Welcome to the New Bohemia

Brandon Christensen History, Politics , , , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: I first came across this article while living in Santa Cruz. It was in one of those trashy “arts and events” weeklys that you find littering every city in America. I have tried to locate the author of the piece but he appears to have written it under a pseudonym, and the weekly is now defunct. So, I figured I’d reprint the whole damn thing here. You can find an archived copy here]

———————————————————————————————————

We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta. —Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn’t really need. You can quote me on that. —Saul Bellow

Perhaps Schwarzenegger and Bellow divined what’s now painfully clear to everyone: Arnie’s California is Humpty-Dumpty, the Hindenburg and some kind of sociopolitical Holocaust all rolled up into one overstuffed exploding burrito. It’s an ungovernable, near criminally impotent and outdated mess. Remedying California’s woes requires draconian cutbacks to essential services and infrastructure. Anyway, that’s what we are told, grand allusions to Athens and Sparta notwithstanding. Others insist the fix lies with the Feds, that the U.S. Treasury need to bail California out at the begrudging consent of Congress. But another still largely muted scenario is slowly gaining traction. Continue reading →

Words of Wisdom

Brandon Christensen Economics, Links ,

From Tyler Cowen:

This is a post about Jamaica and also about macroeconomic inference.  If you are tempted to write a post in response, criticizing me on the grounds that I am postulating a historical equivalence between the United States and Jamaica, or if you try to cover your tracks with semantics, by suggesting that I am “implying” such an equivalence, or implying some other mistake, or if you are committing any number of other fallacies or equivocations in response to this post, put on the dunce cap and go to the back of the class.  Please consider this a general warning to be attached to everything written by me on this site.

I just liked this because Dr Cowen is usually very polite, and if there is one thing I enjoy in this world, it is watching polite people dish out some wholesome snark casserole for the masses to devour. Read the whole thing.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

Hey all, I’m entering into a tough stretch at school, so my posting will be minimal for the next little while. Before I get to the cool links I’ve been reading, I thought I’d highlight Evgeniy’s recent piece on the chemical warfare taking place in Syria. If I am not mistaken, it is the rebels – al-Qaeda and Hizbollah – who are responsible for using chemical weapons. These are the same rebels that Dr Delacroix advocates the United States not only support morally, but militarily as well.

You can spot weak reasoning – morally as well as logically – when a person starts to hurl epithets like ‘isolationist’ or ‘pacifist’ around even after the other side insists that their position is anything but.

  1. Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.
  2. China: Year Zero. 1979 and the Birth of an Economic Miracle.
  3. “Of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor.”
  4. GMO Opponents are the Climate Skeptics of the Left. Not quite. Climate skepticism is rooted in scientific inquiry and politics, whereas the anti-GMO backlash is rooted in superstition. Nevertheless, a good read.

Y’all have a great week!

Looking into the Crystal Ball

Amar Ali Liberty , , ,

Since the rise of the first civilization, a centralized organization having access to the levers of influence on certain types of infrastructure has been a given. Specifically these are information, commercial transactions (especially the flow of goods), and human movement. The institutions of government and society have been structured to reflect this circumstance.  As I will demonstrate below, this paradigm will shift dramatically. Of course, new institutions will be needed to adapt to this reality, which is where my interests lie as should those of other liberty lovers concerned with the future.

The introduction of the internet is beginning of the direct unraveling of the first lever, and indirectly of the second. With the advent of global real time communication, boundless storage capacity and near universal access, centralized control of information is coming to a close. The internet is decentralized compared to other infrastructure.  So the only way a centralized organization, for example, the state, can control information is by a complete shutdown of the internet, i.e., the internet kill switch used in Syria during civil unrest recently and championed by many government officials around the world. The way this works is if there is a centralized structure, which in this case is your local Internet Service Provider (ISP), through whose lines people access the internet. However, advancements are being made to create a fully decentralized internet, void of middle men ISPs, functioning like a peer to peer network. Silk Road, an invitation only “internet” on which many things are traded, is a prototype of a fully decentralized network.

