Category Archives: War

2 Immutable Libertarian Truths About Gold Stars & Creating Value For Society

Business, Donald Trump, Free Markets, Government, libertarianism, Military, The State, War

Shall I play the litmus-test game of, “Are you a libertarian”? OK. I don’t believe you can call yourself a libertarian and disagree with these two statements I tweeted out:

1) The obscenity of the Gold Star designation, given for the “privilege” of dying for Uncle Sam. You are not awarded for bravery, where your obligation is toward your brothers-in-arms, for whom most men in the military are prepared to die; your family is awarded with a special status for simply dying, for getting killed.

2) Donald Trump has created more value for many more fellow Americans than any one man dying in the service of The State. (He just doesn’t know how to express himself. Neither do his “surrogates.”) Are we back to conflating The State’s wars with the Common Good? Wars destroy wealth and life; they don’t enhance them. America hasn’t fought a Just War for a long long time. (Read “Just War for Dummies.”)

The Statist Mindset Of ‘Libertarians’ Garry Johnson & William Weld

Donald Trump, Law, libertarianism, Nationhood, Rights, The State, War

Gary Johnson and his sidekick William Weld, Libertarian Party goofballs, are running for president and VP, respectively. The two fulminated to CNN’s Victor Blackwell against Donald Trump. From the libertarian perspective, though, their mindset was much more statist and deferential to state structures than Trump’s.

Weld, in particular, went over the various policies Trump was proposing, voicing objections to each that were thoroughly statist.

WELD: Some of the stuff that he’s running on I think is absolutely chaotic. I’m going to do this to Mexico. OK, that’s a violation of the North American Free Trade agreement, which is the supreme law of the land. It is a treaty. We signed it. I’ll do this to China. No questions asked. OK, that’s a violation of the World Trade Organization rules [which good libertarians despise], exposing us, the United States, to sanctions. And we would be the rogue nation. I don’t think we want to be the rogue nation. You know? Let’s let North Korea be the rogue nation, not us.

Trump can’t do what he proposes because he’ll be in violation of this or the other agreement between states, national and international, which Weld treats as holy writ.

Not to real libertarians. The idea of radical freedom is to dissolve the chains with which others have bound us. Smashing or refashioning these agreements and reclaiming national, state and individual sovereignty, as Trump proposes, is more libertarian than the queasiness these two evince at such actions.

Johnson and Weld objected to Trump’s proposals on the statist grounds that renegotiating agreements or optimizing them for Americans would violate agreements that by their nature sideline the American people.

You don’t get more un-libertarian than that. Then there’s the viva Hiroshima attitude:

UPDATED: What ‘Bombing ISIS’ In Syria Looks Like

Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Russia, Terrorism, War

This is what “bombing ISIS” in Syria looks like. You can’t find them, you can’t tell friend from foe, and you kill kids galore. It’s a bad idea.

“The truth about Syria: Undercover behind rebel lines,” By Clarissa Ward

The Russians did it. How will our Daisy Cutters differ?

UPDATED (3/22): Donald Trump, will you consider?

There are no good bombs.

Hope For Rubio’s Political Demise, Or Expect More Wars

Bush, Neoconservatism, War

Marco Rubio is the closest to George Bush in his robotic, ruthless ability to “regurgitate the militaristic talking points of the party’s neoconservative wing.” He’s even hired the war criminals that lined the Bush administration. As has Rubio curried favor with the most internationalist, interventionist among the donor-class: Little Marco is bitch to billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.

Via Foreign Policy Focus:

Adelson doled out an estimated $100 million — more than anyone else in American history — during the 2012 presidential election, at first in support of Newt Gingrich and then to the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan presidential ticket.

“… another major hardline “pro-Israel” donor: hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. Rubio’s political career was in fact jump-started by powerful donors in the ideological vein of Adelson and Singer. Norman Braman, a Florida businessman with a decisively hawkish attitude on U.S. Middle East policy, has been the ‘single-largest backer of Rubio’s presidential campaign.’”

And here are the “disgraced foreign policy entrepreneurs” whom Rubio has recruited:

Rubio counts among his foreign policy advisors numerous prominent neocons, including Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, hawkish former senator Jim Talent, former Reagan official and Iran-Contra convict Elliott Abrams, neoconservative writer and historian Robert Kagan, and former George W. Bush national security advisor Stephen Hadley.

Rubio has also been advised by the avowedly militarist John Hay Initiative, an advocacy group founded in 2013 by former Romney advisor Brian Hook and former George W. Bush administration officials Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen. The Hay Initiative consists of more than 250 “experts,” of whom the vast majority have hawkish track records, and is “structured somewhat like a campaign foreign policy team in waiting,” according to the Daily Beast. Observers have opined that the group is a “rebirth of the Project for the New American Century.” (My hunch was right.)

Another Rubio advisor, neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot, recently garnered attention for his call for the United States to unilaterally declare a Sunni autonomous region in Iraq. Rubio promptly echoed him, stating that as president he would “demand” that Iraq’s government grant “greater autonomy” to the country’s Sunni regions.

On his official campaign team, Rubio has appointed Jamie Fly as his “counselor for foreign and national security affairs.” A former director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, another PNAC successor organization that was founded in 2009 by Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, Fly co-wrote a paper in 2012 with Gary Schmitt (of PNAC fame) that explicitly called for a military attack on Iran that would “destabilize the regime.”

Is Rubio’s full-spectrum saber-rattling just campaign rhetoric, or is it reflective of what he would actually do as president? Either way, his water-carrying for hardline donors and disgraced foreign policy entrepreneurs is bad news for global peace and stability.

READ “Marco Rubio Is Winning the Neocon Primary.”