We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day

“The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world. They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America’s moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal.

I am not sure whether it is very smart for the WSJ to have a headline referring to Mr Obama as an “alien” in the White House – that will only reinforce the view, held by parts of Mr Obama’s more extreme fans, that his critics are racist bigots. And it is also far from the first time that a supporter of Transnational Progressivism has held office – think of the dreadful Woodrow Wilson, for instance, or to a lesser extent, Jimmy Carter. But it certainly is notable that more and more people are drawing the conclusion that Obama and his associates don’t seem to care for their country very much, or pander to some of the silliest Blame-Amerika-First lines.

Of course, had WSJ readers been following Paul Marks on this blog, none of this stuff would be a surprise.

21 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • John K

    Is the Manchurian Candidate the first President whose father was not a US citizen (apart from the founding fathers of course)? Many Americans are the children of immigrants, but he is the son of a man who didn’t even bother to settle in the USA, indeed, he barely stayed long enough to impregnate his mother before returning to his other family in Kenya. Young Barry Soetoro was then brough up in Indonesia with his new dad, before ending up in the care of his Communist garndparents in Hawaii. Has any American President ever had such a disjointed, and frankly un-American upbringing?

  • Stephan

    I know that a lot of you here, despite otherwise sound quality libertarian credentials, turn into raving armchair warriors when it comes to U.S foreign policy; but it has to be said that even by your irrational standards on America’s external relations, this article is somewhat ridiculous. Whatever “apology tour” Obama went on, was certainly not apologetic enough, as the foreign policy of the new administration has hardly changed from that of his predecessor. Sure, the “War on Terror” is no longer referred to by this schoolyard fantasy title, but the Current admins “Overseas Contingency Operations” are the exact same doctrine (albeit slightly expanding), writ more obscurely…

    If only Obama had actually gone around the world and apologized for barbaric liberty ruining campaigns like Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and so many other little actions that were ultimately pointless, killed millions of innocent civilians, disrupted the shit out of whole societies, and are in no way justified by either the Constitution or any intellectually honest libertarians idea of freedom.
    What an incredible boon to a freer world it would have been if he had actually pulled back and recalled the various parts of the U.S military machine, which is really just another inefficient, self justifying, bureaucratic monster that eats hundreds of billions in productive peoples tax money, and spits out pointless destruction and chaos, mostly for the sake of pleasing a bunch of generals and policy makers who get to masturbate over their big boys version of war games, but from the safety of bunkers and command centers of course. Them and the dozens of corrupt military contractors who are terrified of having to compete in a real market instead of selling at bloated prices to Uncle Sucker.

  • Armchair warrior/aka Johnathan Pearce

    Stephan, well, if you believe that your self defence requires that murderous regimes that have stated their desire to crush others should be robustly confronted, then it is hardly being an “armchair warrior” to take the view that whatever errors the US has made, that it should not piss off its allies as Obama has done, or cringe before various thugs.

    I won’t go through all the various examples of wars you mention, but in the case of Iraq, I happen to regard the overthrow of Saddam’s vile regime – a regime that was untrustworthy to the nth degree and with an appalling history – as a net gain for liberty. The issue of course is whether the war was prudent as such, or worth the cost. But that war has been fought; it is mere cant for Obama and his allies to go around the world playing to Blame-America-First tunes. Even worse, it makes the US look weak in the eyes of various regimes.

    Even from a hardcore libertarian perspective, that’s not very smart.

  • Laird

    I don’t disagree with you, Stephan, that the US shouldn’t be flexing its military might all over the world, or that Obama’s prosecution of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is not substantively different than that of his predecessor. But I think you are missing Ms. Rabinowitz’s central point. It is quite clear that, for all his alleged* eloquence, Obama is quite tone-deaf when it comes to understanding the American psyche. He plays to the world’s elites, but not to those for whom he is the putative leader.

    Americans don’t understand Europeans (especially the French), but I’ll bet Obama does, and probably better than he understands Americans. In truth, he should be the French Premier, not the American President. He won’t win a second term, because we are coming to understand that he is not really one of us.

    * I say “alleged” because without his teleprompters and the services of his speechwriters he’s actually a rather poor speaker. He’s not a great orator, let alone a deep thinker, merely a reasonably good actor. Another President within living memory was roundly excoriated in some quarters for that, but not Obama. Perhaps that’s because Obama isn’t actually good enough to have been paid for his thespian skills. He’s an amateur, both at acting and leadership.