The internet has also a great deal of influence on the second lever. It has unleashed three dimensional printing, or the ability to create or scan and recreate practically any non-biological or electronic object. From wrenches to shoes soles to burritos to guns and even a house, they have all been constructed without any physical human labor. It is only a matter of time till this becomes widespread and supersedes the need for most objects to be centrally created, hindering any potential efforts to limit production and distribution of such products. Once this happens, economies of scale will struggle to remain relevant as customization, ubiquity, and efficiencies in material usage achieved by 3D printing will supersede any value created by mass manufacturing.

If the first two sound tantalizing, the end of final lever of influence will be even more consequential than the first two combined. That is the advancement in what I like to call three dimensional travel. Vehicles that are ubiquitous such as cars and ships are limited to what is known as two-dimensional travel, meaning they can only go forwards/backwards and left/right.  The rise of private rocket company SpaceX , successfully accomplishing what only the government agencies of the U.S.A. China and Russia have been able to accomplish in space, shows private space exploration is catching up to the established players. It’s not the only rocket company with massive firepower behind it.  But getting back to Earth, nine different companies vying are for governmental approval to launch flying cars. Both are examples of three dimensional movement which aim to be available to the masses. Once successful, no one will have an inescapable dominance nor be able to realistically limit the movement of people as they will be able to escape barriers otherwise impossible in the prevalent “two dimension” travel.

As the control of these levers is decentralized, it will become imperative to understand the transformation of institutions and concepts such as economies of scale being overturned and anticipating the challenges that such innovations will bring. This however will not be enough. A focus on developing alternative institutions and solutions to mitigate those hazards must also be taken into account.

And that is where I believe libertarians need to focus. On the institutuions of the future. If we are to secure liberty for our prosterity and its future, we must study and build the institutions that will anticipate and seek to amelorite that challenges of the future well before and better than the state. Then and only then will we see the permananet demise of the state as a temprary blot on human history and a relic of agricultural society.

Economic Rationality

Fred Foldvary Economics, Liberty , , , , , , ,

[Cross-posted at the Foldvarium]

The concept of rational action is a frontier of economic theory. The new field of behavioral economics combines economics and psychology to analyze actions that seem to be irrational. For example, people value health and long life, yet they smoke and eat unhealthy food. A related field, behavioral finance, examines psychological and emotional traits that prevent people from making wise investments. Perverse psychological biases include anchoring to past prices and facts, the bias of weighing recent events too highly relative to the more distant past, being overly confident in one’s abilities, and following the herd to a cliff.

Neoclassical economics often assumes that people are purely self-interested and always seek financial gain, and that therefore altruism is irrational, whereas as Adam Smith and Henry George wrote, human beings have two motivations: self interest and sympathy for others. Since people get satisfaction from serving others, it is incorrect to label altruism or actions based on subjective views of justice as “irrational.”

The Austrian school of economic thought has a different perspective on rationality. The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises envisioned human action as inherently rational. A person has unlimited desires and scarce resources. Human beings economize, seeking maximum benefits for a given cost, or minimizing costs for a given benefit. At any moment in time, a person ranks his goals, ranging from most to least important. He chooses the resources to achieve the most important goal at some moment, then the second most, and so on, until his gains from trade have become exhausted. This is the inherent rationality of human action. Continue reading →

Zarine wind over Syria

Evgenii Grigorev Current Events , ,

Привет, сообщество! На днях прочитал свежие новости по теме сирийского конфликта и с ужасом обнаружил сообщения о том, что сирийская оппозиция применила химическое оружие. В качестве поражающего вещества был применен нервно-паралитический газ зарин, печально известный еще по токийскому инциденту 1995 года, когда организация Аум Синрикё применила это вещество против мирного населения на нескольких ветках токийской подземки. Я в свое время прочитал две книги на тему этого прискорбного случая из страниц истории Японии (в ближайшей записи я еще раз вернусь к этой теме) и имею достаточно полное представление о принципах действия этого газа, о симптомах, и последствиях его применения. Книги оказали на меня очень сильное воздействие, и с тех пор любое упоминание о применении зарина становится личной трагедией для меня. Самое мерзкое в данной ситуации, что газ убивает медленно и изначально не чувствуется в воздухе. Первые симптомы проявляются не сразу, что затрудняет правильную постановку диагноза и во многом определяет смертельный исход болезни. Вылечиться можно, более того, принципы лечения весьма просты. Об этом я тоже расскажу в следующей записи. Я хочу чтобы каждый человек понял, каково это – подвергнуться воздействию зарина – пусть не на собственном опыте, но хотя бы теоретически.

