In the dreary march of no-news stories about the war in Iraq, little changes from day to day, or even from month to month or from year to year. The killing continues relentlessly, almost monotonously; the Iraqi people struggle to survive without adequate supplies of water, sewerage, and electricity; the political situation festers and bursts forth episodically in kidnappings, assassinations, and violent reprisals; much-ballyhooed elections serve as little more than pointless rituals; the elected representatives quarrel and haggle, altering nothing in the world outside the meeting hall. Through it all, President George W. Bush never fails to perceive progress, and he always promises that U.S. forces will leave Iraq as soon as the Iraqi government becomes capable of providing security.

So, when a genuine news report comes along, even on the front page of the Sunday Washington Post, we may fail to notice that something significant has actually changed. The article I have in mind, by Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer, appeared on August 14 under the headline and subhead “U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq: Administration Is Shedding ‘Unreality’ That Dominated Invasion, Official Says.” Although the article quotes several experts outside the government, its punch comes from statements attributed to anonymous high-level “officials in Washington and Baghdad.” Such “leaks” often consist of information the government wants people to have, even as its official statements continue to follow a different story line. The government may want to see how people react to the leaked revelations or to soften them up for a policy change to come.

The Bush administration, the article explains, no longer expects to produce a model democracy, a well-functioning oil industry, or “a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges” in Iraq. In short, the country is in terrible shape, and the U.S. government cannot solve the Iraqis’ most pressing problems. According to a senior U.S. official, “what we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground. We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

To appreciate just how shocking this statement is, one must recall that not so long ago, a Bush staffer was quoted as saying, “We’re an empire now, we make our own reality.” Indeed, since 9/11 the Bush administration’s foreign policy has been everything that foreign-policy realism is not. The government’s faith-based occupation of Iraq, however, has not held up well against the rocket-propelled grenades, improvised explosive devices, small-arms fire, and mortar rounds that continue to batter it with distressing regularity, inflicting casualties of nearly 2,000 dead and some 14,000 wounded among U.S. military forces so far. An administration notable for its arrogance now undertakes to “shed the unreality” that underlay its invasion and occupation.

The president himself, of course, continues to sing the same song. It wouldn’t look good if he deviated abruptly from his mock-Churchillian resolve to “finish the job.” (Forget about that “mission accomplished” celebration on the aircraft carrier a few years ago—a mere spasm of false labor.) Yet, notwithstanding the president’s brave pretense, another official leaker concedes, “We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic.” Because the politically correct democracy the U.S. occupiers had in mind cannot be put in place, the Iraqis will have, for example, not equal rights for women but the sort of rights that women enjoy in Iran. Oh, well, a reality-based world is not always a pleasant place to operate a neo-Jacobin project for global liberation and democratization. Let us move on.

If the administration now admits that its desired transformation of Iraq’s political, social, and economic affairs is infeasible and that it cannot defeat the resistance forces that oppose its continued occupation, will the Americans pack up and leave, putting all their propaganda eggs into a basket labeled “at least we toppled that horrible dictator Saddam Hussein”? Of course not. The program to create a democratic paradise in Iraq may have collided with reality, but that collision does not imply that U.S. forces will proceed to evacuate the venue of the failed experiment. To suppose that it does is to misunderstand why they were sent there in the first place.

Now, a great many commentators have speculated about why those forces were sent. Some people took seriously the administration’s own proffered justifications for the invasion and occupation: to disarm the Iraqis of weapons of mass destruction; to displace a regime that harbored Islamist terrorists who posed a serious threat to Americans and their allies; to build a democracy that would serve as a beacon of hope and a shining example to all the people of the Middle East and prompt them to replicate the Iraqi success story in their own lands; and so forth—the administration has proceeded through a series of such announced purposes. Of course, these announced objectives were never more than pretexts—what the politicians call “talking points,” arrant propaganda aimed at soothing the American people while the government did the deed. There were no WMDs of which to disarm the Iraqis, no genuine connection between Saddam’s regime and the 9/11 terrorists, no realistic chance to build a peaceful, orderly, well-functioning democracy in Iraq. Not being idiots, the Bush people must have known these things all along, even if the vacuous president himself did not. Surely they did not believe their own spin and cock-and-bull stories. (Attributing the administration’s false claims to faulty intelligence is simply ex post blame-shifting, inasmuch as Vice President Dick Cheney and the rest of the neocon desk warriors fought tooth and nail against everyone in the intelligence community who insisted that the claims lacked adequate factual foundation.)

Which brings us back to the question, why did the Bush team invade Iraq? The most plausible hypothesis has always appeared to be that it did so as part of a larger plan to reshape the strategic contours of southwest Asia, from the Mediterranean to China, from Kazakhstan to the Arabian Sea. By lodging U.S. forces in the heart of this region, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States would be well positioned to launch future attacks on, say, Syria or Iran, should the president and his lieutenants decide to do so. Even without such further attacks, however, the Americans would be able to threaten credibly or to intimidate countries in the region to secure their compliance with U.S. demands.

By effectively controlling the region, the U.S. government would attain several of its cherished ends. First, it would eliminate or greatly diminish the threats posed to Israel by countries such as Syria and Iran. Second, it would control much of the oil and gas extraction and transportation in a region believed to be richly endowed with untapped deposits of those prized fossil fuels. Third, it would butt up against the Russians and the Chinese, excluding them from hegemony or substantial influence in the lands of the Great Game. Fourth (but merely incidental, you should understand), important supporters of the Bush team would make tons of money: Halliburton, Bechtel, Chevron, Unocal, Shell, and the rest of the good old boys, not to mention the arms suppliers and the mercenaries.

In the aftermath of the invasion and two and a half years of occupation, in now-devastated Iraq, it is unfortunate that the Iraqis won’t buckle under to the U.S. forces, but it need not derail the larger plan. The U.S. government will continue, of course, to pretend that it is doing its damnedest to establish a democratic paradise in Iraq, but if the locals kick and scream too much, then the Bush administration will just have to “shed the unreality” of its earlier expectations. And then what? That’s the key question, to which we may conjecture an answer with some confidence.