  • bgates

    Stephan, you forgot to include World War II in your list of American crimes against humanity. You must have been distracted by your schoolboy fantasy image of masturbating generals. But let’s take the oldest conflict you mention. South Korea has grown into one of the most economically productive nations on the planet; North Korea is a slow-motion Holocaust. You want the United States to apologize (to whom?) for keeping the former from becoming the latter. Go fuck yourself.

    Every one of the conflicts you mention was justified, despite the appalling loss of life, because the alternatives were worse. Half a million Americans died, and thousands of German and Japanese civilians were killed by Americans, in a war which resulted in the French being able to engage in decade-long conflicts in Algeria and Vietnam and the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe – and it was the right thing for us to do, because our enemies were worse than our allies.

  • Well, I think the straightforward libertarian position on this is that you only go to war when you have to, due to a clear and present danger. That has a lot of merit.

    Whether another regime is “vile” or not, we become little Woodrow Wilsons when we decide we’re going to overthrow it for some greater good. It’s hard to see what justification there was for deposing Saddam Hussein. We didn’t like him? Is Iran next? Where do we stop? Do we just use this policy against shitty little nations with crappy armed forces, or do we intend to topple the vile Chinese regime? How many of our troops do we sacrifice taking Beijing, for the Greater Good? Perhaps we should have a rule that those who shout loudest for war, regardless of their physical status, be conscripted as frontline troops?

  • MattP

    “It’s hard to see what justification there was for deposing Saddam Hussein. We didn’t like him? Is Iran next?”

    Actually, it’s not hard at all. Having ousted him from Kuwait, placing conditions on the cease-fire signed at Safwan that had to be met before a peace treaty could be signed, knowing what the Hague convention has to say about the rights of an enforcing power of a cease-fire, I’d have to say it’s not hard at all to see the justification. What’s hard to see is how successive administrations studiously averted their eyes for over a decade. Thus making the situation worse.

    So far, the self proclaimed Libertarians have in these comments demonstrated why their party is a laughingstock. Libertarians simply can’t be trusted with national defense. The people who wrote the Constitution obviously rejected the Libertarian concept of what constitutes a “justified” war of national defense. Many of them voted for the war against the Barbary Coast pirates during the Jefferson administration. The very first war this country fought was against a group of states on another contintent, which didn’t pose a direct threat to the territory of the United States.

    And guess what, libertarians? It wasn’t a “declared” war. Congress authorized the President to use force, in exactly the same way Congress authorized the President to use force against Afghanistan and Iraq.

    The Libertarian’s historical and Constitutional illiteracy exceeds Obama’s. Obama, at least when it comes to the Constitution, knows what it says. He just hates it, and wants a SCOTUS that will ignore it and let him do what he wants.

    Libertarian’s on the other hand don’t have a clue as to what the Constitution permits and prohibits.

    It’s also obvious that any apology tour that would satisfy Stephan and his ilk would be just as fiction-filled as Obama’s Cairo speech.

    Keep it up, guys. You’ll be getting less than 5% of the vote in perpetuity at this rate. And deservedly so.

  • Alice

    One way of interpreting Dorothy Rabinowitz piece is that Barry Hussein is the symptom, not the problem.

    At least two generations of Americans have been brought up with a burden of Original Sin which would have made the Inquisition blush being forced down their throats by an extreme left establishment. It says a lot for the common sense of Americans that less than a third of them believe the nonsense. Unfortunately, in what passes for democracy, a third of the population can constitute a majority of votes cast.

    Fortunately, the solution is at hand, and is now unavoidable. Empty-Suit Obama’s incompetence becomes more obvious with every passing day, and the great wave of good will he had from most Americans has dissipated. The budget deficit, unfortunately, has not dissipated — and that will be the undoing of Barry & friends and Big Government generally.

    When James Watt was a technician at Glasgow University, professors collected payment in cash from the students who chose to attend their lectures. I look forward to the reinstitution of that world, following the end of the “perpetual deficit spending” fantasy.

  • PersonFromPorlock

    It was the bowing that did it. Americans don’t bow to potentates, theirs or ours. We had a revolution just so we wouldn’t have to. That one action proved to us that Obama simply doesn’t understand what it is to be an American.

