla warfare & was capable of conventional military operations. The UN tried and failed to get UNITA to agree to compete against the MPLA with ballots instead of bullets, then gave a contract to EO to fight UNITA, which EO did quite successfully for much less money than the UN had already spent trying to bring UNITA to the bargaining table. Unfortunately, the MPLA won the elections and tried to assassinate Savimbi, who refused to recognize the election result, and EO’s contract wasn’t renewed by the UN, so the Angolan civil war continued. EO did move its HQ to Angola, however, and provided security for many of the foreign corporations exploiting the vast natural resources of Angola. (Last I heard, all foreign corporations doing business in Angola were required by law to provide their own military security, making Angola home to the highest number of private military security firms in the world.)

A similar story took place in Sierra Leone, where a civil war was underway between the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a sort of African Khmer Rouge without the ideology, who punished people for voting for their opponents by chopping off the hands they used to pull the levers at the voting booths, and the internationally-recognized government. At first, the government of Sierra Leone was a military dictatorship that was allied with Nigeria, also a military dictatorship at the time. Nigeria intervened in the Liberian civil war against Charles Taylor, who has made the news again recently, so Taylor retaliated by supporting the rebels in Sierra Leone, Nigeria’s ally. Sierra Leone’s military dictatorship was overthrown, and EO was given another contract by the UN to train the Sierra Leone regular military so they could fight the rebels. EO did so, also commanding Sierra Leone’s soldiers in the field in operations against the RUF, and beating the RUF so badly that the RUF agreed to submit to democratic elections to decide the president. The elections were held, the RUF lost, EO’s contract expired and was not renewed, and the RUF overthrew the newly-elected president, terrorizing the people of the country until they were driven back into the jungle by a combination of tribal militiamen and Nigerian regulars that intervened under the banner of ECOMOG, an organization that serves as a vehicle for international cooperation in the region.

In each case, a bias against mercenaries seems to have been a major factor in either terminating or not renewing EO’s contracts. The bias is based upon the fact that they are for-profit, and that their leadership is usually white (although not always, and frequently many of their soldiers are black).

This is unfortunate, because Africa’s natural resources are so vast that it would be profitable for mercenaries to get paid out of a percentage of the profits from their exploitation, if only they were legally permitted by the governments of the world to secure them. The resulting increase in peace & security would be of great benefit to the African people, who have been suffering under some of the most barbaric regimes in the world for decades.

Will it happen? I doubt it. The most recent intervention in Sierra Leone was by the British government military (the Royal Marines, as I recall), not any private military service firms (Sandline International’s attempt to intervene having been stopped by the Blair government). It seems that the window of opportunity for mercenaries in Africa only opened during the 1990s when the great powers of the world couldn’t figure out what they wanted to do next after the end of the Cold War, and now that they’ve got their shit together again they’re too jealous to let any private military forces take credit for any good that could be done by government soldiers, instead.

Still, the recent record of mercenaries in Africa is most impressive compared to that of government military forces, so we ought to keep on advocating their right to defend the lives, liberties, and property of innocent people in Africa or anywhere else there is a need. Perhaps that will help open a new window of opportunity for them.

�The fourth national war of the peasants was brigandage and here, too, the humble Italy was historically on the wrong side and bound to lose. The brigands had neither the arms forged by Vulcan nor the heavy artillery of the government troops. Even their gods were powerless: of what avail was a poor Madonna with a black face against the Ethical State of the Neapolitan followers of Hegel?�
- CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI, by Carlo Levi

My friend S. lives in what could be called lovely Deseret, or Zion (West), but is more commonly known as South Salt Lake City. Every so often, I get one of those five-dollar long distance cards and we talk about what’s been happening with each other and the state of the world in general. I mention polygamy in Seattle � S. expresses the opinion that while that kind of thing may be all right down in Zion (West) where tough Utah girls can push their husbands around, she questions how well it will work out in passive-aggressive Seattle, �among the Gentiles�. There is nothing much to say about Seattle anyway, as we both know all too well, and so S. describes her new adorable lop-tailed kitty-cat, her �sketchy� neighborhood and the �ghettolicious youth� that inhabit it. (�Salt Lake City is full of tweakers� she tells me, and I can believe it.) We are both broke but happy and someday we�ll see each other again. Eventually the talk turns to politics. S. intensly dislikes military men like Wesley Clark, and refers to them as �the traitorous generals on CNN.�

�Traitorous generals?� I say �That sounds like some phrase from the Spanish Civil War!�

�That�s the kind of times we�re living in, man!� S. replies, laughing.

