Category Archives: Bush

A Saddamless Iraq — A Free Iraq

Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Islam, Neoconservatism, War

Genghis (Bush) and his gang have recently told Iraqis to get with the program: form a government, or else. There is something really screwy about this administration’s admonitions to Iraqis for not getting it together. As though Iraq ever had it together; Saddam’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people, which did not, I might add, ask to be invaded—and “improved.”

Under our ministrations, Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state. Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order or under a force made up of ideological terrorists and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?

I know what my answer would be. But then I’ve actually had some experience—nothing compared to the experience of the Iraqis, but certainly something compared to the inexperience of the types (Hannity, O’Reilly et al.) who talk up this war.

I lived under a dictatorship in apartheid South-Africa. So did millions of Africans. Crime was never an issue then. Africans suffered indignities, but not much violence. Unless one made a point of clashing with the authorities, one’s life was secure. Now that “freedom” has come to South Africa, lawlessness is such that the “democratic” government has implemented “an official blackout” on national crime statistics. The place is one of the most violent spots on earth, after Iraq, Haiti, and some other African countries.

A few weeks back I got the news that my youngest brother and his family (wife and new baby) were attacked in their suburban fortress at 2:00am by a gang of Africans. The alarm was bypassed. Luckily they escaped with their lives.

In my father’s upmarket neighborhood, another dad was shot point-blank in front of his little girls, as he exited his car to open the garage gates. The loot? A cell phone and some cash. He begged the savages to take his car and all his possessions and spare his life. Two of my husband’s colleagues are dead; one shot in broad daylight as he left his girlfriend’s apartment.

South-Africa is heaven on earth compared to Iraq. So don’t speak to me about “liberation.” The removal of Saddam is not to be equated with liberty in Iraq; a Saddamless Iraq is not necessarily a free Iraq.

Let us stipulate for the record that Saddam Hussein was a killer, a wicked man indeed. Yet even the invasion’s most avid supporters cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our merciful faith-based intervention.

In addition to their society’s cultural limitations vis-a -vis the attainment of democracy, if Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented it is because they are busy… busy dying at rates much much higher than those claimed by the Saddam = Hitler crowd. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” according to a Lancet report. Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence.

As I once wrote, people “whose lungs are airless, whose hearts are not beating, and whose eyes and limbs are missing are not free and will never be free.” And people who risk such a fate daily are not free in any meaningful way.

On the Three Amigos in the Ottawa Citizen

Bush, Canada

I wrote an op-ed for the Ottawa Citizen about the three amigos’ Cancun conference—Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, President Bush, and Mexican president Vicente Fox. The column is supposed to run today, Saturday, April 1. To read The Citizen online one has to subscribe. I’ll scan the page and post it on the website as soon as I get the tear sheet. I wrote the thing right after submitting my WorldNetDaily column, so I’m quite drained.

Update: “A Vacation from Reality” can be read by clicking here and enlarging the scanned page. Here’s an excerpt:

So long as the U.S. and Canada remain relatively high-wage areas with tax-funded welfare systems, they will experience migratory pressure from a low-wage country such as Mexico. Protectionist policies, the kind Bush is guilty of, immeasurably worsen this pressure. If people can’t sell their wares into foreign markets, they’re more inclined to relocate in search of better economic prospects. Unhampered trade, not NAFTA, might diminish this pressure.

We Are The World

Bush, Economy, Free Markets, Government

“Whether the economy is better off for their labor is a debate nobody will have. An interminable supply of such workers creates its own economic realities, chief of which is a shift to labor-intense, rather than innovation-oriented, forms of production. A never-ending supply of cheap and unskilled workers actually retards the productivity and progress of a modern economy by preventing mechanization and delaying important breakthroughs, thus reducing competitiveness.

More importantly, the purely economic argument about the price at which American workers will perform menial work is meaningless without a reference to borders and to the thing they bound—a nation. Render asunder the idea of a nation, make borders obsolete—and the world is your labor market.

Bush has zero understanding of things metaphysical—and has no appreciation for the bonds that unite members of a civil society in common purpose. He brazenly contends that Americans won’t do certain work. But he leaves out that they can’t afford to toil at a price that is a function of an artificially created, ceaseless supply of immigrants.

Bush’s Brave New Borderless World is at work here, not the invisible hand.”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily column, “We Are The World.” It deals with the “Bush-backed immigration bill, penned by the unholy McCain-Kennedy-Specter trinity.”

Henry Hazlitt and the Government-Spending Hazard

America, Bush

The national debt is reason enough for the impeachment of W. Today, as The Christian Science Monitor reports, it totals $8.3 trillion. Democrats are quite right to tar “Bush as the president who squandered the Clinton-era track record of fiscal responsibility.” As our national debt stands, we would not be admitted into the company of socialists: The European Union. The EU “expects member nations to hold deficits below 60 percent of GDP.”

The US doesn’t qualify.

The evidence goes to show that government growth as a share of GDP coincides with a decline in GDP growth. Governments in high-income developed economies have now been steadily accreting for decades. The decline in prosperity or in real growth rates in these nations has been concomitant: As government share of the GDP rises, so has GDP in the OECD nations been declining. ‘A 10 percent increase in government expenditure as a share of GDP results in a 1 percent point reduction in GDP growth.’

If they do nothing else, Americans should switch off Fox News and open Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson (the first makes you too dumb to comprehend the last). There they will learn that there is no free lunch. To finance his Welfare and Warfare wantonness, Bush calls on the Federal Reserve and the printing press to print money. Inflation is an increase in the money supply. This practice—inflation—raises prices and depreciates the value of the currency. The new money will generate price hikes throughout the economy. The endemic price hikes and economic distortions that follow are a byproduct of this legalized counterfeiting.

And that invariably means poorer people, not politicians—Americans should also know that the parasites in charge, the ones they give their unremitting support to, will always get richer; you and I poorer.

Why? The new money reaches the politically connected first. They get fat checks well before the general price increases caused by all the new money affect their purchasing power. Corporate cronies like Kellogg Brown & Root, the construction arm of Cheney’s Halliburton, and the Bechtel Corporation are good examples of war profiteers who’ll benefit first from counterfeit coinage.

By the time you and I, politically unconnected suckers that we are, experience a meager rise in money income, rising prices will have obliterated the tiny gain.

Further reading: Government Growth Impoverishes, Blame Government for the Economic Bust, Wartime Socialism, and Deficit Disorders.