Category Archives: Iran

Neoconservative Kingpin Taps Ryan/Rubio

Elections, Foreign Policy, Iran, Neoconservatism, The State, War

William Kristol is touting Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio as a 2012 presidential item.

What are we to take away from this? “They are both strong on national defense,” Kristol repeated twice to Neil Cavuto with that broad Cheshire-Cat grin of his. Could the neoconservative kingpin be licking his chops for war? Is Iran on the chopping block? What else would make a religious proponent of big government and American manifest destiny so smitten?

Cut to 2000, with Kristol and David Brooks making mischief together—or magic, depending on whose side you’re on. The two collaborated on a piece, “The Politics of Creative Destruction,” in which they argued that McCain would revive, rather than repress, the State.

And who could forget Kristol, over on the op-ed pages of his new editorial home, the New York Times (an appointment that speaks to how cozy the left-neocon cabal truly is), excitedly admonishing mutinous anti-McCain conservatives, while reciting gory poetry in honor of McMussolini. Limbaugh he had maligned as suffering from “McCain Derangement Syndrome.”

If Kristol is this excited, it must mean the promise of killing and carnage.

UPDATE II: Cyber Warfare: Is It Libertarian?

Individual Rights, Iran, Israel, libertarianism, Natural Law, Technology, War

“There is a pithy aphorism from a Tractate of the Jewish Law regarding the right of self-defense. The Talmud, as the law is called, is a veritable minefield of complexities and interpretations. The rabbis would have prefaced their edict with extended discussion. They would have argued about the threshold that must be met before a pre-emptive strike can be carried out, what constitutes imminent danger, and whether defensive actions apply only to individuals or to collective action as well. These scholars belonged to a people that spent a good part of their history perfecting the Christian art of turning the other cheek. Yet ironically, and doubtless after careful consideration, the rabbis recommended that, ‘He who rises to kill thee, ye rise earlier to kill him.'” (See “Facing the Onslaught of Jihad”)

Likewise, I am not a pacifist, although I am a libertarian.

There is no doubt in my mind that Iran would evaporate Israel if it could. Yet mention to Iran’s apologists that Israel is being considered by Ahmadinejad as The Bomb’s designated test site, and the reply one invariably gets is, “Oh, c’mon; are you referring to all that ‘wipe Israel off the map’ stuff? Haven’t you heard of ‘Scheherazade of the Thousand and One [Arabian] Nights? Ahmadi’s excitable. That’s his style. Chill, man.”

[READ “That Persian Pussycat.”]

There is a strong suspicion that Israel is behind “The Stuxnet worm, ‘the most sophisticated malware ever’ … [it] has been discovered infesting Iran’s nuclear installations. There’s growing speculation that these were indeed the intended targets of what the mainstream continues to call a ‘virus’ — it only infects certain Siemens SCADA systems in specific configurations. There’s also speculation that it’s state-sponsored malware, with fingers pointing at either Israel or the U.S.”

Reuters reports that “Cyber warfare has quietly grown into a central pillar of Israel’s strategic planning, with a new military intelligence unit set up to incorporate high-tech hacking tactics, Israeli security sources said on Tuesday.”

To be sure, hacking is a violation of property rights. That is as clear as crystal. Why, spam is trespass. But this alleged Israeli property trespass is also non-violent (I doubt very much that Israel is messing with systems that sustain life).

It would seem to me, then, that if indeed Israel is under a real existential threat from Iran—and not everyone believes this—the Jewish State has found the quintessential libertarian method to begin to combat some of the Iranian menace.

What do you think?

UPDATE I: TokyoTom: An act either does or does not comport with the libertarian non-aggression axiom. I spoke about your logical error in “LIBERTARIAN WRANGLING”:

“From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who, while fleeing the law, happens on a scene of a rape, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because a murderer has performed it?”

Iran’s leaders have threatened to annihilate Israel. They could easily do so, given Israel’s size. The act jibes with their beliefs. The more senior leader, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, right-hand man to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, once explained with lethal logical that “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.”

They know Israel would never launch a nuclear strike first. Iran’s top dogs have clearly done the math.

The men and women of the Israeli military, with their families in mind, have come up with a peaceful way to mess with this program of mass destruction threatening their community. And libertarians protest this? Don’t you just love the way so many libertarians inveigh against the evil of nuclear weapons, except when they are pointed at Israel?!

UPDATE II (Sept. 29): With respect to “contemplationist’s” comment here, I thought it was obvious to all libertarians who regularly weigh in on BAB, that the debate about the proper purview of the state is limited to its enforcement of natural rights only. That’s the mandate of the state in classical liberal thinking. As I have said often, to the extent that the American Constitution respects the natural law, to that extent only is it legitimate. It should be obvious to the same folks, for example, that, unlike Glenn Beck or other “Constitutionalists,” this writer views a great deal of the constitution as an affront to man’s natural rights. The 16th Amendment, for example.

“Sometimes the law of the state coincides with the natural law. More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute,” I wrote in a March 20, 2002 column.