A few days later I am walking around on Capitol Hill, around Pike and Pine, waiting for an appointment. The sun is out, and I feel a sort of undifferentiated benevolence for all the cheerfully hopeless people (as hopeless as myself) who are out and about and on the sidewalk today. There are plenty of ghettolicious youth, and pop-eyed shirtless skinny tweakers with greaser DA haircuts. There are bums sleeping in the park. There are many beautiful girls out in the sun today as well, and perhaps this accounts for my undifferentiated benevolence. Of course, the Ethical State is present, in the form of a big brand-new police station up the hill a block or two, but it�s possible that the Black Madonna di Viggiano is around somewhere as well. Perhaps that was Her looking through the latest releases bin at Zion’s Gate Records

I stop and inspect a store window display. The store sells the kind of novelty items that kids used to send away for in the mail, the kind of junk sold in ads in the back of comic books. Except now it�s been repackaged in ironic fashion and being sold to young urban hipster types for purposes of hipster ironic apartment decoration.

I am looking at this display, and wondering if I could work up some kind of article for No Treason discussing this phenomenon as evidence either for or against the Beckian Endarkenment � when I chance to overhear the conversation of two passing strangers.

�3000 comedians thrown out of work� one of them says �and he thought he had to be funny.�

Now that�s what I�d like for an epitaph. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Lew Rockwell’s final judgement upon Gulf War 2, “War on Iraq: The Verdict,” just begs for a dissenting opinion, which I will endeavor to provide:

Turkish and American officials had just finished toasting the first shipment of oil out of Iraq when the sound of clinking glasses was drowned out by a terrifying explosion. An oil pipeline west of Baghdad had been blown up by saboteurs. The resulting flaming tower was a fitting symbol. The supposed victory of US forces in Iraq has turned from hoax to chaos and, now, to all-round calamity.

Those of who remember the dire predictions made by the antiwar crowd before Gulf War 2 will find this conclusion hard to swallow. Saddam had the oil wells all rigged to explode, or he might empty them into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, thus causing a new environmental catastrophe, as he did back in Gulf War 1 when he set Kuwait’s oil fields ablaze. It was also feared that he might blow up the dams north of Baghdad, thus sweeping away Iraq’s liberators in the ensuing flood. Saddam might attack Israel with SCUD missiles with chemical warheads, thus provoking Israeli nuclear retaliation. One week into the liberation of war, a pause in the action was widely interpreted as a “quagmire” and a “stalemate” by the antiwar crowd, and another week or so later Baghdad fell to the liberators. None of the dire predictions made by the antiwarmongers came true, and now we’re told by Rockwell that the demolition of one oil pipeline indicates that the situation on the ground in Iraq is one of “all-round calamity.” In fact, the Iraqi situation is nowhere near as bad as the antiwarmongers feared/predicted/hoped it would be.

Those who have made a science out of studying government know the principle at work: government tends to accomplish the opposite of its stated aims. The advertised aim of this war was to bring the region and world more safety and order. But even ulterior aims have failed: Saddam is loose, oil pipelines are being sabotaged, troops are being killed every day, and the entire region is more resistant to US control than ever before.

Like most antiwarmongers, Rockwell misrepresents the goals of Gulf War 2. Saddam’s regime was targeted for change because it was a dictatorship which was sponsoring terror and developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Antiwarmongers like Rockwell have denied any and all evidence presented in support of the claims that Saddam sponsored Al Qaeda and was pursuing WMD. However, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of evidence that could possibly persuade them of these things. Judged by the achievement of these goals, Gulf War 2 is quite successful: Iraq is no longer a totalitarian dictatorship, and Saddam is no longer in a position to use the profits from the sale of Iraqi oil to sponsor Al Qaeda and finance WMD development. At most, he may still have some resources stashed away before his overthrow to use for these purposes, but he’s certainly not in anywhere near as strong a position as he was before then. Iraq is still a long way off from being as free as the USA, much less an anarcho-capitalist society, and there’s still some mopping up to do of pockets of resistance by Saddam loyalists amongst the Sunni Arab minority of Iraq and Iran’s proxies amongst the Shia Arab majority, but things were much worse before the war.

