[31] News from Absurdistan - The Raptorial Fallacy of Going to War for Oil

While a favourite description of the "deadly enemies" of the US, being irrational and at the same time not only holding in their hands but actually using copiously weapons of mass destruction against innocent peoples is precisely what the US administration has been doing for years on end, with little prospect that the will of the [American] people to cease waging these wars will be represented and properly acted upon by the institutions of American democracy.

For the doubtful, invading a country with 130 000 soldiers and killing the occupied at a rate of 10 000 per month is using weapons of mass destruction - even if we are not talking about nuclear devices but a captive group called American soldiers whose duty to their country is no longer defined by the Constitution but by a blood-thirsty dictator with an endless record of spurious ad-hoc rationals to continue the slaughter.

And to those, who question the figure, referring to methodologically less convincing studies that place the number at 2 000 to 3 000, I say: we are still talking about mass destruction.

And let me remind the accountants of death, it is not the number of casualties that gives us insight into the fundamental issue of whether a war is just or not.

Analysing the raptorial fallacy of going to war for oil, David. R. Henderson writes in his executive summary:

Many people fear that a hostile foreign oil producer will be able to damage Americans and, for that reason, think that the U.S. government should ensure U.S. access to oil. But a foreign government cannot cause Americans to line up for gasoline.

Only price controls imposed by U.S. governments can do that, which is what they did in the 1970s.

A hostile foreign oil producer cannot inflict more than a small amount of harm on Americans by refusing to sell oil to Americans, unless this oil producer is willing to cut its own output. If a hostile foreign oil producer maintains output but cuts exports to the United States, it initiates a game of musical chairs in which the number of chairs equals the number of players. Different buyers will be linked with different sellers than before the hostile producer reduced its oil exports to the United States, but the cost to Americans of switching suppliers would be negligible. The only way a foreign oil producer can harm Americans is by cutting output, but that producer will then harm itself and also harm all other oil users, not just U.S. consumers. This harm is likely to be well under 0.5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product(GDP). Ironically, war for oil could well drive the price of oil higher, not lower, thus costing Americans twice—as taxpayers and as oil users.

[30] News from Absurdistan - Deluge of Disinformation

Get the full story by clicking on the post's headline, while in the below excerpt Scott Ritter reminds us:

From speculation to speculation, the case against the Quds Force by the Bush administration continues to lack anything in the way of substance. And yet the mythological Daqduq has become a launching platform for even graver speculation, fed by the media themselves, that the highest levels of leadership in Iran were aware of the activities of Daqduq and the Quds Force, and are thus somehow complicit in the violence. Not one shred of evidence was produced to sustain such serious accusations, and yet national media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post both ran stories repeating these accusations. Politicians are formulating policy based upon such baseless accusations, and the American public continues to be manipulated into a predisposition for war with Iran largely because of such speculation. No one seems to pay attention to the fact that the U.S. military itself has subsequently contradicted its own briefings, noting in July 2007 that no persons had been captured by the United States that can provide a direct link between insurgents in Iraq and Iran. Again, in August of 2007, the U.S. military stated that it had yet to catch anyone smuggling weapons into Iraq from Iran.

(Bold face inserted by I.G.T.U.)

All That Killing and Maiming - Just around the Corner

The skies of my sleepy German home town are full of the dead and the dying. The planes keep coming in around the clock - they look like huge grey fish, reminiscent of the Koi in the Japanese Garden that the city strives to be noted for; lethargic, if one can say that of military air craft, slow-moving on the descent to the Air Base, placid.

I do not know what it was like living in the vicinity of a concentration camp. I guess, there is a blunting routine to the business of killing. Our town is part of that industry, and the economy would be considerably worse off if "the Americans" were not as eager to go to war as they are.

All I can say about living next to one of those factories of death: you hardly notice. It is all neatly organised. It is run-of-the-mill. Good for real estate prices and employment rates. You do not see people going insane about the prospect of getting killed or taking somebody's life.

They buy a BMW, for once in their lives. Some look like they cannot quite afford it, or not for too long. But then, Germans like to look in better shape than they are - "exact same" way, to use that awkward American pleonasm.

Organised genocide, mass killing will never be noticeable when we keep on trusting in government the way we do.

The government is wiser than we are. So, there must be a point to the ordained goings-on.

Maybe, some of us will notice the errors - with hindsight, much later. Maybe then, they will find it hard to convince the contemporaries that they really did not know that much about what had been going on. Maybe then, like today in Germany, it will be a cheap feat and, hence, fashionable to know more about the past than those knew who lived through it.

