[The Raven]

See also the excellent Dangers from the Left also by Sowell.

[Mudboy Slim]

"North Korea openly repudiated the treaty by which Bill Clinton had tried to buy them off by essentially paying blackmail to get their nuclear weapons off the headlines. Sweeping the problem under the rug worked for Clinton, in the only sense that mattered to him, that it solved his immediate political problem and left the dangers to be dealt with by his successors."

Once again, Thomas Sowell demonstrates his brilliance by summing up the Clinton's Foreign Policy in a sentence or two.

FReegards...MUD

[any1]

Colin Powell's suggestion of *having conversations* with N. Korea is simply an effort to buy the time to deal with Iraq before we are forced to possibly war with N. Korea.

[RLK]

Cynics say that every man has his price. But you might at least expect presidents to have higher prices than these.

----------------------

Quite the opposite. We require our people to be whores and incompetents to get elected.

[A Vast RightWing Conspirator]

Sooks like he deplores the demise of empires. Very, very interesting.

Let's remember that our little country used to be part of the once-mighty British empire. Were George Washington and friends wrong?

[PGalt]

But to destroy regimes that are trying to destroy us is very different from going on nation-building adventures.

Replacing "regimes" with "puppets" or different forms of corruption doesn't work. Any US supported start-up nation that is not laying down a "Constitution" similar to ours...means:

A. We are asking for trouble somewhere down the road.

B. We've all been duped.

[NMC EXP]

The track record of nation-building and Wilsonian grandiosity ought to give anyone pause. The very idea that young Americans are once again to be sent out to be shot at and killed, in order to carry out the bright ideas of editorial office heroes, is sickening.

Absolutely true.

In a dangerous nuclear world, it is a full-time job for the U.S. government to protect the lives of the American people. That cannot be done by staying home and depending on two oceans to shield us, as the old-line conservatism of Patrick Buchanan seems to suggest.

Obviously the two oceans do not shield us from a nation equipped with ICBM's or SLBM's.

Given the facts that; (1) every nation and even non state actors pose a credible potential threat via nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, (2) the US is (for the time being) a relatively free and open society, (3) pathetic border control and lax immigration policies, the question is where does the US draw the line of pre-emption?

Sowell draws a distinction between US troops dying to enforce a Wilsonian world utopia as compared to troops dying to protect the US from potential threats. Again he is correct, but he avoids the central issues.

Those issues are the facts that (1) idiotic Wilsonian foreign policy created the enemies we currently face, (2) our attack on Iraq will harden the resolve of enemies we already have and create more in the bargain, and (3) the only way to make America truly safe is to establish an American led global empire with freedoms on par with the Soviet empire.

An empire based on legitimate security concerns is ultimately no different from a Wilsonian empire.

Freedom is not free. It's cost is a degree of risk. That is a cost I am willing to pay.

Regards

J.R.

[snopercod]

Great piece. Thanks for posting it.

It does bring up the question of what the U.S. "is going to do with" Iraq after we take care of Saddam.

[Copernicus]

It is about time the Wilson Administration was placed back on the front burner of American Consciousness.

Nearly every (Unconstitutional)problem of contemporary America- from the IRS, to the centralized Police force known as the FBI, to the odd public/private Central bank known as the Federal Reserve,to the direct election of Senators, to interventionist "entangling foreign alliances" had their genesis in the Wilson Administration.

The 20th Century was truly the Wilsonian Century. FDR may have built Socialist America, but Woodrow Wilson was the architect with the original blueprints.

There should be a separate Woodrow Wilson section on Free Republic so people can learn how badly the Constitution was gutted during his tenure.

Best regards,

[independentmind]

China, incidentally, has nuclear missiles that can reach American cities, thanks to American technology which they obtained when Bill Clinton over-ruled the objections of our military and intelligence officials, and allowed that technology to be exported.

As I recall, there were more than a few Republicans involved in the process as well. Why doesn't Sowell address that?

[TLBSHOW]

Its as if its January 2001 all over again!

......

Political Advice for President George Bush

[CAPITALISM MAGAZINE.COM] No sooner do we elect a new president than we start telling him what to do. People in the media are full of advice, perhaps more so this year than usual. Because of the closeness of both the presidential and congressional elections, much media advice seems to be that President-elect Bush should adopt the policies of those he beat -- first John McCain's "campaign finance reform" and then the Democrats' class-warfare objections to cutting taxes.

But what is the point of winning, if you are going to act as if you lost? While George W. Bush does not have the kind of overwhelming majorities that have enabled some presidents to hit the ground running, making sweeping changes in the proverbial "first hundred days," the fact is that his party has control of both Houses of Congress. Ronald Reagan never had that and yet he carried through "the Reagan Revolution."

Thomas Sowell

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=66

[Vast Buffalo Wing Conspiracy]

Sowell's recent comments about Max Boot are quite similar to those of antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, and Sowell and Raimondo don't otherwise have a lot in common, politically.

BTW, I knew Max Boot as an ungrad at UC Berkeley: Max, even then, is what I would call a "young fogey": a bit of a stuffed shirt. I'm not suprised he's become an acolyte of the neo-cons: careerists always have a knack to the fastest road to wealth and influence, and the neo-cons are the best, and nastiest, bunch of careerists ever to plague the American political system.

Not that Max or other neo-cons are nasty in person: they are just nasty, as a group.

[junta]

I guess the shot at Buchanan will insulate him from the poison arrows that will be shot at him by a few neo-con scribes, but I agree with his premise.