In all likelihood, the U.S. government will pretend that its properly elected Iraqi puppets have taken over the government, whereupon those Iraqi kingpins will promptly negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement to maintain a U.S. military presence in the country. American officials stoutly deny that the United States intends to maintain a permanent military presence in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld stated last February, “We have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq.” Of course, when tomorrow comes, conditions on the ground will somehow justify what the Americans never “intended” as of yesterday. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad recently reiterated, “We are not seeking to maintain permanent bases in Iraq,” but he stressed that the United States would negotiate with an elected Iraqi government with regard to its continued military presence. One need not have mastered rocket science to understand who will hold the upper hand in any such “negotiations.” While the U.S. forces remain in Iraq, no elected Iraqis will constitute a genuine government because they will be powerless to resist the will of those alien forces. The Iraqis may squawk and demand bigger bribes, but everyone knows whose desires will have been fulfilled when the dust settles.

Although eventually some U.S. troops may be withdrawn from Iraq, we have good reason to suspect that many—perhaps 50,000 or 60,000—will remain, because their permanent bases are already under construction. A half-billion dollars for this project was included in the Iraq war supplemental appropriation approved last May. The plan widely discussed in various media outlets calls for U.S. forces, now scattered around the country in more than a hundred bases, to be concentrated in fourteen large, fortified bases on the way to eventual consolidation in four giant, heavily fortified mega-bases.

Once this relocation has been completed, the United States can use the bases to serve important purposes in the implementation of its larger plan for the region. The Iraqis can fight each other day and night, so long as they do not threaten the security of the mega-bases. The hope, of course, is that when the U.S. forces have repositioned themselves in these enclaves, the Iraqi resistance will lose interest in attacking the Americans and turn their energies toward joining a coalition focused on ordinary politics—that is, on looting the country’s oil revenues. If they persist in slaughtering one another, well, the Bush administration realizes that it can do nothing to stop them—short of leaving the country, which it certainly will not do in any event—and so it will rest content to protect U.S. forces inside the big bases, where they will be shielded from the mayhem of the surrounding countryside by wide, lethal, perimeter defenses.

Larry Diamond, a former consultant to the U.S. occupation authority and the author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, tells the Los Angeles Times: “I don’t know why we just can’t say, ‘It is not our goal to set up for the indefinite duration military bases in Iraq, from which we can operate in the Middle East for our own geopolitical purposes.’” Well, Dr. Diamond, U.S. officials certainly can say so; indeed, everyone from the president to the secretary of defense to the U.S. ambassador already has said so. The problem is that, in view of the ongoing U.S. construction of permanent bases in Iraq, these American bigwigs evidently do not mean what they say. Imagine that.

The United States began its occupation of Germany and Japan sixty years ago, yet large U.S. military bases remain in those countries today. Does anyone really believe the Americans will walk away from their mega-bases in Iraq just because the Iraqis want the Yankees to go home? Why, that would spoil the big plan, wouldn’t it? The pretext, it now appears, is dispensable, but the plan most likely is not.

Lies, Damn Lies, And Conventional Measures of the Growth of Government

By Robert Higgs

Many of us who believe that governments continue to grow relentlessly, at least in the economically advanced countries, have been criticized by analysts who claim that in fact the growth of government has petered out or slowed substantially. The latter group perceives us to be needlessly alarmed and faults us for a failure to acknowledge the decisive turn of events associated with the so-called Reagan and Thatcher revolutions of the 1980s. Not to worry, they exhort us; the statists are on the run, and a brave new world of market-oriented liberalism shimmers on the horizon. My thesis here is that these seemingly level-headed realists are the ones who have failed to perceive correctly the ongoing growth of government. A major reason for their failure is their reliance on certain conventional measures of the size and growth of government. Some of these measures have a built-in tendency to exhibit deceleration even when a more compelling representation displays continuing steady growth. Often the conventional measures miss the growth of government because it has been diverted into channels beyond the scope of their measurement. To some extent, governments have been growing in important but unmeasured or poorly measured ways all along, and they continue to grow in these ways, perhaps more menacingly than ever before. Off-budget spending, for example, is a well-known resort of political scoundrels, but it is only one example among many of how governments employ hard-to-measure means to achieve their usual ends, especially when tax revolts, formal spending limits, or borrowing limitations frustrate their chronic desire to spend at a greater rate. Governments Share of Gross Domestic Product The most common measure of the size of government is the amount of government spending relative to gross domestic product (GDP).

Now, the first thing to notice is that a sure-fire way to make nearly any economic magnitude appear small is to divide it by GDP, because the latter, which purports to be the total value at market prices of all final goods and services produced within a country in a year, is always an enormous dollar (or euro or peso or other currency unit) amount. Government spending of $2,855,200,000,000, as in the United States in fiscal year 2001, seems to be an astronomical amount, but just divide it by the value of GDP and, voilà, it is a mere 28 percentsurely nothing to be alarmed about, especially in comparison with corresponding figures for many European countries that exceed 50 percent.2

The next thing to notice is that because government spending for currently produced final goods and services is itself a component of GDP, the ratio of the former to the latter is immediately compromised. Any addition to such government spending increases the denominator as well as the numerator of the ratio. Suppose that in year one the government spends $100 dollars for currently produced final goods and services, and the GDP in that year is $500. Now suppose that in year two the government spends twice as muchthat is, it increases its purchase amount by 100 percentbut nothing else changes. In year two, the governments share of GDP will be 33.33 percent (or $200/$600), as compared to 20 percent in year one. An analyst focusing on the governments spending share concludes, then, that government has grown not by 100 percent, as it plainly has by construction, but only by 66.66 percent (that is, [(33.33/20) 1] 100). The greater the governments initial share is, the greater is the bias in moving from its absolute spending to the share concept to measure its growth. If government had begun with spending of $100 out of a GDP of $200, then doubled its purchase amount, other things being unchanged, it would have increased its spending share from 50 percent to 66.66 percenta mere 33.33 percent growth.