I see the American soldiers at "Thursty Nelly's" (a down town Irish Pub) getting drunk or looking for a screw, before the fat flying fish take them out of town to the Middle East.

Should you decide to watch the below video, I assure you, the fate of the victims is much, much more hellish than what you may think, having seen the clip.

You can go look them up in person (thanks to private establishments)...but, there is no sign next to the Autobahn directing you to my home town's local branches of hell - the signs are reserved for The Japanese Garden.

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

Ron Paul - Another Introduction

Four Titanics and One Iceberg, Ron Paul?
By Larry Fester

The Republican presidential field has four media appointed Titanics in the race, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain. All the candidates have garnered positive media attention and demonstrated fund raising ability.

Still, with the GOP nomination up for grabs these Republican frontrunners have at least one iceberg to navigate in the New Hampshire primary, namely Dr. Ron Paul, the Texas Congressman that is starting to gain momentum and may actually be expanding the GOP base in the process.

With so many primaries moving their dates up, 22 states are now up for grabs on Super Tuesday. If Ron Paul wins New Hampshire his odds of winning the lions share of states on Super Tuesday’s February 5th elections become very good, as will his likelihood of winning the GOP nomination.

Paul supports eliminating federal income taxes and the Federal Reserve which he blames for the current housing crises. Ron Paul also voted against the Iraq war and has been critical of Hillary Clinton and his fellow Republicans for supporting the war.

To many Ron Paul is known as a civil rights leader defending the Bill of Rights and the U.S. constitution at every chance. Paul gathers large crowds wherever he holds rallies across America and when he says ‘we’ve become soft on liberty’ and promises to ‘repeal the police state’ he is welcomed with chants of ‘Freedom’ by adoring supporters from all walks of life.

Ron Paul also opposes a North American Union and says he will protect U.S. borders and not allow them to be erased. Republicans and some Democrats have been critical of the Bush administration for not securing borders in the six years since 9/11.

Paul’s campaign recently did an online challenge to raise 500 thousand dollars to end the quarter strongly on September 30th. They over shot the mark and raised over 1.2 million dollars in the seven day period.

Paul activists believe that if he wins the nomination he may be re-create a Republican landslide like Ronald Reagan did in the 80s.

For the first time in a generation, Republicans have a presidential primary that has not been decided before it started. GOP frontrunners should proceed with caution because if Ron Paul wins New Hampshire, the nomination will likely follow.

[29] News from Absurdistan - Fragments of Truth

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it." - Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism.

Incidentally, our concept of [political legitimacy under] democracy is analogous to that of the totalitarian fabrication of "fact" explained by Hannah Arendt above: political legitimacy depends entirely on the power of the [majority-based] ruler who can fabricate it [by claiming the power of government to be legitimate by definition as it is derived from the "will" of the people].

Democracy, as we practice it, is just an excuse for the abuse of power, creating the egregious illusion that majority consent imparts to holders of unrestrained power the ability to act in compliance with "the will of the people" (what should that be? How can an abstraction have a will?) regarding millions of issues, most of which have not even been made known to the people nor subjected to a process of ascertaining popular consent. While of course popular consent as such is no guarantee of a reasonable course of action - like government, it must be subjected to the test of higher, enduring principles ensuring the protection of liberty.

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” - Benjamin Franklin, 1759

For more, see my post from July 2007: "[13] News from Absurdistan - The Sun Queen of Germany", and http://www.democracyisnotfreedom.com/

As for the extreme contempt for facts regarding the planned attack on Iran, Lew Rockwell is right in writing:

...the elected Ahmadinejad, though a crazed Keynesian and other things, is no dictator, let alone a totalitarian one. He has far less power than Bush, for example, and is not even commander-in-chief of the Iranian military. And the notion that third-world Iran is a threat to nuclear powers America and Israel is laughable. Of course, so was the notion that Saddam Hussein was going to nuke the Bronx, but the booboisie believed it, thanks to the intellectuals who toed the line.

Democracy Is Not Freedom - An Iraqi Experience

Oh dear, Iraq does not seem to be ready for democracy - when the occupying force does not like what the democratic government of Iraq intends to do (see the news below).

Well, Bush will teach them a lesson in democracy, and in the meantime he'll bomb Iran to prepare a democratic future for the very country that lost democracy in 1953 at the instigation of the USA.

Too bad, Iraq wants peace and friendly relationships with Iran and other neighbours. Pretty immature stance, this. After all, Iran is going to have nuclear weapons, in five years time, or maybe never, even if left alone. But the mere possibility of Iran possessing nuclear weapons is a cogent reason to attack it, isn't it?