Already it is too late for the US to leave in hopes of restoring anything resembling normalcy in the country and region. Islamic fundamentalists have never been as influential and powerful, and terrorists never more bolstered with an ideological rationale for menacing Americans at home and abroad.

What “normalcy” is supposed to mean in Iraq, a country which has been under Saddam’s totalitarian rule for about three decades, and was ruled by a succession of military dictators before then, is difficult to tell. What it’s supposed to mean in “the region,” considering that the entire Middle East has been ruled by regimes that range from totalitarian dictatorships to authoritarian dictatorships (with the sole exception of Israel, but don’t tell that to Rockwell) is equally obscure.

As for the power and influence of Islamic fundamentalism, Saudi Arabia was the first Islamic fundamentalist state in the world, and Iran has rivaled Saudi Arabia for power and influence as an Islamic fundamentalist state since Khomeini overthrew the Shah in 1979. However, the Iranian clerisy is currently having to use violence against popular protests against its rule and facing the threat of a general strike scheduled to start in early July, and the Saudi regime is taking baby steps towards political liberalization, so it’s no surprise that Rockwell doesn’t even bother to try to cite any evidence in support of his claim that Islamic fundamentalism is more powerful & influential than ever.

As for the terrorists being “never more bolstered with an ideological rationale for menacing Americans,” terrorist incidents last year were at a 30-year low according to a recent State Department study, the much-vaunted and much-overrated “Arab Street” failed to rise up and do much of anything in the wake of the overthrow of either the Taliban or Saddam, and the most recent terrorist attacks were in the terrorists’ own backyard, Saudi Arabia, showing that their reach, at least for the moment, has been greatly reduced.

Without having found WMDs, the US has lost any rationale that might have existed for the war in the first place, which raises fundamental questions about the legitimacy of the continuing mission, even among those who supported the war. The Bush administration, which advertised forged documents and has otherwise done nothing to bolster its credibility as a truth teller, expects us to believe that someone made the WMDs vanish just ahead of advancing US troops. Uh huh.

Again, the rationale for the war was threefold: Saddam was sponsoring terrorists, developing WMD, and oppressing the Iraqis. He is no longer doing any of those things, except perhaps from hiding on a much smaller scale. However, since so much has been made of the failure thus far to find any WMD in Iraq, let’s address that point.

First, as I am not the first to point out, we haven’t yet found Saddam, either, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t exist before the war. The same goes for Saddam’s WMD. I don’t know where they went - some probably went to Syria, Saddam’s Ba’athist brother-regime, some probably went into the Euphrates, some may have been destroyed. However, even if Saddam had destroyed all of it after he foiled the UNSCOM inspectors in 1998, he still didn’t achieve transparency of his WMD programs, and that’s the key thing. Even if Saddam didn’t have any WMD, that would’ve been insufficient. What he needed to do was make it evident to the world that he did not have any WMD, and was not in the process of trying to develop any. That certainly was not the case. He gave all the appearance of someone who was trying to hide the fact that he was developing WMD. Furthermore, Iraq had already developed the scientific expertise necessary to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and still had most of that scientific establishment. As long as Saddam still had all those scientists on staff, he could resume WMD development at any time. The only way to prevent him from doing so was to remove him from power.

The expense of life and resources that went into war has so far produced only one major political result: it has made a folk hero out of Saddam Hussein, who credible reports describe as still alive, along with his sons. Only the Bush administration could have led millions of Iraqis to reflect on how good they had it when the “brutal dictator” was in charge. Does anyone doubt that he would win a landslide election today � unless the Islamic parties prevail and impose someone worse?