Granted, many economically advanced countries have maintained a fairly steady government exhaustive share of GDP during the past couple decades (Tanzi and Schuknecht 2000, 25), but this steadiness merely attests that the governments purchases of currently produced final goods and services have grown fully as fast as the sum of nongovernmental purchases of such goods and services during that period of substantial economic expansion, not that the government has become quiescent or stuck in the mud. In the United States, for example, the total government share of GDP was 22.1 percent in 1975 and 17.6 percent in 1999.3 Lest one think that government had run out of steam during that quarter-century, however, one ought to notice that government increased its purchases of currently produced final goods and services from $361.1 billion in 1975 to $1,634.4 billion in 1999which is to say, it increased the annual rate of such spending by $1,273.3 billion during that period (U.S. Council of Economic Advisers 2001, 27475). To be sure, inflation accounts for some of that increase, but even in constant (1996) dollars, the increase was from $942.5 billion to $1,536.1 billion (U.S. Council of Economic Advisors 2001, 277), or 63 percenthardly a retrenchment. Population growth cannot justify the increased spending because the U.S. population grew by just 26 percent during the period (U.S. Council of Economic Advisors 2001, 315).

Of course, the really gigantic increases in government spending have most recently taken the form of transfers (including subsidies), which are not components of GDP and therefore do not give rise to exactly the same numerator-denominator bias that arises when government increases its purchases of currently produced final goods and services (exhaustive spending). Transfer spending also, however, is commonly placed for purposes of analysis in relation to GDP, which then serves as a sort of normalizer or standard of comparison, and whenever this ratio is used, some of the same problems identified earlier arise again. Why, one might ask, should governments transfer spending be placed in a ratio to GDP rather than, say, in a ratio to population or some other base? And if the ratio to GDP remains constant, why, one might ask, should such constancy prevail? That is, why should governments transfer spending increase whenever the economys output of final goods and services increases? Indeed, such constancy would seem to betoken a kind of relative growth of government in its own right, inasmuch as people in a more productive economy presumably can get by more readily without government assistance; hence, as a rule, the ratio of transfers to GDP might be expected to fall in a growing economy rather than rise or even remain constant.

However this matter might be viewed, in reality the ratio has risen enormously in all the economically advanced countries during the past several decades, and it now stands at more than 20 percent on average for a group of seventeen important industrial countries studied by Tanzi and Schuknecht, up from less than 10 percent as recently as 1960 (2000, 31).4 Increasingly, transfer spending is becoming recognized as the Godzilla that threatens to consume New York, Tokyo, Berlin, and nearly every other city on the planet. A few countries, such as Chile, have taken effective measures to deal with this looming threat to government fiscal viability, but so far most politicians in most countries have kept their heads planted firmly in the sand, ignoring everything beyond the next election, while the governments transfer spending has grown ever more bloated, and the severity of the adjustments that will have to be made when the day of reckoning can no longer be postponed has grown ever greater.

Governments Share of Employment

Government employment as a percentage of total employment has often served as an index of the size of government. This measure, too, has a built-in bias toward suggesting that the rate at which government is growing is decelerating over time even when government increases its share of employment by, say, one percentage point every year. Thus, for example, when governments employment share increases from 2 percent to 4 percent, the government grows by 100 percent, but when the share increases from 20 percent to 22 percent, gobbling up the same incremental proportion of total employment, the government grows by just 10 percent.

In the group of seventeen advanced countries analyzed recently by Tanzi and Schuknecht, the governments average employment share increased from 5.2 percent in 1937 to 12.3 percent in 1960 to 18.4 percent in 1994 (2000, 26). The rate of increase of this ratio has declined during the past two decades in most countries, but one ought not to make too much of that deceleration. In the United States, increases in the amount of contracting out of government functions have led to a replacement of formal government employees by a growing shadow army of many millions of seemingly private employeesgrantees, contractors, and consultants but the latter are doing what they are doing only because the government arranges and pays for it to be done (Blumenthal 1979; Hanrahan 1983; Light 1999a, 1999b). According to Paul Lights estimates, the U.S. federal workforce is not the fewer than 2 million persons officially reported (as of 1996), but nearly 17 million personsand the count does not even include the full-time equivalent employment of the people who work on a part-time or temporary basis for Uncle Samfor example, the 884,000 members of the military reserves, although it does include some 4.7 million federally funded workers already counted in the all-governments total as employees of state and local governments (1999a, 1).

Moreover, governments increasingly have established regulations that in effect require bona fide private parties to work for the government. Tanzi and Schuknecht themselves take note of such quasi-fiscal policies, which they describe aptly as regulations that become alternatives to taxing and spending (2000, 203). In this recognition, they follow in a long line of analysts stretching back at least to Richard A. Posner in his capacity as the author of the 1971 article Taxation by Regulation. The relevant class of regulations, though, is much wider than it is usually recognized to be in the standard literature of economics and public choice. To be sure, all sorts of economic, environmental, health and safety, and social regulations continue to spew out of Washington and Brussels, among many other government centers. In addition, however, the U.S. government especially requires ever more uncompensated information collection and reporting by its subjects in order to slake the Surveillance States insatiable craving for the most minute details of everyones conduct (Bennett and Johnson 1979; Twight 1999). These Big Brotherish demands are justified by the despicable slogan that only those with something to hide will object, but in truth this vile rain falls on the righteous and the wicked alikeand one would have to be pretty dimwitted to expect the latter to report truthfully even if officially required to do so.

According to a recent summary of U.S. federal regulation by Clyde Wayne Crews Jr.,

The 2001 Federal Register contained 64,431 pages. . . .
In 2001, 4,132 final rules were issued by agencies. . . . .
Of the 4,509 regulations now in the works, 149 are economically significant rules that will have at least $100 million in economic impact. Those rules will impose at least $14.9 billion yearly in future off-budget costs. . . . .
The costs of meeting the demands of off-budget social regulations were as high as $229 billion according to the Office of Management and Budget. A more broadly constructed competing estimate that includes economic regulatory costs and paperwork costs pegs regulatory expenditures at $854 billion in 2001, or 46 percent of all FY01 [fiscal year 2001] outlays. (2002, 12)

The foregoing summary, shocking as it is, describes the regulatory burden being imposed at only the federal level of government. The state and local governments, as well as various international bodies, simultaneously continue to pour out endless streams of their own regulations, all of which entail resource costs and sacrifices of citizens liberties. Because the public has less awareness of the burdens imposed by these regulations, many of which remain obscure and indirect in their operation and effects, governments encounter even less resistance to their ongoing imposition of regulatory burdens than they encounter in their quest to collect greater revenue from explicit taxes laid on incomes, sales transactions, and property values. So far it seems that there is no natural limit to the number of regulations governments can and will impose. Hence, we are fast approaching a condition in which everything that is not forbidden is required, even as Americans, acting for all the world like faux-patriotic zombies, continue to reassure themselves incessantly that its a free country.