Так вот. Зарин применен, и Америка пообещала “полностью пересмотреть свою политику по поводу конфликта в Сирии, так как оппозиция переступила красную черту”. Будем следить дальше. Теперь эта трагедия, во многом благодаря зарину, стала еще ближе мне. Будем следить за развитием событий.

Interesting Thread on Reddit Between True Believers and the Devil

Brandon Christensen Links

You can find it here. As always with reddit, pay attention to the dates and times.

Kareem, UCLA and Time Travel

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

I can’t believe I’ll be done with school in another five weeks. Time really flies by. I recently came across an interview of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Esquire and thought I’d pass it along to readers here. It’s kind of a wimpy interview, actually (as an alumni, I have access to much higher quality interviews with famous Bruins). Abdul-Jabbar lists twenty things he would’ve done differently if he could step into a time machine and become a young man again.

Two of them were interesting, and one of them not so much. First, the two interesting choices:

11. Cook more. After I got divorced I missed home cooked meals and the only person I had to rely on was the guy in the mirror. Plus, I found it impressed women if you could cook a good meal. Once, very shortly after I started cooking for myself, I had a first date with a woman I really wanted to make a good impression on.

And this:

16. Don’t be so quick to judge. It’s human nature to instantly judge others. It goes back to our ancient life-or-death need to decide whether to fight or flee. But in their haste to size others up, people are often wrong—especially a thirty-year-old sports star with hordes of folks coming at him every day. We miss out on knowing some exceptional people by doing that, as I’m sure I did. I think the biggest irony of this advice is that it’s coming from someone who’s black, stratospherically tall, and an athlete: the trifecta of being pre-judged.

These are both things I’ll be working on as I figure out how to live a proper middle class life post-graduation. One thing I can’t help but to disagree with Him (pay attention to capitalization, and bow down) on:

10. Being right is not always the right thing to be. Kareem, my man, learn to step away. You think being honest immunizes you from the consequences of what you say. Remember Paul Simon’s lyrics, “There’s no tenderness beneath your honesty.” So maybe it’s not that important to win an argument, even if you “know” you’re right. Sometimes it’s more important to try a little tenderness.

Nonsense! Every libertarian knows that it’s far more important to be right than to be popular!

Read the whole thing.

I Agree with Obama on Guantanamo but….

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Liberty , , , , ,

I agree with President Obama. It’s unacceptable that we, the US, have kept people as prisoners for as long as ten years without trial or any other procedure that could conceivably result in their release or conviction.

Let me say first that it’s not an issue of toughness or not toughness. I, for one, think it’s ridiculous to invoke the Geneva Conventions to protect people who burn women and children alive and who assassinate while wearing  civilian clothing. I am also in favor of making their lives difficult, of increasing the hardship of doing their disgusting job any way we can. That would include making a public announcement that specific individuals may be volatilized from the sky anytime, any place. That sure would create a circle of isolation around them. I would also be in favor of including an option to surrender and be investigated (by us.) I don’t understand why this option does not already exist.

There are three purposes for keeping people locked up. One is  to secure them while they await trial. The lock-up time in this case should be as short as technically possible. The second reason is that they are serving a prison term, a punishment imposed  after a conviction of guilt in a well-described, appropriate procedure.

The third reason  to prevent people from leaving is to keep them out of any situation where they can hurt others. Thus, the classical treatment of prisoners of war is to secure them until there is peace. No punishment ought to be intended. In fact, there is international agreement that such prisoners should be treated the same as the soldiers of the nation detaining them. Again, to punish people, you have to try them formally and to find them guilty of something. That’s true even if the accused are prisoners of war, for example. A prisoner of war may also be guilty of crimes. The two issues are separate. A civilized society should not allow its collective judgment to drift from one situation to the other.