I most certainly do doubt that Saddam Hussein would “win a landslide election today” in Iraq. The Kurds certainly wouldn’t vote for him, nor would the Shia (who account for a majority of Iraq’s population), both of which population groups had tens of thousands of their members mass-murdered by Saddam’s regime. The only Iraqis to whom Saddam might be a folk hero today are the members of the Sunni Arab minority who had it best under Saddam and resent their loss of privilege. (Considering the fact that Rockwell is a white male defender of the Confederacy and the antebellum South and a die-hard opponent of the post-1965 desegregation of the South, I don’t find it the least bit surprising that he identifies with those who resent their loss of privilege.)

The unwillingness of the Bush administration to face any of this, or at least to admit any problems in public, is an ominous sign. So far its spokesmen have dealt with the massive tide of anti-US hatred in Iraq with absurd denials. US soldiers and civilian administrators wear body armor and travel only under the protection of heavy armor, and yet we are told that the opposition is somehow limited and narrow.

There is no “massive tide of anti-US hatred in Iraq,” and the only absurd denials are those from antiwarmongers like Rockwell about Saddam’s WMD & sponsorship of Al Qaeda. The opposition is limited and narrow, and wearing body armor and traveling under the protection of heavy armor is an appropriate response to such a threat. Consider how much people in the region changed their behavior when the Beltway Sniper was still on the loose - that was in response to only one sniper team!

Iraqi militants, Saddam loyalists, resistance fighters, Islamic radicals, guerillas under the control of the remnants of the Ba�ath party, disgruntled former employees of the former regime � these are all phrases invoked by the Bush administration and thus the press to describe the nameless snipers, rock throwers, and chanting mobs who continue to vex the US military during its occupation.

Precisely - and those phrases are all quite accurate.

For example, US head occupier Paul Bremer says these are merely “a very small minority still trying to fight us.'’ But when reporters have a hard time finding any Iraqi, from any class or religion, to say something nice about the occupation, the prattle about “pockets of resistance” begins to wear thin. At some point in the course of human events, all decent people develop more sympathy with those who seek liberty from occupation than with the occupiers, even if the troops wear the Stars and Stripes.

Reporters wouldn’t have a hard time finding Iraqis with nice things to say about the occupation, if only they cared to look for them, but they don’t. Quite the opposite, Western journalists are so infected with the same antiwar memes as Rockwell that they spend virtually all of their time looking for Iraqis with complaints about the occupation. Still, reports about Iraqis who are thrilled to be free of Saddam manage to make their way into the news anyways.

Almost half as many US troops have died since Bush declared the war over (55) as died during the war (138). That figure is significant enough, but consider that there is a huge difference between deaths in wartime and those killed during the supposed postwar peace. It is the difference between a military conflict, in which killing and dying is the whole point, and a political conflict, in which killing and death suggests despotism, lawlessness, and all-round calamity.

Considering the fact that Rockwell’s fellow antiwarmongers were predicting many thousands of US deaths in the Battle of Baghdad, a total of 193 dead thus far is pretty damn good.

We are encouraged to believe that anyone who would seek to harm US troops is necessarily driven by something other than the desire for the well-being of the Iraqi homeland. They must be radicals! They must be receiving their orders from a shadowy Saddam! They have been indoctrinated by Islam and thereby are prevented from seeing the great blessings being brought to Iraq by the US military! Pure nonsense, as ridiculous as the idea that the US has a just cause for occupying this country.

There’s nothing ridiculous or nonsensical about the notions that the Iraqi resisters are Saddamite loyalists & Islamic fundies, or that the US has a just cause to occupy Iraq and help it get back on its feet, just as the US did with Germany & Japan after WWII.

In Iraq, the “freedom” brought by the troops has so far meant canceling elections, suppressing opposition newspapers, confiscating weapons from civilians, going house to house to seek out political opponents of the US administrator, smearing and possibly killing anyone who raises questions about the occupation, and generally ruling the country as militaries from ancient times to the present have always ruled: through brutal force in the absence of the rule of law.