For present purposes, the point is that people occupied with regulatory compliance are not truly privately employed. Instead, they are in effect stealth government servants, working not for their own ends but doing the bidding of their political masters. In the present Western world, then, nearly everybody is actually a government employee, but rather than getting a government paycheck for our efforts, we are required to pay the government for the privilege of our own serfdom and to bear the risk of prosecution and imprisonment should our unpaid work on the governments behalf prove unsatisfactory to our employer.

All That and More

Astronomical taxes and expenditures; regulations distended beyond human comprehension; gigantic borrowing and lending; countless prohibitions and subsidies; innumerable loan guarantees; multitudes of fines, fees, and charges; mountains of surplus commodities distributed like manna; precious private property seized at the whim of the forfeiture police; foreign wars without end; internal-security measures that treat all human beings going about their daily lives as criminal suspectsall that and more, much more, ever more constitute the glorious realm of government in todays economically advanced countries (you know, the ones that are color-coded as free on the maps prepared by research institutes better left nameless on this occasion). Each day the galling chains around us are pulled tighter. Yet until the last breath of liberty is squeezed out of us, we can rely on hardheaded scholars to trot out their anemic and biased measures of the growth of government and to announce calmly that we have no valid cause for alarm. My advice: if you value your life, liberty, and property, do not employ one of these experts as your night watchman. --posted 08.05.04

References

Bennett, James T., and Manuel H. Johnson. 1979. Paperwork and Bureaucracy. Economic Inquiry 17 (July): 43551.
Blumenthal, Barbara. 1979. Uncle Sams Army of Invisible Employees. National Journal (May 5): 73033.
Crews, Clyde Wayne, Jr. 2002. Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, 2002 Edition. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.
Greenhut, Steven. 2003. Land of the Free, Home of the Slave. Available at: http://www. lewrockwell.com/greenhut/greenhut15.html.
Hanrahan, John D. 1983. Government by Contract. New York: Norton.
Higgs, Robert. 1983. Where Figures Fail: Measuring the Growth of Big Government. The Freeman 33 (March): 15156.
. 1987. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. New York: Oxford University Press.
VOLUME IX, NUMBER 1, SUMMER 2004 LIES, DAMN LIES, AND THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT 153 . 1991a. Eighteen Problematic Propositions in the Analysis of the Growth of Government. Review of Austrian Economics 5: 340.
. 1991b. Leviathan at Bay? Liberty 5 (November): 6470. Light, Paul Charles. 1999a. The True Size of Government. Government Executive Magazine (January 1). Available at: http://www.govexec.com/features/0199/0199s1htm.
. 1999b. The True Size of Government. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. Posner, Richard A. 1971. Taxation by Regulation. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 5 (spring): 2250.
Tanzi, Vito, and Ludger Schuknecht. 2000. Public Spending in the 20th Century: A Global Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Twight, Charlotte. 1999. Watching You: Systematic Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans. The Independent Review 4 (fall): 165200.
U.S. Council of Economic Advisers. 2001. Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
U.S. Office of Management and Budget. 2002. Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2003: Historical Tables. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

Taking Stock One Year After
the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

By Robert Higgs

One year ago the United States unleashed its armed forces in an invasion of Iraq. Prior to the invasion, the Bush administration offered a variety of justifications for launching it and defended its war plan against critics who claimed that a U.S. invasion was unnecessary and would be immoral or unwise. For everyone except those blinded by partisan loyalty to the Bush administration, the truth is now all too obvious. The administration was wrong and the critics were right.

The president, the vice president, the secretaries of defense and state, and other leading figures in the Bush administration insisted confidently and repeatedly in interviews, speeches, and public forums that the Iraqi regime harbored vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons; that it was actively developing nuclear weapons; that it either possessed already or soon would possess effective means, including long-range missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles, of delivering so-called weapons of mass destruction far beyond its borders, even to the United States; that it had established links to members of al Qaeda; and that it was directing its military and related efforts toward wreaking great harm on the United States. Along the way, many auxiliary claims came forth involving, among other things, an alleged Iraqi attempt to obtain uranium “yellow cake” from Niger; procurement of aluminum tubes allegedly for use in Iraqi nuclear-weapons production; and an alleged April 2001 meeting in Prague between al Qaeda operative Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent. Administration leaders maintained that the conquest of Iraq (officially its “liberation”) would set off a chain reaction of democratization across the Middle East.

On March 17, 2003, just two days before the beginning of the U.S. invasion, President Bush said in an evening address to the nation:

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. . . . The [Iraqi] regime . . . has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other. . . . Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed. . . . The tyrant will soon be gone. [Iraqi people] [t]he day of your liberation is near. . . . [W]e cannot live under the threat of blackmail. The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed. . . . We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far greater. . . . We choose to meet that threat now where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities. . . . [R]esponding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense. It is suicide. The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now. . . . [W]hen the dictator has departed, [the Iraqi people] can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.

On March 19, having ordered U.S. forces to begin the invasion, the president said in an evening address:

We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people. . . . Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. . . . We will meet that threat now with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.

Despite a lingering unwillingness to admit in plain language that none of the president's claims about Iraqi threats has held up in the face of the facts brought to light during the past year, the administration has ceased to defend them and has resorted instead to denying that the president himself ever used the phrase “imminent threat”; to blaming faulty intelligence for misleading the president; and to justifying the war on the grounds that no matter what else might have been the case, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. Moreover, although the U.S. occupation of Iraq has made that country a magnet for Islamic holy warriors, suicide bombers, and planters of roadside IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and although terrorists have carried out horrendous retaliatory bombings in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey, and Spain, among other places, President Bush persists in his locker-room bravado and declares that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have made the world “a safer, freer place.”