  • orcadrvr

    Stephen:

    Please explain how United States involvement in the Korean War was, in your words, a “barbaric, liberty ruining campaign”. Without U.S. participation in the Korean War, South Korea would today resemble North Korea. North Korea, as I am sure you know, is the most oppressive society on earth.

    If your point is that the U.S. ought to ignore the rest of the world and retreat behind its borders, that is a reasonable and pragmatic position, right or wrong. It is not necessary to demean our past efforts to rescue, for instance, the Korean peninsula, in order to make that point.

  • Stephan

    Alright, to address a few of the above criticisms. First, yes, It is true that Obama is a two faced smarmy hypocrite. Singing one tune to one group and humming another one to the other. This, however, does not automatically undermine the idea that maybe the U.S should damn well apologize for some of its past blunders. I agree with Ian B on this whole argument, and really couldn’t have stated the point better then he did there. But yeah bgates, if these wars against tin pots were justified and you support them whole heartedly, then why don’t we just keep on going, declare war on just about everyone! Africa is full of murdering thugs, there are a few still tinkering around in Asia too. Some of the American allies can also join the list with full honours. Or are they exempted by your mental magic just because they mouth the bullshit that Washington likes to hear? This policy being the case, why exactly don’t we go ahead and Invade China? Or does showing strength only apply against nearly broke shitholes?

    Does anyone in their sane mind really think that America was under some sort of real threat from people like Saddam, or is from that little penis Kim Jong Il, or that you could compare the invasion of Iraq to attacking that was then the worlds most powerful armed forces during the Second World War? I mean seriously? How simplistic of a mindset would you need to think this?

    What exactly happened to the idea of no foreign entanglements? It’s bloody obvious that the vast military industrial complex, with all its colossal size and multi hundred billion dollar budget needs to justify its continued growth (like any bureaucracy) and in doing so will create all sorts of “urgent” pretexts for invading turd holes A, B, and C. Mind you though, if it came to fighting a genuinely dangerous war, then suddenly talk of diplomacy is all over the place (as is constantly the case with either China or Russia). Idiots the generals and politicians, and idiots you for swallowing their shit right up

  • Bogdan from Australia

    To IDIOT Stephen: Please read the epic book “Mao The Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and John Halliday about the fella who is credited with murdering some 70 million of his fellow citizens.
    The genial author (Chang) clearly states that the Korean War was instigated by Mao in order to suck the Yanks into the conflict lasting so long that would cost America hundreds of thousands of lives and damage her economically and morally to such a degree that it would collapse.
    In that provocation Mao was whole-heartedly, albeit covertly, supported by Stalin.
    All the tragedy of China and the entire Indo-china is extremely well documented in that book, so there you shall find the answer to your ignorant and idiotic questions about the validity of the Korean War.
    “Mao-The Unknown Story” is certainly comparable with Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” and so far it is the only thorough document on the enormous suffering of the Chinese people.

  • Stephan

    Bogdan, I’ve read Yang and Hallidays book, great book, seems to be well researched, but in telling me your little anecdote you undermine your own argument in two ways:

    1. The U.S looks all the more stupid for having fallen for the ruse and happily going along to lose 30,000 of its young men (most of whom i’m sure would have been more then happy to live long enough a life to post on the internet one day, as you can do) If idiots much like yourself hadn’t been around to egg on for war from the comfort of safety, maybe they wouldn’t have.

    2. What you say begs the question which ties into my argument above, Why didn’t they then invade China itself? Oh yeah! because that would have involved an actual war of a truly dangerous scale.

    A third point that i’d like to also make; Sure countries like North Korea are terrible places, and South Korea would be just as bad if it were to have fallen under communist control… But guess what? The world is full of nasty shit, It should no be one governments job to go around and waste tax payers money trying to build a kingdom of peace on earth. This is both unrealistic, and at odds with even a loose libertarian, nay moral ethic.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Stephan, well at least your reply was a bit more measured than your initial item. But in response, it is a matter of judgement: sure, Iraq is not close in terms of geography to the US. But the calculation was, that, in an age of jet travel and the rest, that a country with a proven history of:
    supporting terror groups where convenient;
    providing safe haven to Islamist terrorists;
    defying and frustrating UN weapons inspectors;
    Using chemical weapons on various groups;
    Invading neighbours on economic/other grounds;

    was a threat. It was a threat in the sense that the defence of US borders is not just about waiting until the threat actually sets foot in Jefferson’s republic, but in dealing with an appalling regime.