Since when is Rockwell so hot about elections, anyway? Doesn’t he hate democracy as the worst form of tyranny, just like his comrade, Hans Hermann-Hoppe? The “elections” which were canceled were ones in which manifestly undemocratic candidates were likely to win, and the US doesn’t want the post-Saddam Iraqi regime to follow the common Third World pattern: “One man, one vote, once.” The US had made it clear that those who are willing to confine their opposition to peaceful means will be free to do so, but those who are committed to violence will not be allowed to undermine the democratization of Iraq. If their newspapers are shut down, their weapons confiscated, and some of them are killed in the process, that’s evolution in action. By failing to distinguish between peaceful and violent “political opponents of the US administrator,” Rockwell is engaging in typical antiwarmonger mendacity, enabling him to misrepresent legitimate suppression of violent insurrectionists as if it were illegitimate repression of dissenters. (Then again, a neo-Confederate like Rockwell is committed to defending the violent insurrectionists of the Slave States, so it’s not surprising that he would naturally try to protect the remnant rulers of another slave state by trying to camouflage them as peaceful demonstrators.)

Finally, skipping several paragraphs because my replies to them would be merely redundant:

Of the fire produced by the exploding pipeline, an official told the New York Times: “We couldn’t do anything because the fire is bigger than our capabilities.” That sums up the entire US experience with this war.

A few years ago, there was a pile of old car tires in the California central valley that caught fire and couldn’t be put out, either, but that hardly meant that the entire Republic of California was in a state of “all-round calamity.” Putting out fires is a highly specialized occupation, putting out oil well/refinery/pipeline fires is even more highly specialized, difficult, and dangerous. Sometimes the best thing to do is to simply let the fires burn themselves out. However, the fact that some things are beyond our capability to accomplish doesn’t mean that everything is beyond our capability.

How ’bout some historical context here, folks: the US liberated, rebuilt, and democratized both Germany and Japan during WWII & afterwards - two countries which were much bigger military threats than Iraq, had much bigger populations than Iraq, and had suffered far more war damage than Iraq. By comparison, Iraq’s a cakewalk. That proved true during the military campaign, and it will prove true during the occupation, too. It’s still very early in the occupation, even if you accept the 2-year timeline of the Bush administration’s planners. I’ve always thought that was over-optimistic, and thought the US should plan on an occupation of 5 to 10 years, instead, especially considering the fact that the NATO occupation of Bosnia is still ongoing, having started back in 1995. Still, whichever timeline you use, it’s only a couple of months into the occupation of Iraq, and far too early to call it a failure.

He was so old that in the days of the brigands he was already a full-grown young man. I could never find out for certain whether, as was most likely, he had been one of them, but he had known the famous Ninco Nanco and he decribed to me as if he had seen her only the day before this brigand’s consort, Maria ‘a Pastore who lived with her lover in the wooded mountains, fighting and robbing at his side, clad like a man and always on horseback. Ninco Nanco’s band was the cruelest and most daring of the region, and Maria ‘a Pastore took part in the raids on farms and villages, the highway robberies, the division of spoils and the murders for revenge. When Ninco Nanco tore out with his bare hands the heart of the bersagliere who had captured him, Marie ‘a Pastora handed him his knife. The grave-digger remembered her distinctly, and there was pleasure in his strange voice when he told me how beautiful she was, with the pink and white coloring of a flower and black braids that hung down to her feet as she sat straight, astride her horse. Ninco Nanco was killed, but the old man did not know what had been the end of Maria ‘a Pastore, goddess of the peasant war. She neither died nor was captured, he told me; she was seen at Pisticci, swathed in black, then she disappeared on horseback into the woods and was never heard of again.

- from CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI, by Carlo Levi

When is vague anonymous hearsay evidence acceptable to Lew Rockwell? When he can use it to lie about neocons, of course:

Prominent neocons and minicons at Beltway thinktanks defended the Bolshevik revolution, “on balance,” and would not allow it to be questioned. This man could, indeed should, be anti-Stalin (post-FDR), but not anti-Bolshevik.