Today, many prewar predictions can be tested against the actual outcomes of the war. We now know, for example, that U.S. forces have not been welcomed – at least, not for long or by many people – in Iraq. But in view of the thousands of deaths that they caused among civilians as well as Iraqi soldiers, the countless persons of all ages and both sexes that they injured, the vast destruction of property that they wreaked, and the widespread looting that they unleashed and then stood by watching, why would they have been welcomed? Many Iraqis, especially the Shiites and Kurds, are pleased to be rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime, but few of them relish the occupation of their country by U.S. troops or their subjugation to a foreign power. In the port city of Umm Qasr, hospital director Dr. Akram Gataa gave representative testimony for the southern region when he said, “Everyone was happy when the soldiers came here to get rid of the old regime but now people are wondering what this so-called freedom has brought them.” Dr. Gataa reported that the mood of the local people was turning quickly from frustration to resentment and anger, and he added: “All of us will fight them if they stay here too long. No Iraqi will accept this turning into the occupation of their country.”

Nor do the U.S. troops themselves enjoy serving as targets in the scores of attempts made daily to kill them. As one soldier said, “U.S. officials need to get our asses out of here. We have no business being here. . . . All we are here is potential people to be killed and sitting ducks.” Nearly 600 have died so far, thousands have been injured seriously, and many have had their mental states rearranged for the worse – approximately one thousand of the U.S. troops evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany were suffering from mental problems, according to hospital commander Colonel Rhonda Cornum. Violence can accomplish certain things, but neither “nation building” nor the promotion of sound mental health is among those things.

For many of us, none of these events has come as a surprise. Before the war, we told anyone who would listen that the administration had not made a convincing case for its impending invasion of Iraq and that its rosy forecast of the aftermath of a U.S. attack was so unlikely as to border on the fantastical.

Because the prosecution of a war serves so splendidly to promote government power and to gratify a president's delusions of war-leader “greatness“ (his prime claim to fame as he seeks reelection), however, one naturally suspects that the invasion of Iraq was never intended to serve the announced purposes, that the stated rationale was pure pretext all along. A close look at the backgrounds, expressed policy preferences, and actions of the neoconservative schemers who played such a prominent role in promoting the invasion – Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and company – does nothing to diminish such suspicion. Indeed, if the pure-pretext explanation is not valid, then one is hard pressed to understand how the government, with its vast multi-billion-dollar intelligence apparatus, managed to get so many things wrong while isolated individuals with no privileged access to classified or inside information, such as I, managed to get them right all along.

Truth be known, this discrepancy testifies to the comic-opera quality of the whole undertaking. It illuminates the many ways in which the administration, the so-called intelligence community, the make-believe checks and balances in Congress and the courts, and the propaganda organs that masquerade as major independent news media have been engaged, and even now continue to engage, in something akin to one of those huge ballroom dances at the Palace of Versailles, each dancer moving in perfect harmony with all the rest, almost as if the entire performance had been – dare I say? – choreographed. Gazing though the unshuttered windows of power at this grandiose performance, the awed peasants perceive the elegantly costumed and magnificently coiffured dancers as they join and turn and separate, only to join and turn again in harmonious synchronization.

Thus, the Democratic challenger for the presidency is represented by his party and by the press as a stern critic of the war, but one has to wonder: where was his steely resolve in October 2002, when he voted in the Senate to hand over to the president the authority that the Constitution gives to Congress alone to declare war? Now, weaseling like a typical politician, he maintains that he was tricked – Bush “misled every one of us,” he declares – and that he voted as he did because he trusted George Bush to go to war only as a “last resort.” Can John Kerry have been so obtuse that he had no idea who held the reins at the Bush administration? Did he not know what Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and the rest of that gang had been cooking up for decades in public as well as in private? Clarifying his stance, Kerry maintains not that Bush should not have gone to war but only that Bush should have formed a bigger coalition before doing so. Evidently an immoral and unwise war is hunky-dory if enough aggressors join forces to wage it.

To suppose that Kerry is antiwar and Bush prowar would be to mischaracterize a case of Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber. As a phrase used on another, similar occasion back in the 1960s reminds us, there's not a dime’s worth of difference between these two barons of the ruling oligarchy. The effusion of campaign blather and the election that will mercifully end it in November are all part of the ritual dance. In no event will the election's outcome materially affect the realities of death and destruction that U.S. and puppet forces are dishing out worldwide or the spasms of terrorist retaliation and assorted other “blowback” that are certain to follow. To imagine anything else is tantamount to forgetting the entire political history of this country during the past century.

Meanwhile, the dance continues. A congressionally approved blue-ribbon commission, though repeatedly obstructed by the president’s refusal to cooperate fully, strenuously probes the 9/11 disaster in preparation for its eventual preordained whitewash of presidential or administration responsibility. Another bipartisan, presidentially appointed panel, whose report has been conveniently scheduled to arrive well after the November election, digs into the “faulty intelligence” on which the administration relied prior to its invasion of Iraq. Weapons searcher David Kay has already admitted that “we were almost all wrong,” and the commission's goal of course is to “get to the bottom” of this matter – as if, at this late date, the whole world doesn't know exactly how the neocons spun the whole shebang in order to tell a plausible tale on behalf of their beloved war. On Capitol Hill, Congressional committees hold mock-serious hearings, going through the motions of searching for the facts about intelligence failures, military snafus, and cozy deals in the military-industrial complex. These dedicated public servants are always shocked – shocked! – when they happen to stumble onto the truth, but as well-rehearsed dancers they can be counted on not to stumble that way frequently. If John Q. Public thinks that any of this official investigatory activity will provide him with reliable information about how the government actually works, or even about how it intends to work, he is sacrificing a good opportunity to go fishing. It's all for show.

If you think I’m off base, then take the following test. Check the cast of characters a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. See who’s prospered and who hasn’t. See whose head has rolled (don’t expect many) for misfeasance or malfeasance in public office. Check whether many politicians who came into office without great wealth somehow left office filthy rich. Check on their friends and relatives, too. Notice whose kids have been killed or wounded by roadside IEDs in whatever Third World hellhole the United States has invaded and occupied most recently (don't expect to find the scions of any government bigwigs among those blown to smithereens or driven mad by combat stress). Check whether the United States has managed to bring into being a glorious worldwide regime of democracy, peace, and prosperity and whether the world‘s peoples are hailing Uncle Sam with hosannas and strewing his global pathways with flowers in gratitude for his beneficent intervention (just don’t hold your breath waiting for this oft-promised outcome). I'm prepared to be wrong. If I am, I'll deliver a dollar for each of your donuts.