Funny, the Americans ignore nuclear Pakistan, a haven of terrorists (as defined by the US administration). Maybe Iran should have acquired nuclear weapons, to be safe from a little visitation from the US military.

By contrast, America enjoys a mature democracy. Not one of the frontrunning presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, has expressed opposition to or voted against recent legislation empowering Bush to go ahead with his aggression against Iran as he sees fit (see the excerpt below the news). The exception, of course, is Ron Paul.

"Iraq’s vice president said on Saturday that his country will not be used as a base to launch attacks against Iran or Syria. Adel Abdul-Mahdi said he discussed security and other regional issues with Syrian President Bashar Assad during their meeting on Saturday. In response to a reporter’s question about a possible US military strike against Iran, the Iraqi vice president said: Iraq does not accept that its territory be used for any aggression against any neighbouring country.’ Iraq has an (Arab) identity which it is keen on and will defend,’ he told reporters at the Damascus Airport at the end of a three-day visit to Syria. Abdul-Mahdi said he discussed security issues with Assad adding that Assad stressed Syria’s support for the political process in Iraq. He said Syria had an important role to play in the political process of Iraq due to its weight’ in the Arab world." -International News

No Hope in the Democrats Democrats signal capitulation on Iraq – and Iran

by Justin Raimondo

As the cool undercurrents of Indian summer hint at winter frosts to come, the rhetoric of the Democrats at their most recent presidential debate foreshadows their capitulation to the War Party on the two vital issues of the day: Iraq and Iran. The first fifteen minutes of the debate were devoted entirely to these issues, and, to anyone who wants to find hope in the prospect of a Democrat in the White House, watching the performance of the Seven Dwarves & Gravel (I'll resist the temptation to dub him the Troll) was a depressing experience. "Will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term more than five years from now, there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq?" – moderator Tim Russert's question was posed to one and all, and the Clinton-Obama-Edwards axis of frontrunners all refused to take the pledge, albeit each in their own way. Obama: "I think it's hard to project four years from now, and I think it would be irresponsible. We don't know what contingency will be out there. Hillary: "I agree with Barack. It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting." Edwards: "I cannot make that commitment." If your illusions in the Democrats as the "peace party" aren't shattered, then your capacity for self-delusion is limitless. We're going to be in Iraq for at least through the first term of the next President, and likely far beyond that – and it doesn't matter what the voters voted for, or think they voted for. That's American "democracy" for you, a system that George W. Bush wants to export at gunpoint to the rest of the world. No wonder the rest of the world is saying "No thanks." It was Gravel who raised the real issue coming to the fore in this campaign, and that is the looming confrontation with Iran: "There was a vote in the Senate today – Joe Lieberman, who authored the Iraq resolution, has offered another resolution, and it's essentially a fig leaf to let George Bush go to war with Iran. And I want to congratulate Biden for voting against it, Dodd for voting against, and I'm ashamed of you, Hillary, for voting for it. You're not going to get another shot at this, because what's happened if this war ensues – we invade and they're looking for an excuse to do it. "And Obama was not even there to vote." How that last barb must have stung the self-righteous Obama, whose self-backslapping – "I was against this war [in Iraq] from the beginning" – was an embarrassment. Hillary's sinister laugh, when given the opportunity by Russert to answer Gravel, ought to have curdled the blood of even the hardest of the antiwar movement's hardcore Democratic partisans. What followed was a pretty faithful recitation of the War Party's talking points regarding Iran and the resolution passed by the Senate: "My understanding of the revolutionary guard in Iran is that it is promoting terrorism. It is manufacturing weapons that are used against our troops in Iraq. It is certainly the main agent of support for Hezbollah, Hamas and others, and in what we voted for today, we will have an opportunity to designate it as a terrorist organization, which gives us the options to be able to impose sanctions on the primary leaders to try to begin to put some teeth into all this talk about dealing with Iran." The resolution [.pdf], sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyle, designates the Quds force, as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are known, as an official "terrorist" organization. Besides placing sanctions on individual Iranian officials, as Hillary points out, it would also give the President extraordinary leeway in going after the Quds guards militarily – giving him, in effect, the power to unilaterally go to war with Iran, without coming to Congress for any further authorization. There would doubtless be howls of outrage from some Democrats, and even a few Republicans, but the administration would justify its actions – and quite credibly – on the grounds that the authority to go after "terrorists" had already been granted. Of the Democratic "majors," only Edwards seems to realize the import of this. That Senator Gravel, alone, had the courage to raise the alarm, and confront Hillary on this issue, speaks volumes about the state of the Democratic party – and the political impotence of the antiwar majority in this country. Those who want us out of Iraq, and, furthermore, are bitterly opposed to the prospect of yet another war in that neck of the woods, are the new silent majority. Silent because we don't hear this view reflected in the media – where pro-war commentary and "centrist" of-course-we-can't-withdraw-until-2012 punditry prevails – and also politically impotent: with the Democratic frontrunners basically taking a Bush-lite approach.