Funny, the “neocon” Richard Pipes, who Rockwell has falsely accused of being all wrong about the Soviets, is quite harsh in his condemnation of the Bolshevik “revolution” in his book, “The Russian Revolution,” arguing that it is rightly understood as a counter-revolutionary coup d’etat, and that Lenin and Trotsky were mass-murderers on a scale that put the Tsar to shame. In “Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime,” he argues that Lenin was the model for Mussolini’s Fascism, among many other things.

So, who are these “neocons” who allegedly were soft on Leninism, and only turned anti-Stalinist after FDR’s death? Rockwell never says, although he lamely tries to cite an interview on National Public Radio, calling NPR “left-neocon,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. But that doesn’t stop him from putting more words into the mouth of his neocon bogeyman:

Communists may have murdered more than 100 million innocents in the last century, but to our neocon friends, they are still charming fighters of inequality.

It would be a lot more accurate so say that Paleos like Rockwell still see Fascists as charming fighters of blacks, Communists, immigrants, and other threats to “our” white Christian heritage, despite the tens of millions of innocents they murdered in the last century - not to mention their interventionist domestic and foreign policies.

Wonderful news from Alaska, where it seems that even Democrats are pro-gun:

Alaskans will no longer need a permit to carry a concealed weapon under a bill signed into law Wednesday.

It’s about bloody time! However, since so many other of these United States require such permits, but recognize permits issued by other states, Alaskans will still be able to apply for permits to carry concealed handguns if they wish. If they do, they will also be exempt from background checks when buying handguns (background checks being required by Federal law, so Alaskans can’t get out of those entirely without going to the black market).

Here in the lovely Pacific Northwest we worship the all-powerful Salmon God. We sacrifice our economy, our incomes and our freedom for the sake of our finned masters, but apparently our sacrifice is not enough, according to the high priests at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Environmental Protection Agency.

What is our sin? How have we offended the Salmon God? According to this article, our sin lies in the fact that we exist at all.

The biggest danger to the survival of wild salmon is the population juggernaut that will see the Pacific Northwest’s population surge from today’s 15 million to 50 million or more by century’s end, researchers said at the World Summit on Salmon.

Is there no hope? Robert Lackey, an “Environmental Protection Agency fisheries biologist from Corvallis, Ore.” calls upon us to render even more unto the Salmon God:

Lackey called for “uncompromising ecological realism.” He said the main factors affecting salmon abundance that are under human control are competition for natural resources, especially water; increasing human population; the drive for economic efficiency through globalization; and “individual and collective lifestyle choices and priorities.”

We must abandon our sinful luxuries!

Several speakers cited urban sprawl in this region — symbolized by our appetite for SUVs, computers, McDonald’s and Starbucks — as a death knell for salmon.

But in the end, according to these holy men, it would be better if we would all just die. At least, that’s what Malcolm Windsor, “secretary of the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization” seems to be saying.

Yet in Kamchatka, the peninsula forming the remote eastern edge of mainland Asia, “salmon populations are the happiest and the human populations are the lowest,” Windsor said.

The happiness of fish is all-important of course. For a moment, Mr. Windsor succumbs to a mood of weak-minded compromise:

“Maybe attitudes could change and a larger human population could put down a smaller footprint,” Windsor said hopefully.

His true instincts soon reassert themselves, however.

But he said it’s also possible that something unseen — disease, a fertility drop or some other factor — could lead to a crash of the human population.

“At least think of it the good way — the salmon will be happy,” he said.

Infidels might claim that the likes of Windsor and Lackey are hateful eco-Nazis, who are willing to sacrifice human lives for a wretched fish, and who disguise a lust for power and social control behind sanctimonious concern for the “environment.”

Infidels might say that phrases like “individual and collective lifestyle choices and priorities” really translate in practice to an eco-nazi dictatorship, a static hierarchy immune from economic reality and disturbing innovation, where power is wielded by resentful loser bureaucrats like Windsor and Lackey.

That, of course, would be blasphemy. All hail the Salmon God!

Mori Chack’s adorable Gloomy Bear, beloved cartoon character.

Marcus Epstein, a contributor to LewRockwell.com, informs us of a change of heart in a list of his articles:

The Upside Down Flag (LewRockwell.com; August 25, 2001) Why patriotism isn’t good for the sake of patriotism. I’ve had a change of heart since I wrote this and now feel that patriotism should be based on blood and soil rather than any abstract ideological concepts.