What we see in Iraq one year after the invasion might have been foreseen, and in fact was foreseen, by anybody who cared to take the trouble to look into the matter without ideological or religious blinders and with a modicum of historical background on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy during the past century. This war, like all the others, has been not so much a case of who knew what when, of well-intentioned mistakes and tragic miscalculations. It has been more a case of who told what lies to whom, to serve what personal, political, and ideological ends; of who paid the price in blood and treasure and who came out smelling like a rose; of mendacity and irresponsibility in high places and of colossal public gullibility in the face of relentless political opportunism. As the saying goes, the more things change . . . --posted 05/03/04

*Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute and editor of its scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review. He is also the author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government and the editor of Arms, Politics and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. For further articles and studies, see the War on Terrorism and OnPower.org.

Can Bullets and Bombs Establish Justice in Iraq?

By Robert Higgs*

President George W. Bush has said on many occasions that he seeks to “bring to justice” those responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the United States. On September 20, 2001, he told a joint session of Congress: “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” Later, he associated the U.S. invasion of Iraq with that same quest for justice. Today, however, as violent resistance to the U.S. occupation increases throughout Iraq and as the Shiites as well as the Sunnis fight pitched battles with the occupation forces, the Bush administration’s devotion to justice stands clearly revealed as declaration without substance.

Although convincing evidence of alleged cooperation between the Iraqi government and the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks was never adduced, nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein’s regime reeked of injustice, and so the U.S. overthrow of that regime might appear to have been at least consistent with the establishment of justice. The trouble that arose at the very outset, however, reflected the choice of military means to attain the desired end. Notwithstanding all the claims made on behalf of precision weapons, modern warfare always spills over from the guilty to the innocent. Certainly it did so in Iraq, where tens of thousands of men, including many noncombatants, as well as thousands of women and children suffered death or injury as a result of U.S. military actions. Thus were new injustices committed in the process of overthrowing those responsible for old injustices. A net gain for justice?

For U.S. authorities the question never seemed to arise. On the rare occasions when they recognized that their invasion had entailed any evils at all, they always insisted that those evils amounted to only a small cost relative to the great benefits to be enjoyed by the liberated Iraqi people once the immediate turmoil of the fighting had ceased. All along, however, it was plain that many Iraqis held a different view. Indeed, many were so opposed to the U.S. presence in their country that they tossed not the ballyhooed welcoming flowers but rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells at their self-anointed liberators. Saddam Hussein’s regime was quickly dispatched, thereby accomplishing the declared U.S. goal, yet the U.S. forces then settled down for an indefinite stay, and many Iraqis continued to fight them tooth and nail at great risk to themselves and their places of residence. What had become of justice?

Listening to U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer tell the story, we might never suspect that anything deserves notice in Iraq besides the sweetness and light of the American “reconstruction” of the country’s shattered infrastructure and undemocratic institutions. Responding to questions about the recent widespread violence, Bremer declared: “I know if you just report on those few places, it does look chaotic. But if you travel around the country . . . what you find is a bustling economy, people opening businesses right and left, unemployment has dropped.” Maybe so, just as after September 11, 2001, almost everything in the United States (except the airlines) continued to operate much as it had before—a few buildings knocked down here and there and four airliners lost out of a fleet of thousands didn’t amount, so to speak, to a hill of beans. One suspects, however, that Bremer and other leaders of the Bush administration would vehemently reject this analogous way of putting things into perspective. After all, they have steadfastly insisted that the events of 9/11 “changed everything.”

Speaking of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers have recently joined the fray in several cities, Bremer described the preacher as “a guy who has a fundamentally inappropriate view of the new Iraq.” This statement demands close examination. Here is the resident chief of a conquering power seemingly speaking as though he were entitled to say what is appropriate for Iraq. What has happened to government by the consent of the governed? Clearly, although al-Sadr may have little authority to speak for the Iraqi people, Bremer has none at all. Al-Sadr, declared Bremer, “believes that in the new Iraq, like in the old Iraq, power should be to the guy with guns. That is an unacceptable vision for Iraq.” It required a great deal of chutzpah for Bremer, who presides over Iraq solely by virtue of the massive firepower of U.S. forces there, to call into question the validity of power that flows from the barrel of a gun. Bremer has utterly no legitimacy as the kingpin of Iraq, and it would be far more becoming if he confined his declarations to topics such as repairs to the water and sewer systems.

In an April 7 press briefing, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described the Iraqi resistance fighters as a few “thugs, gangs, and terrorists.” Minimizing the scope of the resistance, he characterized it as consisting of “a small number of terrorists and militias coupled with some protests.” (Rumsfeld routinely speaks of all Iraqis who oppose the U.S. occupation as terrorists.) Moreover, in the briefing, he and General Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred repeatedly to al-Sadr as a murderer. Yet no legitimate court has convicted al-Sadr of murder. To be sure, a certain Iraqi court is said to have indicted him. What should we make of such an indictment? Who composes that court, and how did those persons gain their positions? Clearly, the court has no power to enforce any decision except with the approval and cooperation of U.S. occupation forces. One might have thought that the world had seen enough kangaroo courts during the days of Stalin and Hitler to have acquired some suspicion of judicial integrity in extraordinary circumstances. Yet U.S. authorities display no appreciation of what genuine justice requires for either its determination or its enforcement. There is absolutely no rule of law in Iraq; U.S. forces simply do as they please.

Further evidence of this disregard for justice comes from an anonymous source that the Wall Street Journal describes as a “senior Pentagon official.” Speaking of previous U.S. deliberations about how to deal with al-Sadr, this official stated, “We’ve always been really conflicted on how to deal with Sadr. Do you capture or kill him and make him a martyr, or do you ignore him and hope that the Shiites move away from him?” Well, if one seeks to establish justice, one treats him as the rules of justice require. If he is reasonably suspected of having committed a crime, he should be arrested and given a fair trial. In no event, however, is someone who dislikes his sermons or his political views entitled to kill him peremptorily—evidently a live option in discussions among U.S. leaders, according to this nameless official. What sort of justice is it simply to kill an unpopular preacher? Indeed, such a killing would itself seem to be an act of murder that cries out for its perpetrators to be brought to justice.