    Isolationist revisionists, such as the Libertarian Alliance’s Sean Gabb, have made a similar argument that there was no need for the US, or indeed Britain, to declare war on Germany when they did and that we could have played for time or even simply let Hitler/Japan “get on with it”, so to speak. Given the track record of those regimes, there was every reason for FDR and Churchill to take the view that it is better to confront a bully than try and avoid catching his eye.

    Of course, another reason why Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 was to try, however naively, to implant something democratic and more liberal in a part of the world that had been a breeding ground for terror. As far as certain parts of Iraq are concerned (like the Kurdish north), things are considerably better for people than they were under the “secular” Mr Hussein and his charming sons.

  • MattP

    Stephan, you ask, “What exactly happened to the idea of no foreign entanglements?”

    That was never the idea. It simply isn’t a founding principle.

    Which is precisely why I not so gently pointed out the first “foreign entanglement” this nation involved itself in.

    An “undeclared” war against a bunch of North African pirates that posed no existential threat whatsoever to the United States.

    Sure, we should pick and choose our foreign entanglements carefully. But the idea we would have “no” foreign entanglements was never entertained. It is amusing when Libertarians like you insist upon it, even when the entire historical record shows that not even the founding fathers considered that realistic.

    Unless, of course, you want to claim that Thomas Jefferson, one of the 7 key founding fathers, didn’t have a clue about the founding principles of this nation. I’m certain I can also prove that two other of the 7, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, also were in on this vile desecration of the Constitution that you know, OH, so much more about than the guys who wrote it.

    I also like to toss in the part about the war being “undeclared,” as that really seems to be a real irritation to you libertarian types. Apparently you guys believe that the Constitution that gives Congress the power to declare war requires them to use those “magic words” or it doesn’t count.

    Sorry. The guys who wrote it disagreed. They simply authorized to the President to direct his ship captains to use whatever force necessary given the circumstances.

    “Authorization to Use Military Force.” Sound familiar?

    On top of everything else, you don’t have any principles to guide when the use of force is a permissably exempt from your “no foreign entanglements” rule. All you have to say on the subject is, “Well, this guy ain’t Hitler so we have to stay out of it.”

    Here’s a newsflash: in 1801 the Pasha of Tripoli wasn’t Hitler, and the founding fathers had no difficulty taking him down.

    As I mentioned, there’s a reason why libertarians are a fringe party here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for limited government and I don’t agree with every aspect of our foreign or national security policy.

    But you have nothing serious to say on the subject.

  • Johnathan, the biggest supporter of “terror groups” is, as everybody knows, Saudi Arabia. The Saddam regime, for all its vileness, was a hostile place for Islamists until we regime changed it. Look at it now.

    One of the great lessons of the history of international politics is, or should be, that it rarely works out as intended. That’s for the same reason as why economic planning doesn’t work; you can’t plan that which you can’t control.

    If somebody’s a direct threat sure, think about having a war. That just didn’t apply to the Saddam regime. We all know that.

    I’ll admit, at the gut level I’m hawkish. But libertarians need to think with their brains, not their guts. Hawkishness swtiches us from thinking about individuals suddenly to a collective “we”. “We” should invade here and “we” should invade there. But the “we” actually means somebody else; some other poor schmucks lying dead on a battlefield, and some other poor schmucks blown to bits as “collateral damage”. I don’t think “we” would be the least impressed if, say, the USA invaded Britain to save us from a government that we here all agree is vile, not if we, as individuals, were rooting through the rubble looking for the remains of our children.

    War is a very blunt instrument, a very bloody instrument. However it may serve a collective, many *individuals* won’t leave to see the possible benefits. It must always be the strategy of last resort, from a libertarian perspective.

  • MattP, stop banging on about your Constitution. It’s not a perfect document. It’s a curate’s egg with some good (libertarian) parts, that is all.

    Trying to decide philisophical issues on what you think somebody in the Eighteenth Century would have done is just ancestor worship, or the same as hunching over a Quran wondering what Mo would have wanted.