I often hear comments among my fellow conservatives that obscure the existence of a line separating the task of punishing terrorists from the mission to keep them out of our harm’s way. I also hear an absence, the absence of realization that the issue if not one of some Middle-Eastern strangers’ – many of whom openly hate us – rights. It’s about our rights. (It always is, in the final analysis.) Confinement to a small space open has not chosen is experienced as  punishment regardless of intent.  It’ s even the most severe punishment several other civilized societies have. I agree with President Obama that we should not punish severely individuals who may be completely innocent. They may be people who are no more guilty of violence against the United States and against Americans than I am. (Repeat this sentence. Make th”I” yourself.” )

I suspect many of my fellow conservatives believe in their hearts that those detained by American forces because they are suspected of terrorism must be at least a little guilty, or guilty of something. Of course, there is no such thing as being a little guilty in our legal tradition. The idea belongs in totalitarian societies.

If we need to control  some people’s movements for the third reason, to prevent from from doing us harm, in a war that may never end, we owe it to ourselves  as a nation to develop inventive solutions that don’t confuse our need to be safe with the imposition of undeserved punishment. I can think of two such solutions .

We could develop a place to keep them that does not resemble prison except that it should be guarded from intrusion by outside forces. High-tech surveillance methods on the periphery of such a place connected to  missiles, for example come to mind. I am thinking of a sort of armed Club Fed. It could even be a Guantanamo Two, a decent resort where the detainees could lead a life more closely approximating normal life. Inside the resort, they would govern themselves as befit people who are not in jail or prison. There is no reason why they couldn’t have a normal family life with spouses and children. I can hear some already snickering about the cost of such a scheme. It’ s extremely unlikely that it would be more expensive to maintain than the highest security jail this country has ever had. It would also be less expensive than war, any kind of war.

There is another, a sort of libertarian solution to the problem of neutralizing those we suspect of wishing to do us harm.  We could try to free them  on bail. Let me explain: There are millions of individuals around the world and thousands of organizations who profess to be terminally disgusted by the very existence of Guantanamo prison. Among the latter are hundreds of Muslim non-government organizations (NGOs). Some of the latter have thousands and tens of thousands of  members. The US government could negotiate the transfer of custody to private NGOs of inmates who have been held for several years and who are not slated to be tried. The US government could ask for a vertiginous bail amount, millions or even billions of dollars per inmate so transferred. The bail money would be refunded after  a determined number of years (say, when the detainee reaches a certain age) if the detainee had not been killed or recaptured in the process of conducting or of supporting terrorist activities.

Either some would take up this offer of privatization of custody or not. If the offer were taken, we would at least have put some distance between us and the practical problems of dealing with people we think dangerous. (This includes, as I write, the horror of force-feeding.) Relapses of terrorists would become more publicized than they are now, less subject to the constant suspicion that the US is manipulating appearances.  At the very least, if there was no no rush to adopt Guantanamo detainees, it would be nice to point  out the hypocrisy of our critics.

Cool PDF on the Dishonesty of Debate

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Liberty, Religion , , , ,

From one of the concluding paragraphs:

We have therefore hypothesized that most disagreement is due to most people not being meta-rational, i.e., honest truth-seekers who understand disagreement theory and abide by the rationality standards that most people uphold. We have suggested that this is at root  due to people fundamentally not being truth-seeking. This in turn suggests that most disagreement is dishonest.

This reminds me, mostly, of debates about the illogicality of more federal gun control laws or using American military power to intervene in a foreign conflict that has nothing to do with national security (see, on this last point, my recent post “Imperialism: The Illogical Nature of Humanitarian Wars“).

Why, just the other day I was deleted by a female FB acquaintance for pointing out to her that her facts were wrong on gun control and that the numerous, hastily Googled  studies that she threw at my feet contained either errors in statistical reasoning (“saying that ‘more guns equals more crime’ is like saying ‘the black cat is a cat because it is black'”) or simply wanted to inflame passions rather than discern truth from tall tale.

On this second point, I even went so far as to suggest that since the piece did not contain any quantitative reasoning whatsoever, it would be safe to agree with me that it was merely an attempt to inflame passions rather than educate. The female (a UC Santa Cruz alumni, in her defense) did just the opposite: after acknowledging that the piece contained no intellectual argument whatsoever, she stated – matter-of-factly – that the piece was an attempt to document all 62 mass shootings over a 30 year period with visuals (posting the killers’ faces to a timeline) and explain that most of the guns used were obtained legally. Therefore, it was quantifying the evidence and proving that mass murders were on the rise, federal gun control is proven to work, and that bans on certain types of guns have been proven to work.

Indeed. This is the face of the enemy of freedom, and it’s not Satan. It’s the bimbo next door.

