Posted on 06/06/2003 5:45:42 AM PDT by JohnGalt
The Self-Castration of the Libertarian Hawks by Gary North
There were no weapons of mass destruction. There were no operational connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. There was no threat to the United States. But there was oil. Lots and lots of oil. And there are closed-bidding contracts with the large American construction firms that have supplied Vice Presidents and Secretaries of Defense.
Before the war, I watched in amazement at libertarians and fellow travelers who got on board Bush's war wagon. They were adamant: Iraq constituted a military threat to the United States. They would not consider the possibility that the CIA was wrong, that the President had resorted to deception, that the Administration's use of data out of a decade-old term paper and faked data from Africa to bolster its case for war were all signs of the same old same old: big government gobbling up other people's wealth wherever it can. The traditional suspicion of libertarians regarding the official pronouncements of the state simply disappeared from the hawks' thinking.
George Bush handed them a knife, and said, "You guys know what to do!" They did, too. The soprano section of the Establishment's choir is louder than ever before.
If you are waiting for the recent defectors to rejoin the fold, handing in their confessions, you are terminally naïve. There will be no mea culpas from the libertarian hawks. Nobody wants to admit that George Bush had invited them to the Emperor's Clothing Emporium, where they all donned the latest fashions in camouflage evening wear.
They will not be back. I suspect that they will no longer carry libertarian placards. They have joined the ranks of the military interventionists, and, for better or worse, they will not return. To return would be a public announcement: "We always said that government surrounds the truth with a bodyguard of lies, especially in wartime, but we forgot. George Bush was just too eloquent. He has a mind like a steel trap."
We should not expect them to display their former systematic hostility to the state in areas other than war, either. Once someone has put his trust in the lying state to the degree that he violates the principle of non-aggression that he once held dear, he will no longer hold that principle equally dear. This will affect his thinking in other areas. Like the bite of the vampire in the Dracula movies, the state's deception in wartime creates mirror-avoiding drones out of libertarian war hawks.
I watched in amazement as a former revisionist historian, who once wrote a book exposing the lies of the Roosevelt Administration's foreign policy, abandoned his position. Why? Because of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He accepted the lies of George Bush and then publicly recanted his position that had demonstrated the lies of Franklin Roosevelt.
There were no new footnotes. There was no new evidence that Roosevelt had not deceived the public. What, then? Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
The public fantasy that was spun by the latest foreign policy interventionist regime retroactively transformed the fantasy of Roosevelt's amazement at Pearl Harbor into the truth – textbook trust. The visibly tattered tapestry of lies of the latest President made a truth-teller retroactively out of America's all-time master of deceit.
How does this happen? How can Presidents lie us into war, generation after generation, and subsequently avoid condemnation, either at the polls or in the textbooks, when their lies are documented by historians who dig up the evidence? How is it that every American war is justified at the time by means of noble reasons that are found later to be contrived?
These wars are always found to be in the self-interest of the military complex and its domestic allies, but not in the interest of the public. Yet the public forgets, or chooses not to remember, when these lies are exposed after the war. The next war is greeted with the same enthusiasm as the previous war, and once the troops are mobilized, no criticism is allowed – not even after the troops come home, if they come home, which is not often. (There are 50,000 American troops in Korea, 1,000 for every year since the cease-fire.)
Janette Rankin, America's first Congresswoman, voted against World War I and World War II. In the second case, she was the only person in Congress who did. Yet the truth is that Roosevelt lured the Japanese into the attack, and he knew it was coming before the bombs fell. But who remembers Janette Rankin? And among those few who do, who say in print that she was right? To admit that she was right would mean admitting that Presidents can lie this nation into war nearly risk-free. They can, of course, and do.
The only exception has been Lyndon Johnson. The war's protestors – the sons of the ruling class who took to the streets – finally overcame the pro-war sympathies of the best and the brightest in 1964–66. So, Johnson is today fair game. Volume by volume, Robert Caro has documented Johnson's career, a career built on lies and criminal behavior. Johnson was a thief in every sense.
But no one in the historical guild, in published praise of Caro's books, ever mentions a very inconvenient fact: the whole story had been told in succinct form by one of the greatest historians of the American West, J. Evetts Haley, in his 1964 paperback, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, a book panned at the time by professional historians when it was reviewed at all. Yet Haley's critics at the time rarely matched the professional career that Haley possessed when he wrote that little book. The reviewers showed little awareness of Haley's distinguished career. He paid a heavy price, though this was not the first time in his academic career that his conservative politics had cost him. All of this has been dumped down the academic memory hole. No one today gives credit where credit is obviously due. The revisionists get no thanks for a job well done.
Neither do anti-war critics whose warnings turn out to be correct – sometimes within weeks of the cease-fire.
But there is one benefit, nonetheless. The castrati won't come back.
As far as the debate goes, libertarians on FR have been debating this same topic on threads mostly written by libertarian hawks, so I hope they will read and consider and engage so that we can work through this rather than splinter off.
On what does he base this statement?
Can someone identify for me who the Libertarian Hawks are?
How long are you willing to wait before you finally admit that you’ve been lied to?
There were no operational connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Of course, the old "Iraq was a sponsor of terrorism" is too broad to go after, so the author has to get REALLY specific, thus the "no operational connections". I guess if there were financial connections, that would be OK?
Unfortunately there this:
Iraqi arrested after toxic letters sent to prime minister and U.S., British and Saudi embassies
Note please, that at no point did I say that I believed they exist. Although that is a belief of mine, that isn't the point here. I am referring specifically to the statement:
"There were no weapons of mass destruction."
That is an out-and-out lie. Ask the Kurds, Sunnis, or select Iranians.
One of our reasons for going to war was to prevent the Iraqi government from producing, distributing or using WMDs. There is no doubt that they have had the means to produce them in the past, and there is no doubt they have now lost those means. It seems pretty simple to me.
Another question. If all we wanted was oil contracts for the American firms connected to administration members, why didn't we just approach Saddam and offer to remove sanctions if he would sign the contracts? Don't you think he would have done that in a heartbeat?
Had . …. Not could, would, or might or maybe, and certainly not a 20 year old maybe!
It was fascinating and just a little revolting to see the new, so-called "Libertarians" hook up with the Islamofascists, the antiwar.com cabal, the ultra-left anti-semitic Socialists, the ANSWR crew, and various other nutjobs to march against the war in Iraq. What a stew. :))
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