How, uh, libertarian. Or something.

Personally, I feel that patriotism should be based on “The Oath Of Green Blood”

Chalmers Johnson, left-of-center economist and author of the over-rated “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire,” has published a review of the new book, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” by George Crile, which I’ve already mentioned before in this blog.

According to Johnson, the CIA has always been utterly incompetent, and every covert operation it has ever run has been an embarassment. Since he specifically mentions Operation Phoenix, the CIA’s campaign to pacify South Vietnam by neutralizing the Viet Cong Infrastructure, it seems relevant to point out that Mark Moyar didn’t find it incompetent or embarassing in his book, “Phoenix and the Birds of Prey.” Upon examination, many of the cases mentioned by Johnson were actually successful in their own terms, or were failures for reasons other than CIA incompetence, and most of the US embarassment about them has been the result of biased interpretation by hostile left-wing critics like Johnson himself. (Not that there hasn’t been plenty of incompetence to go around within the CIA, of course.) However, Crile’s book is about the Afghan-Soviet War, so it would be best to stick to that subject.

One of the first things Johnson says about Crile’s book is simply false:

he never mentions that the “tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists” the CIA armed are some of the same people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; blew a hole in the side of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden harbor in 2000; and on Sept. 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In fact, Crile goes on at length about this very subject in the last section of the book, titled: “Epilogue: Unintended Consequences.” E.g.:

For anyone trying to make sense of this new enemy, it would seem relevant that for over a decade in the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. government sponsored the largest and most successful jihad in modern history; that the CIA secretly armed and trained several hundred thousand fundamentalist warriors to fight against our common Soviet enemy; and that many of those who now targeted America were veterans of that earlier CIA-sponsored jihad.”
- p. 508

For someone as presumably interested in the unintended consequences of US policy as the author of “Blowback,” Johnson doesn’t seem to have read any of the Epilogue of Crile’s book. Perhaps if Johnson had read it more carefully, he would’ve realized that Crile specifies two reasons why the Afghan mujahideen are not sufficiently grateful for America’s help against the Soviet invaders of their country:

1) US support for the Mujahideen was covert, not overt. Most of the weapons supplied were not US-made, but were made in Soviet-block countries. The mujahideen were trained by the Pakistanis, who wouldn’t let the CIA have access to the training camps. This meant that a good deal of the average Afghan freedom-fighters weren’t even aware of how much help they were getting from the USA.

2) The US did as Johnson advocates in “Blowback,” and totally withdrew from Afghanistan once the Soviets left, thus abandoning the Afghans to inter-tribal warfare between rival warlords and the eventual rise of the Taliban, who succeeded thanks to continued Pakistani and Saudi intervention in Afghanistan.

Of course, the implication of both of these points is that things might have gone better of US policy in support of the Afghans had been more overt and interventionist, if the US had openly supported the Mujahideen, and supported democratic nation-building in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. That would hardly square with Johnson’s antipathy to interventionist US foreign policy, though, so no wonder he ignored this aspect of Crile’s excellent book.

Finally, Johnson makes much of the fact that Carter authorized US support for the mujahideen prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as if that were the beginning of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In fact, the Soviets had already been intervening through the Afghan Commies for years, ever since one of them overthrew the democratically-elected leader of Afghanistan, Daoud, and the Afghan Commies had started collectivizing agriculture and murdering their political opponents. Johnson also leaves out the fact that the campaign Carter authorized was merely a “nuisance” campaign of supplying the Afghans with bolt-action .303 rifles modeled on the WWI-vintage British Lee-Enfield. At that time, no one thought the Afghans had a chance of winning, and no one in the CIA or U.S. Congress was willing to take the chance that they might achieve victory. It wasn’t until Wilson, Avrokotos, and Mike Vickers took a serious look at how much money, ammo, and the kind of weapons victory would take that the Afghans really started to unleash hell upon the Red Army.