Read the whole PDF. Grab a cup of coffee or hot tea first.

A couple of tips for figuring out if you are on the right side of the facts or not:

  1. If you are defending somebody else’s words – especially the words of a politician, a religious leader or even an intellectual, there is a good chance you are on the wrong side of truth.
  2. If you attempt to justify the horrible crimes committed in the past by looking at the virtuous deeds that were accomplished because of the crimes, then you are most likely on the wrong side of the facts. For example Franklin Roosevelt’s policies did absolutely nothing to get the US out of the Great Depression. All economists are in agreement on this. Where they disagree is on whether or not his policies exacerbated the Great Depression – as most libertarian economists argue – or simply that the New Deal did absolutely nothing (Left-wing economists generally see World War 2 as the economy’s savior). Yet many people give Roosevelt credit where credit is not due. They even go so far as to overlook his ruthless campaign to rid the West Coast of citizens with Japanese and German ancestry (locking them up in concentration camps), copying Hitler’s policies of cartelizing the economy, banning Jewish refugees from entering our shores, and raising taxes to unjustified levels in order to carry out his worthless policies. Fidel Castro is another good example of this.
  3. If you take the argument personally, then you are on the wrong side of the facts. If you have a tendency to delete people on social media sites because they failed to acknowledge your genius, then you are on the wrong side of the facts.

Hope this helps!

From the Comments: Going Into Syria

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events , ,

Longtime reader –Rick provides some helpful clarity to the Syrian debacle in the Middle East. He writes:

For me the answer is that unless there is a direct connection between Syria and their use of force against America or its population, then the right course is to let the fools kill themselves by whatever means they choose. Dead is dead. Innocents die in revolutions; it is unavoidable.

if the Syrian people are left to fight their own revolt for liberation, they might actually learn to value the peace that comes with freedom and individual rights as they shed the collective. It should be obvious that trading one collective for another collective is not a solution, only a change in masters. Only when people have the right to live as they choose, to worship or not worship as they choose, to travel freely as they choose, to freely and openly associate with people they choose and have the right to earn a living and keep most of what they earn…only then will the country find both peace and freedom.

Until Syria launches a weapon at the United States or our troops, then, Syria’s problems belong to the Syrians.

If the Syrians, either alone or in concert with some other nation choose to attack America or her citizens/troops, then, the United States should enter into the conflict with the goal of no less than unconditional surrender and a capitulation by the enemy to surrender all arms and pay for the destruction suffered by all involved for their warlike behavior. Continue reading →

Questions About Going Into Assad’s Syria

henrymoore Liberty

The question that many of you will assume I am answering was clearly (and emphatically) intended for someone else, so instead of answering it I’ll be making comments that, given the timing and the subject matter, just happen to answer the question anyways. I don’t want to do so directly because I would prefer it if Dr. Delacroix kept pestering Brandon and left me out of it. I do not want to draw his ire. I’m too busy with other things. So, this piece, and it’s similarity to recent pieces by Brandon and Andrew is coincidence and nothing more, I assure you. Just so you are not totally confused by what I am referring to, here is the question (that I remind you I am not specifically or directly answering):

This is for Brandon:

A question: If you were 100% convinced that Assad of Syria had used chemical weapons on civilians, would it affect your judgment about the desirability of American intervention in Syria?

I know it will sound eerily similar to the following question(s), but that sort of thing happens I guess:

So, say there is this country, this regime (you’ll assume it anyways, so let’s call it “Syria under Assad”) that has weapons, perhaps even the chemical variety. It has used them on its own population, threatens to use them again, and likely will make good on that threat. Let’s also assume that Syria under Assad is the chief aggressor and that every victim was either innocent or, if guilty (of inciting mob violence, say), deserving of a far better fate than what their fate ended up being. Should not someone do something to stop the Syrian dictatorship? Should not someone intervene and make it all better? Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. The Dream of Azawad. Azawad is a region in the Sahel that encompasses parts of Mali.
  2. The Many Faces of Neo-Marxism. A beautiful goodbye to Karl Marx and his system.
  3. Ten Thoughts on Civil Liberty and the Boston Bombing Aftermath. From a UCLA Law professor.
  4. Lies in Foreign Policy: Neoconservative Edition. Daniel Larison points out the lies peddled by imperial hawks.
  5. Lawmakers Exempt Selves, Families and Staffs from ObamaCare. I can’t imagine why…

 

Imperialism: The Illogical Nature of “Humanitarian” Wars

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , , , , ,

Dr Delacroix is simply unable to grasp my argument. There are two possible reasons for this:

  1. He simply does not want to grasp it
  2. He simply cannot grasp it

Most of the time I believe that Reason #1 is responsible for one’s inability to grasp a concept, at least when we are dealing with high intelligence individuals like Dr Delacroix.

