I want my country back(HARRY BROWNE BARF ALERT)

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: December 5, 2002 1:00 a.m. Eastern

Whenever I say that America has become an empire, someone is sure to say I'm being ridiculous.

But what do you call a government that has tried (usually successfully) to force "regime changes" in Panama, Grenada, South Vietnam, Cuba, Guatemala, Chile, Rhodesia, South Africa, Iraq (in 1963), the Philippines, Serbia, Afghanistan (twice), Iran and several other countries that don't immediately come to mind?

What do you call a government that has troops stationed in a hundred countries around the world?

What do you call a government whose leader says everyone must play by his rules or risk being attacked?

But then someone is sure to instruct me that "American troops are stationed abroad because those countries asked for them."

Yes, people in foreign countries want American troops there – just about as much as the Poles enjoyed having Soviet troops in Poland.

American troops are in those countries only because the governments of those countries were bribed with your money to allow American troops in.

So how do you think Germans feel about seeing American troops walking their streets – or Korean or Japanese citizens watching American soldiers commit murders and rapes in their countries without facing local prosecution?

And that's ironic. Because for as long as I can remember, conservatives have been railing against the threat of world government.

But now we actually have a form of world government – a government run by George Bush and enforced by the American military – and most conservatives are all for it.

Our government decides what rules Iraq must live by, and if Iraq breaks those rules it can be bombed or invaded.

Our government decides which governments are legitimate and which must be replaced, which dictatorships are evil and which are "our partners in the War on Terrorism."

Some people can't understand why our government is getting ready to attack Iraq, but is ignoring North Korea – which admits to having nuclear weapons and the ability to fire them at Alaska.

The difference between the two countries is simple: North Korea has the means to hurt us, Iraq doesn't.

In the past 50 years, our government has attacked many countries – Panama, Grenada, the Sudan, Afghanistan (twice), Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq and others. But it has never attacked a country that had the capability to hurt America.

Russia, China, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Israel – all have nuclear weapons. So we participate in "constructive engagement" with those countries.

After 9-11, some people said we should try to find the people responsible, capture them and prosecute them. They were largely laughed at as being unrealistic. Only by bombing and devastating Afghanistan could we be sure to get Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. And our president assured us that they would be brought to justice.

Now it's a year later. Osama bin Laden hasn't been captured or killed. Al-Qaida is alive and well. So is anyone concerned?

Of course not. Our attention is directed to Iraq – even though there's no public evidence that Iraq has anything to do with al-Qaida – and a lot of evidence that they're enemies of each other. Suddenly, Osama bin Laden is no longer important.

This doesn't make sense if you think the object is to end terrorism. But it makes perfect sense if the object is to demonstrate the empire's power to intimidate.

For the past year, we've been hearing over and over that the Muslims and others around the world hate us because of our freedoms and our prosperity.

If that's true, the terrorists have won – because we're rapidly giving up our freedoms, and the loss of those freedoms is destroying our ability to prosper.

But, actually, it is only Americans who say that our freedoms and prosperity are the reason foreigners hate us. If you ask the foreigners, they make it clear that it's America's bullying foreign policy they detest.

We're also told that we must give up some liberty for the sake of security. But that's not true.

For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats.

But, as Tim O'Brien has pointed out, while it's possible to have both liberty and security, you can't have an empire as well. Once the American government decided to run the world, Americans were forced to choose between liberty and security – because you can't have all three. Once you become an empire, either liberty or security must go.

Most likely, however, we will lose both liberty and security. We're losing our liberties, but innocent Americans will continue to be hurt by terrorists because of what our government is doing overseas.

Whenever I write on these subjects, I invariably get e-mails accusing me of hating America or "blaming America first."

Quite the contrary. I love America, and I can't stand quietly by while the land of peace and liberty is being destroyed.

I love the America of the Constitution and limited government – not the America of the Patriot Act and the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security.

I love the America that Washington and Jefferson said should be far removed from all the age-old quarrels of Europe and Asia, while trading benevolently with people all over the world – not the America that has troops in a hundred countries while our own government prohibits us from peaceful trading with dozens of countries.

Brownes an embarrasment to good Randist libertarians everywhere. The objectivist are pretty cool even if you dislike their official views on religion.

Fifty Years of Appeasement Led to Black Tuesday By Leonard Peikoff

Fifty years of increasing American appeasement in the Mideast have led to fifty years of increasing contempt in the Muslim world for the United States. The inevitable climax was the tens of thousands of deaths on September 11, 2001—the blackest day in our history, so far. The Palestinians, among others, responded by dancing in the streets and handing out candy.

Fifty years ago, Truman and Eisenhower ceded to the Arabs the West's property rights in oil—although that oil properly belonged to those in the West whose science and technology made its discovery and use possible.

This capitulation was not practical, but philosophical. The Arab dictators were denouncing the wealthy egoistic West. They were crying that the masses of their poor needed our sacrifice; that oil, like all property, is owned collectively, by virtue of birth; and that they knew all this by means of ineffable or otherworldly emotion. Our Presidents had no answer. Implicitly, they were ashamed of the Declaration of Independence. They did not dare to answer aloud that Americans, rightfully, were motivated by the selfish desire to pursue personal happiness in a rich, secular, individualist society.

The Arabs embodied in extreme form every idea—selfless duty, anti-materialism, faith or feeling above science, the supremacy of the group—which our universities and churches, and our own political Establishment, had long been preaching as the essence of virtue. When two groups, our leadership and theirs, accept the same basic ideas, the most consistent wins.

After property came liberty. The Iranian dictator Khomeini threatened with death a British author—and with destruction his American publisher—if they exercised their right to free speech. He explained that the book in question offended the religion of his people. The Bush Administration looked the other way.

After liberty came American life itself—as in Iran's support of the massacre of our soldiers in Saudi Arabia, and the Afghanistan-based assault on our embassies in East Africa. Again, the American response was unbridled appeasement: a Realpolitikisch desire not to "jeopardize relations" with the aggressor country, covered up by a purely rhetorical vow to punish the guilty, along with an occasional pretend bombing. By now, the world knows that we are indeed a paper tiger.

The final guarantee of American impotence is the bipartisan proclamation that a terrorist is an individual alone responsible for his actions, and that "we must try each before a court of law." This is tantamount, while under a Nazi aerial bombardment, to seeking out and trying the pilots involved while ignoring Hitler and Germany.

Terrorists exist only through the sanction and support of the governments behind them. Their lethal behavior is that of the regimes that make them possible. Their killings are not crimes, but acts of war. The only proper response to such acts is war in self-defense.

We do not need more evidence to "pinpoint" the perpetrators of any one of these atrocities, including the latest and most egregious—we already have total certainty with regard to the governments primarily responsible for the repeated slaughter of Americans in recent years. We must now use our unsurpassed military to destroy all branches of the Iranian and Afghani governments, regardless of the suffering and death this will bring to the many innocents caught in the line of fire. We must wipe out the terrorist training camps or sanctuaries, and eliminate any retaliatory military capability—and thereby terrorize and paralyze all the tyrannies watching, who will now know what is in store for them if they choose in any form to attack the United States. That will be the end of the terrorists.

Our missiles and occupation troops, however, will be effective only if they are preceded by our President's morally righteous statement that we intend hereafter to defend by every means possible each American's right to his property, his liberty, and his secure enjoyment of life here on earth.

To those who oppose war, I ask: If not now, when? How many more corpses are necessary before this country should take action? The choice today is mass death in the United States or mass death in the terrorist nations. President Bush must decide whether it is his duty to save Americans or the governments who seek to kill them.

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