    You don’t like libertarians. That’s cool. That’s up to you. But libertarianism and constitutionalism are not the same thing. There are parts of the world that aren’t in America, believe it or not; most of the contributors to this site, and its owner, for instance.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    IanB, I don’t disagree with you for a nanosecond about Saudi. I don’t carry water for the State Dept of the US on foreign policy, or for that matter, the notoriously old Arabist FO.

    The blindness to Wahabbi financing of terror has been inexcusable. No argument there.

    But here’s a thing (and I think Christopher Hitchens has made this point rather well): if we say “oh, why pick on Iraq when there are so many other nasty regimes against us?”, sometimes the answer is: “Because we might as well start somewhere, preferably with a pretty solid set of arguments”.

    That’s not going to satisfy the hardline isolationist PoV, of course. And to be clear: there are good, solid reasons for taking a “leave me out of it” stance. Prudence typically dictates thus. But not always. And I am fairly lenient on G. W. Bush and friends for wanting to knock off a regime that was as terrible as the Saddam one. It is not the worst thing in the world to get rid of a tyranny such as that.

  • Laird

    Stephan is much closer to the truth than MattP on this one. The concept of “avoiding entangling alliances” is from Washington’s Farewell Address; outside of the Constitution itself that’s about as close to a “founding principle” as we’re going to get. And the action against the Barbary Pirates was no more a “war” than is our current action (ill-managed as it may be) against al Qaeda; both adversaries were (are) rogue criminal enterprises, not nations. (Much of the effort against the Barbary Pirates was conducted by privateers operating under Constitutionally-permitted Letters of Marque; we should restore that principle with respect to al Queda, but that’s another issue.)

    None of which is to say that there aren’t circumstances where the projection of military force isn’t warranted, and this doesn’t always require that it be in direct response to overt attack. There is room for preemptive defensive action if the threat is real enough. Iraq is a good example of this: it harbored and supported terrorist groups and posed a serious threat to the US which culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Iraq wasn’t directly responsible for those attacks, but it clearly provided material aid and comfort to those who were, and to those who would likely have attempted further similar attacks on us. So I don’t object to the destruction of Hussein and his army, although we’ve been there far too long and have turned what should have been the simple removal an existential threat into an ill-conceived exercise in nation-building. We’ve been there far too long and should get out, but we were not wrong to go there in the first place.

    But tin-pot dictators in Africa, morally repugnant as they may be, pose no threat to the US in any sense and we shouldn’t be using military force to remove them. Nor should we be propping up repressive regimes anywhere else. Europe and Japan are large enough economies that they should be responsible for their own defense; we shouldn’t have any troops in either place. NATO has long outlived its usefulness and should be dissolved (or, at a minimum, the US should withdraw from it). Korea is more of a problem and it will take longer for us to get out of there, but we should begin working on that now. Afghanistan is an even bigger problem, and it’s one of our own making, so that’s also going to take time to work out of, but we should be beginning the process now (Obama says he is doing so, which is one of the few things for which I give him credit).

    Bringing our troops home from most of the places in the world where they are stationed, and being far more circumspect in deploying them in the future, will save us immense sums of money, which we can ill afford, and could (perhaps) improve our stature in the world community. That second point is a mere byproduct, however; the key is preserving American blood and treasure. It’s a win-win for everyone except the armchair generals.

  • “Because we might as well start somewhere, preferably with a pretty solid set of arguments”.

    Start what, precisely?

  • Paul Marks

    Stephen:

    I thought the Iraq war was not worth it from the start – not worth the money I thought it would cost and not worth the LIVES I thought it would cost either.

    I also have always opposed “nation building” in Afghanistan – although I supported killing or capturing both Bin Laden and his friend Mullah Omah (founder of the Taliban).

    However, you go a lot further than doubting the whole Bush “Islam is a noble religion – if only we could get rid of the evil dictators then we could be friends with the vast majority of fluffy Muslims” position (a postion I think is a bit on the “uplift” side of thinking).

    You mentioned KOREA and VIETNAM.

    No Islam factor in either one.

    The Communists were trying to murder millions of people and enslave tens of millions.

    Nor did the Communists just want to do this in Korea and IndoChina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) they wished to do this EVERYWHERE (and still do).

    As you say the idea and practice was “liberty destroying”.

    Accept you say that the UNITED STATES was the “liberty destroying” party in the context of Korea and Vietnam.

    Well you have a right to say that Stephen.

    Just as I have right to say that you should go fuck yourself.