Meanwhile, here in the tranquil confines of the United States, the dogs of war continue to howl in the mainstream media, and like the U.S. authorities in Iraq and Washington, D.C., they are howling for further bloodshed, not for justice. (As U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Ray Millen recently explained: ”‘Hearts and minds’ is not applicable during a military campaign; that’s a long-term solution.”) Thus, the Wall Street Journal’s editors opined on April 6 that “what’s needed now is a reassertion of U.S. resolve. . . . Having let Mr. Sadr’s militia grow, the coalition now has no choice but to break it up.” Moreover, not content with prescribing bigger doses of U.S. violence in Iraq, the Journal’s editors used the occasion to shake their fists at Iran, too. “Iran’s mullahs fear a Muslim democracy in Iraq,” they asserted, “because it is a direct threat to their own rule. If warnings to Tehran from Washington don’t impress them, perhaps some cruise missiles aimed at the Bushehr nuclear site will concentrate their minds.”

No one can deny, of course, that incoming cruise missiles do concentrate the mind—the airliners commandeered and turned into guided missiles on 9/11 certainly had that effect on leaders of the Bush administration. Cruise missiles, however, like the 500-pound bombs and M1-A1 tanks being employed to police Iraq today, are not effective instruments for the establishment of justice. There was no justice in the 9/11 attacks on New York City and precious little in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq; nor is any in prospect should the Bush administration loose its firepower gratuitously on Iran. Such employment of indiscriminate force and violence can accomplish certain things—widespread death and destruction above all—but by its very nature it cannot establish justice. Indeed, its most visible effect is the encouragement of recurrent rounds of attack and counterattack. Does anyone really believe that the recent attacks in an arc that stretches from Bali to Istanbul to Madrid were anything but retaliation against people whose governments had cooperated with U.S. military actions in the Middle East? Until the leaders of the U.S. government come to recognize the distinction between waging war and establishing justice, the world will remain at risk of much unnecessary pain and grief. --posted 04.21.04

Is Bush Unhinged?

By Robert Higgs*

Before you conclude that I myself must be unhinged even to raise such a question, ask yourself this: If a man talks as if he has lost contact with reality, then might he actually have done so? Granted that this possibility deserves evaluation, then consider President George W. Bush’s rhetoric in his March 19 speech to diplomats and others at the White House.

The president begins by stating his interpretation of the recent bombings in Madrid, reiterating one of his recurrent themes of the past two and a half years: “[T]he civilized world is at war” in a “new kind of war.” The concept of war, of course, ranks high among evocative metaphors. Not by accident have politicians declared wars on poverty, drugs, cancer, illiteracy, and an assortment of other alleged enemies. A society at war, as William James observed in 1906 in his call for the “moral equivalent of war,” finds a reason for unaccustomed solidarity and—here’s where the politicians come in—for unaccustomed submission to central government authority. James himself, after all, was arguing that “the martial type of character can be bred without war.” Political leaders are always seeking to establish such character, with themselves in command of the battalions of “disciplined” subjects. Insofar as the so-called war on terrorism merely represents the latest attempt to bend the war metaphor to an obvious political purpose, we might well dismiss the president’s rhetorical flourish as nothing but the same old same old.

Bush, however, will allow no such dismissal. “The war on terror,” he insists, “is not a figure of speech.” Well, I beg your pardon, Mr. President, but that is precisely what it is. How can one go to war against “terror,” which is a state of mind? Even if the president were to take more care with his language and to speak instead of a “war on terrorism,” the phrase still could not be anything more than a metaphor, because terrorism is a form of action available to virtually any determined adult anywhere anytime. War on terrorism, too, can be only a figure of speech.

War, if it is anything, is the marshalling of armed forces against somebody, not against a state of mind or a form of action. Wars are fought between groups of persons. We might argue about whether the United States can wage war only against another nation state, as opposed to an indefinitely large number of individuals committed to fanatical Islamism who in various workaday guises are living in scores of different countries. The expression “war on certain criminals and conspirators of criminal acts” would fit the present case better and would entail far more sensible thinking about the proper way to deal with such persons. The idea of war, obviously, calls to mind too readily the serviceability of the armed forces. Hence the application of such forces to the conquest of Iraq in the name of “bringing the terrorists to justice,” although that conquest was actually nothing but a hugely destructive, immensely expensive diversion from genuine efforts to allay the threat posed by the Islamist maniacs who compose al Qaeda and similar groups. “These killers will be tracked down and found, they will face their day of justice,” the president declares, speaking as always as if only a fixed number of such killers exist, rather than a vast reservoir of actual and potential recruits that is only augmented and revitalized by actions such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It would be a boon to humanity if the president could be brought to understand the distinction between waging war and establishing justice.

Whatever our understanding of the president’s “war on terror” might be, however, he definitely parts company with reality when he states, “There is no neutral ground—no neutral ground—in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death.” Of course, this Manichean pronouncement echoes the administration’s previous declaration that everybody on earth is either with us or against us—and if they know what’s good for them, they’ll fall into line with our wishes. Aside from the undeniable fact that some nations simply prefer, as did the Spanish people (as opposed to the Aznar government), to avoid the blowback of U.S. interventions around the world, the president’s insistence on equating U.S. policy with good, freedom, and life and all alternative policies with evil, slavery, and death represents the sort of childish bifurcation one expects to find expressed by a member of a youth gang, not by the leader of the world’s most powerful government. To raise but a single example, though a highly relevant one in this context, can any dispassionate person argue that the U.S. position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is entirely good, whereas every alternative position is entirely evil?