But I think this is a case where Dr Delacroix and other like-minded imperialists simply cannot grasp the logic behind my argument. Allow me to hearken readers back to my recent post on “Libertarian IQ” where I quote an academic computer programmer on the inability of some students to grasp the concepts he is trying to teach:

Let me tell a story that is typical of those I heard from the TAs who worked for me at the computing center. A student comes up to the TA and says that his program isn’t working. The numbers it prints out are all wrong. The first number is twice what it should be, the second is four times what it should be, and the others are even more screwed up. The student says, “Maybe I should divide this first number by 2 and the second by 4. That would help, right?” No, it wouldn’t, the TA explains. The problem is not in the printing routine. The problem is with the calculating routine. Modifying the printing routine will produce a program with TWO problems rather than one […]

The student in my hypothetical story displays the classic mistake of treating symptoms rather than solving problems. The student knows the program doesn’t work, so he tries to find a way to make it appear to work a little better. As in my example, without a proper model of computation, such fixes are likely to make the program worse rather than better. How can the student fix his program if he can’t reason in his head about what it is supposed to do versus what it is actually doing? He can’t.

Dr Delacroix is in a position similar to that of the student.

When I point out that the post-colonial states of the Middle East are, by their very structure, incapable of anything other than autocracy, he responds by pointing out that the West has often taken sides in the various conflicts that erupt in these states. The logic behind this reasoning follows accordingly:

Brandon: This hot dog is undercooked, so eating it will make me sick.

Dr Delacroix: Yes, but it has chili on it.

B: No dude, eating it will make me sick.

DD: Yes, but it also has brown mustard on it.

B: I’m sorry dude, but I’m not eating the hot dog.

DD: Now you’re just being senseless (and rude!).

You see how that works?

Dr Delacroix and other “humanitarian” imperialists seem to believe that when the West picks a side in a conflict that has nothing to do with national security, imperialism suddenly becomes a perfectly acceptable way of fixing the problems of the world. Yet just like the programming student in the example above, Dr Delacroix’s attempts to fix a superficial problem (with bombs no less) actually end up exacerbating the real, underlying problem, which is that the states currently in place in most of the world are not seen as legitimate by its “citizens.”

Post-colonial states are not considered legitimate by their subjects because they never had a say in how to go about structuring such a state. They had no say in where the borders should be, or who they could trade with, or how to best accommodate foreigners.

Because they are not legitimate, power struggles (even in long-lived dictatorships) for the center are constant since those who eventually end up controlling the center receive legitimacy from the UN and other imperial institutions (but not their own people). Why bother trying to gain the legitimacy of an impoverished populace when you can simply capture the rent associated with running a post-colonial state?

Syria and the Failure of Imperialisms (Old and New)

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , ,

Dr Delacroix has recently left a question in the form of a comment that I think deserves to be answered. He asks:

If you were 100% convinced that Assad of Syria had used chemical weapons on civilians, would it affect your judgment about the desirability of American intervention in Syria?

Andrew shares his thoughts here. Rick Weber chimes in here (why isn’t he blogging with us, by the way?). I have written about Syria and military intervention here before, so I thought I’d just try to add a bit more clarity to the topic. First though, I think it is important to take  a closer look at Dr Delacroix’s question.

In it, he seems to be assuming that I don’t think the American government should do anything in this case. Now, he is of course referring to military action in Syria – which I absolutely oppose – but it would be nice if Dr Delacroix employed less trickery in his questioning.

Instead of taking the usual tactic of trying to explain what I think the US could do (see Rick’s piece on this), or why I think another war in the Middle East would be a disaster, I’m going to take a different path altogether and offer a defense of both the Hussein regime and the Assad regime, thus rendering the US wars, or potential wars, in the region immoral and unjustified.