Democracy Is Not Freedom

Democracy Is Not Freedom

by Rep. Ron Paul, MD
by Rep. Ron Paul, MD

“…man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”

~ Ronald Reagan

We’ve all heard the words democracy and freedom used countless times, especially in the context of our invasion of Iraq. They are used interchangeably in modern political discourse, yet their true meanings are very different.

George Orwell wrote about “meaningless words” that are endlessly repeated in the political arena.* Words like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice,” Orwell explained, have been abused so long that their original meanings have been eviscerated. In Orwell’s view, political words were “Often used in a consciously dishonest way.” Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language. As a result, Americans have been conditioned to accept the word “democracy” as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good.

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, “There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word “democracy” is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

A truly democratic election in Iraq, without U.S. interference and U.S. puppet candidates, almost certainly would result in the creation of a Shiite theocracy. Shiite majority rule in Iraq might well mean the complete political, economic, and social subjugation of the minority Kurd and Sunni Arab populations. Such an outcome would be democratic, but would it be free? Would the Kurds and Sunnis consider themselves free? The administration talks about democracy in Iraq, but is it prepared to accept a democratically-elected Iraqi government no matter what its attitude toward the U.S. occupation? Hardly. For all our talk about freedom and democracy, the truth is we have no idea whether Iraqis will be free in the future. They’re certainly not free while a foreign army occupies their country. The real test is not whether Iraq adopts a democratic, pro-western government, but rather whether ordinary Iraqis can lead their personal, religious, social, and business lives without interference from government.

Simply put, freedom is the absence of government coercion. Our Founding Fathers understood this, and created the least coercive government in the history of the world. The Constitution established a very limited, decentralized government to provide national defense and little else. States, not the federal government, were charged with protecting individuals against criminal force and fraud. For the first time, a government was created solely to protect the rights, liberties, and property of its citizens. Any government coercion beyond that necessary to secure those rights was forbidden, both through the Bill of Rights and the doctrine of strictly enumerated powers. This reflected the founders’ belief that democratic government could be as tyrannical as any King.

Few Americans understand that all government action is inherently coercive. If nothing else, government action requires taxes. If taxes were freely paid, they wouldn’t be called taxes, they’d be called donations. If we intend to use the word freedom in an honest way, we should have the simple integrity to give it real meaning: Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.

The political left equates freedom with liberation from material wants, always via a large and benevolent government that exists to create equality on earth. To modern liberals, men are free only when the laws of economics and scarcity are suspended, the landlord is rebuffed, the doctor presents no bill, and groceries are given away. But philosopher Ayn Rand (and many others before her) demolished this argument by explaining how such “freedom” for some is possible only when government takes freedoms away from others. In other words, government claims on the lives and property of those who are expected to provide housing, medical care, food, etc. for others are coercive – and thus incompatible with freedom. “Liberalism,” which once stood for civil, political, and economic liberties, has become a synonym for omnipotent coercive government.

The political right equates freedom with national greatness brought about through military strength. Like the left, modern conservatives favor an all-powerful central state – but for militarism, corporatism, and faith-based welfarism. Unlike the Taft-Goldwater conservatives of yesteryear, today’s Republicans are eager to expand government spending, increase the federal police apparatus, and intervene militarily around the world. The last tenuous links between conservatives and support for smaller government have been severed. “Conservatism,” which once meant respect for tradition and distrust of active government, has transformed into big-government utopian grandiosity.

Orwell certainly was right about the use of meaningless words in politics. If we hope to remain free, we must cut through the fog and attach concrete meanings to the words politicians use to deceive us. We must reassert that America is a republic, not a democracy, and remind ourselves that the Constitution places limits on government that no majority can overrule. We must resist any use of the word “freedom” to describe state action. We must reject the current meaningless designations of “liberals” and “conservatives,” in favor of an accurate term for both: statists.

Every politician on earth claims to support freedom. The problem is so few of them understand the simple meaning of the word.

*Politics and the English Language, 1946.