Observers endowed with humane moral sensibilities recognize that there is plenty of evil to go around in Israel and elsewhere. In Iraq, for example, the U.S. government bears clear responsibility for killing and injuring thousands of noncombatants in the past year—not to mention the horrendous mortality and suffering it brought about previously by enforcement of the economic sanctions used to cripple that country for more than a decade. Some people maintain that the price was worth paying, that ultimately the good obtained will more than compensate for the harm caused in the process, but even if one accepts that assessment for the sake of argument, it remains true nevertheless that much harm was caused, that the burden of responsibility for evils perpetrated must be borne by the U.S. side as well as by the demonized enemy (Saddam Hussein having been made out after 1990 as “another Hitler”). International conflicts in the real world do not often divide neatly into nothing-but-good versus nothing-but-evil. For the president of the United States to employ such a juvenile characterization raises the possibility that his mind is so immature that he ought to be removed from office before he propels the world into even worse disasters.

Seemingly aware of previous criticism, the president declares that “the terrorists are offended not merely by our policies—they are offended by our existence as free nations.” I myself have seen no evidence to confirm such a statement; certainly the president has adduced none. I have seen, however, the translated testimony of one Osama bin Laden, who in a famous October 2001 videotape objects to U.S. support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, and to U.S. economic sanctions and other hostile actions against Iraq—that is, to various U.S. policies. “Millions of innocent children are being killed in Iraq and in Palestine and we don’t hear a word from the infidels. We don’t hear a raised voice,” says bin Laden. In my ears, this statement sounds like an objection to U.S. policies. I have seen no evidence that bin Laden or any other known Islamic terrorist takes offence at our very existence, provided that we mind our own business in our own homeland.

In the president’s mind, however, every deviation from adherence to his promulgated national-security policy of U.S. world domination and preventive warfare represents a dangerous form of appeasement: “Any sign of weakness or retreat simply validates terrorist violence, and invites more violence for all nations. The only certain way to protect our people is by early, united, and decisive action”—that is, by global military intervention by the United States, with all other nations serving as its lackeys. In the neoconservative vision to which the president has been converted, time stands still: It is always 1938, and if we fail to bring all our military might to bear preventively against the Hitler du jour, we shall certainly be plunged into global catastrophe.

Waxing positive, the president credits recent U.S. and allied military actions with bringing about “a free Afghanistan” and the “long-awaited liberation” of the Iraqi people. He maintains that the fall of the Iraqi dictator has removed a source of violence, aggression, and instability in the Middle East. . . . [Y]ears of illicit weapons development by the dictator have come to the end. . . . [T]he Iraqi people are now receiving aid, instead of suffering under the sanctions. . . . [M]en and women across the Middle East, looking to Iraq, are getting a glimpse of what life in a free country can be like. . . . Who would begrudge the Iraqi people their long-awaited liberation?

This effusion evinces a tenuous grip on reality. Nobody begrudges the Iraqi people their freedom, but many of us have serious doubts about just how much freedom those long-suffering people really have. Their country is occupied by a lethal foreign army whose soldiers roam freely, breaking into homes and mosques at will, maintaining checkpoints that often become the venues of unjustified killings, carrying out police activities by employing such means as aerial bombardment and bursts of heavy machine-gun fire. If this unfortunate scene is the “glimpse of what life in a free country can be like” that others throughout the Middle East are getting, then woe unto anyone who yearns to stimulate those Middle Easterners to seek freedom. “With Afghanistan and Iraq showing the way, we are confident that freedom will lift the sights and hopes of millions in the greater Middle East,” the president states. If he really harbors such confidence, one can only note how ill-founded it is.

The president seems to have no idea of what a free society consists of. Violent military occupation and the complete absence of the rule of law totally invalidate any claim that either Iraq or Afghanistan is now a free society. At present Iraq is awash with violence perpetrated by resistance fighters and occupation forces and with criminality of all sorts unleashed by the disruptions associated with the war and by the U.S. dissolution of the old police apparatus. “We will not fail the Iraqi people, who have placed their trust in us,” Bush declares. But they never placed their trust in us in the first place; they simply suffered our invasion and occupation of their country. In any event, we have already gravely disappointed the hopes that many Iraqis held for life after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The country is rife with resentment and hostility, and the people are eager for U.S. forces to get out. Although the president maintains that “[w]e’ve set out to break the cycle of bitterness and radicalism that has brought stagnation to a vital region,” one cannot help concluding from the facts on the ground that the upshot of the U.S. invasion and occupation has been just the opposite, that U.S. actions in Iraq have only poured fuel on the fires of terrorism there as well as in the wider world.

It is disconcerting for me to listen to the president’s speeches. I get the unsettling feeling that the man inhabits another world in which things are the exact opposite of how they seem to me. Of course, I may be the one whose perspective is askew. Unlike Bush, I cannot claim that the Almighty has licensed my position. Yet I fear that time will tell in favor of my view of the matter—a view shared, of course, by most people on the planet, indeed, by nearly everybody who has not been bribed, intimidated, or blinded by partisan loyalty to the Bush administration. For now, this difference of views might seem to be nothing more than that—just one man’s opinion jousting with another’s—but reality has a way of passing definite judgment, and I will not be surprised if Bush’s pronouncements ultimately come to be seen as having no more substance than a bad dream.

Bush Watch is a daily political internet magazine based in Austin, Texas, a non-advocacy site paid for and edited by Politex, a non-affiliated U.S. citizen. Contents, including "Bush Watch" and "Politex," (c) 1998-2001 Politex. The views expressed herein and the views in stories that you are linked to are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bush Watch. Permission of author required for reprinting original material, and only requests for reprinting a specific item are considered. The duration of the working links is not under our control. Bush Watch has not reviewed all of the sites linked to our site and is not responsible for the content of any off-site pages or any other sites linked to our site. Your linking to any other off-site pages or other sites from our site is at your own risk.
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What Does the Administration’s Leaked Mea Culpa on Iraq Portend? August 25, 2005

By Robert Higgs

Lies, Damn Lies, And Conventional Measures of the Growth of Government

By Robert Higgs

Taking Stock One Year After the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

By Robert Higgs

Can Bullets and Bombs Establish Justice in Iraq?

By Robert Higgs*

Is Bush Unhinged?

By Robert Higgs*

What Does the Administration’s Leaked Mea Culpa on Iraq Portend?
August 25, 2005

Taking Stock One Year After
the U.S. Invasion of Iraq