Not the dreaded neocons, according to Lew Rockwell:

“The neocons were as wrong about the Soviet Union as they were about Iraq’s WMD. In both cases, of course, they were lying. The USSR was always an economic and military basketcase…”

This was Rockwell’s comment on the declassification of the CIA’s 1976 Team “B” assessment of the Soviet Union’s strategic threat to the U.S.

My reading in Soviet Studies has convinced me that the neocons were right about the Soviets, and the Rothbardians were wrong. This is most easily proven with Rockwell’s claim that the Soviet Union was “always” a military basketcase. That would’ve come as a great surprise to the German Army at Stalingrad and Kursk, not to mention the rest of the Soviet drive to Berlin. While the Red Army may have been a basketcase at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (although not as much as at the beginning of the Winter War), as Richard Overy writes in “Why The Allies Won,” the explanation for the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany must include a definite qualitative improvement in Soviet military power, and not just mere quantitative superiority alone. After all, the Soviets had quantitative superiority over Germany the whole time that Germany was driving to Stalingrad. After WWII, the Red Army was undefeated until it was forced to retreat from Afghanistan by the Mujahideen.

Furthermore, in his analysis of the Team B estimate, intelligence historian John Prados says that Team B faulted the CIA’s regular estimates of the Soviet threat for failing to take into account the possibility that Soviet strategy was aggressive, not just defensive. Prados says this as if it were obvious that Soviet strategy was purely defensive, not the least bit aggressive. However, about a dozen countries around the world fell to the Soviets or their proxies during the 1970s: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Laos, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Vietnam, etc. All of those Soviet proxies either fell with the Soviet Union, or quickly realigned with another great power. If the CIA’s regular estimate of the Soviet threat omitted the possibility that Soviet strategy was offensive, right in the midst of all this evidence that Soviet strategy not only was offensive but was succeeding, then its methodology was fatally flawed.

The question of whether the Soviet Union was always an economic basketcase is a little more complicated. The Soviet economy was always inferior to that of the USA, but the Soviets did achieve real economic gains. As Paul Krugman comments, Soviet growth during the Khruschev era was so fast that it scared Western economists, until they figured out that it was entirely due to an unsustainable increase in economic inputs.

Economic stagnation did set in during the Brezhnev era, but the Soviet economy was propped up by several things:

* High oil prices. Soviet Russia, like Russia today, was an oil exporter, with one of the lowest costs of production in the world. The OPEC embargo resulted in high oil prices, which enabled the Soviets to export oil for large amounts of hard currency. The lifting of oil price controls and collapse of the OPEC embargo resulted in low oil prices, ending this way for the Soviets to prolong their rule.

* Grain subsidies. As part of detente, the US sold grain to the Soviets at bargain-basement prices. This relieved the Soviets of the need to make their agriculture more productive so as to feed their people, and enabled them to spend more of their GDP on their military. The end of these subsidies took this prop from underneath the Soviet edifice, too.

* Unchallenged lead in the Arms Race. As Peter Schweitzer points out in “Reagan’s War,” no U.S. President before Reagan ever made it a policy goal for the US to have global military superiority over the Soviets. Reagan’s adoption of this policy amounted to a form of economic warfare against the Soviets. Once the USA seriously challenged the Soviets in the arms race, there was no way the Soviet economy could match the productive might of the USA.

So, if the Soviet economy was a basketcase, until Reagan’s Presidency it was one that was running so fast on crutches provided by the US or other foreign powers that it was still winning the arms race and expanding its sphere of influence all over the world. Reagan’s foreign policy team reversed that situation, with full knowledge of what it was doing. When Richard Pipes was Reagan’s National Security Advisor for the Soviet Union, he wrote an official prediction that a reformer like Gorbachev would take the lead in the Soviet Union after a few years of the sort of pressure the US was in the process of applying.

Pipes was right about that, Team B was right that Soviet strategy was offensive, and we have Reagan’s anti-Soviet policies to thank for the Soviet implosion, the liberation of all the millions of people who used to live under Soviet tyranny in Russia and all the Warsaw Pact countries, and the end of the Soviet nuclear threat to the USA. Rothbard’s prediction that only a US return to an isolationist foreign policy could end the Cold War was wrong.