“Contemplationist” has broadened the nightwatchman role of the state in classical liberal theory—confined as it is to the protection negative rights only—to include a plethora of positive duties, including intervention into the economy.

That’s statism, not classical liberalism. The debate in this post, in particular, is as to whether the Israelis, in disabling Iran’s nuclear-related cyber-operation, are defending their natural, negative rights.

UPDATED: Tea Party Totals GOP Candidate

Elections, Foreign Policy, Iran, Media, Politics, Republicans

I know little about Christine O’Donnell (other than that she admires The Hildebeest), but she sure seems a sweetheart. She has just “defeated veteran politician Mike Castle for the Republican Senate nomination in Delaware.” The GOP has responded to the whipping of one of its crooked politicians with this throw down:

“Republican aides told Fox News Tuesday that the National Republican Senatorial Committee will not be funding O’Donnell’s general election campaign, leaving it up to Palin and the Tea Party Express to do the heavy lifting.”

Given GOP good will, why is O’Donnell already talking about cooperating with establishment Republicans “for the common good”?

Reaching across the aisle to get things done is a euphemism for relinquishing principles in favor of political expediency. As one hardcore tea partier said to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, “the only time I want my representative to reach across the isle is to grab a Democrat by the throat.”

Read more about what mainstream media are calling “an upset.”

* Unrelated: I am traveling to a WND event. I will be back at my desk in a few days. My WND column will resume next week.

UPDATE: (Sept. 20): Lew Rockwell wonders whether Christine O’Donnell can be all bad since she is “hated by Karl Rove, Charles Krauthammer, John Cornyn, the Club for Growth, and Dick Armey’s KochWorks.”

Alas, “she calls for murdering the unborn and everyone else in Iran, and is, in general, a foreign policy neocon.”

UPDATE III: An Act Of War? (Reuters Doctors Images, Allegedly)

Iran, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Jihad, Journalism, Media, Terrorism, War

Is it a prelude to an act of war? If I didn’t know better, that’s what I’d call the threat Iran has issued to send its Iranian Revolutionary Guard to escort ships attempting to break through the blockade of Gaza. Were I a resident of Israel, I’d be nervous.

But of course, I know better. After all, it would be perfectly proper, and in keeping with US sovereignty, were Turkish “activists,” escorted by the Iranian military, to wash up on American shores. I’m glad I got that straightened out in my own mind.

FOXNEWS:

Israel will do “whatever it takes” to defend itself from terrorism, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said Sunday, without elaborating what actions would be taken in the face of a potential Iranian Revolutionary Guard escort of ships to break through the blockade of Gaza.
Ambassador Michael Oren said Israel is “open to any ideas to somehow deal with the Gaza situation” but dropping the blockade is unlikely since that would mean allowing thousands of rockets to arrive in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

UPDATE I (June 7): WINNING THROUGH WEAKNESS. Daniel Pipes’ keen analysis of the strategy involving the “Amity Armada” is particularly insightful:

“One of the most important rules for a strategist is not to be put on the defensive. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, developed this concept into a doctrine of forward defense that brilliantly served his state in its early years.

Eventually, however, Israel’s enemies realized that they could not win a conventional war. Instead of launching planes, tanks, and ships at the Jewish state, they turned to other means – weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and (most recently) political delegitimization. Delegitimization turns the rules of war upside down: in particular strength is weakness and public opinion has supreme importance.

Israel’s command structure, having mastered the old ways of war (the ones that lasted to 1973), has shown utter strategic incompetence at the new ways of war (in place since 1982). The new rules require an agile sense of public relations, which means that a powerful state never physically harms, even inadvertently, its rag-tag political adversaries.”…

[snip]

Where Pipes and I depart is in that, finally, after decades of bumbling, I see an Israeli public-relations sea change. Michael Oren accounts for 90 percent of it.

UPDATE II: Nebojsa Malic’s take on the winning-through-weakness strategy:

“Israel has a powerful conventional army, navy, air force, and most likely even nuclear weapons (though not officially acknowledged). It has defeated Arab armies on numerous occasions in open warfare, and has successfully fought terrorism and insurgency through special operations. So those who wish it destroyed came up with a way of turning that strength into a weakness: cast themselves as innocent, unarmed, helpless victims and howl as loud as possible about being abused by that very Israel whose strength no one can dispute.”

UPDATE III (June 8): Fox News reports:

“In one photo, an Israeli commando is shown lying on the deck of the ship, surrounded by activists. The uncut photo released by IHH shows the hand of an unidentified activist holding a knife. But in the Reuters photo, the hand is visible but the knife has been edited out.”

The blog ‘Little Green Footballs’ challenged Reuters’ editing of the photo.

‘That’s a very interesting way to crop the photo. Most people would consider that knife an important part of the context. There was a huge controversy over whether the activists were armed. Cropping out a knife, in a picture showing a soldier who’s apparently been stabbed, seems like a very odd editorial decision. Unless someone was trying to hide it,’ the blog stated.”