To put it bluntly: both regimes were perfectly justified in undertaking the actions that they did, and there was (is) no justification whatsoever for American military involvement.

Imperialists like to pretend that the Middle East is a simple place with simple people performing simple tasks and largely worshiping a simple religion (Islam). The results of applying imagination to the real world can be found first in the mandate system devised by British and French imperialists at the end of World War I. These two states really screwed up the region. They drew arbitrary borders that did not conform to any pattern whatsoever among the indigenous population (Dr Delacroix is fond of using Kurdish autonomy in Iraq as a justification for imperialism, but it was imperialism in the first place that left the Kurds without sovereignty).

Out of these arbitrary borders came the nation-states of the Middle East that we all know and love today. Prior to the entrenchment of these borders (borders which were later to be blessed by the United Nations) a number of political proposals put forth by the indigenous population itself were heard. One historian from UCLA has documented just how trusted the United States was in the region at one point in time:

[…] the elected parliament of Syria that met after the war, the Syrian General Congress, declared that it wanted Syria to be independent  and unified. By unity, the representatives meant that Syria should include territories of present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan. If Syria had to have a mandatory power overseeing it, a majority of the representatives declared, it should be the United States. (87)

It goes without saying that the democratically-elected Syrian General Congress – the one crushed by French imperialism – included representatives from Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Jordan. The question of why the US has fallen so far from grace in the eyes of many Arabs (and other peoples around the world) is far beyond the scope of this post, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out that the United States of America decided it wanted to step into the imperialist boots worn by France and Great Britain during the 19th century rather than pursue a policy of peace, commerce and friendship.

After the French crushed democracy in Syria (Britain did the same in Iraq), it began to carve up their mandates into smaller territories. The goal behind this policy was not to improve efficiency in government, but to create a system of government where religious minorities – specifically Christian minorities – would be able to control the levers of power.

After the French were kicked out of Syria (and the British in Iraq), sectarian violence began. The international legal order, as exemplified by the United Nations, played a lead role in deepening the crisis: by recognizing the legitimacy of these arbitrary states and the sanctity of their borders, the UN contributed directly to the bloodshed that occurred as rival factions sought power over the center of these states (think Washington DC). Because these states were legitimized by the UN, the rival factions could simply seize control of the center and automatically gain legitimacy from the very international order that had created this clusterfuck in the first place. In essence, the United Nations has simply served to further the imperial ends of the British and French in the Middle East (and elsewhere).

The stakes for contesting the center were very high. In Iraq, Arabs who were also Sunni Muslims or Christians, as well as other small religious and ethnic minorities, banded together to counter the violence directed at them by Sunni Kurds and Shia Arabs.

In Syria, Arabs who were also Shia Muslims or Christians, as well as other small religious and ethnic minorities (such as the Kurds or the Alawites), banded together to counter the violence directed at them by Sunni Arabs.

When the dictators of Iraq and Syria murdered thousands of people within the borders created and sanctified by the international system, they did not do so because they viewed some of their fellow citizens – Syrians and Iraqis – as refusing to obey orders. Hussein and the Assads murdered droves of people because they viewed these people as enemies and threats to their own survival (as well as to the survival of their kin and allies) rather than as fellow citizens.

I am not justifying the violence perpetrated by the minority regimes of Iraq and Syria, I am only putting their tactics into context. Without the repressive measures that these regimes had at their disposal, the ethnic and religious minorities that these regimes protected would have been slaughtered just as callously as those who were actually slaughtered.

Here is where the immorality of American foreign policy comes into play. Here also is where the immorality of imperialism comes into play. But I repeat myself.

Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for 24 years. Bearing in mind the situation that Iraqis were presented with as a result of British imperialism (outlined above), it is estimated that his regime killed 250,000 Iraqis. That’s pretty bad.

It took the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US military about a third of the time (nine years) to reach just under half the total body count of the Hussein regime (roughly 110,000 dead Iraqis).

If the US military had stayed as long as Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, and trends continued to remain steady (and there are no signs to suggest that they wouldn’t have), then the US military would have been responsible for more Iraqi deaths than the Hussein regime. The great, disgusting irony of it all is that the Hussein regime was at least defending a significant minority of the population. The US has left the minorities of Iraq in the hands of the dominant Shia majority (Dr Delacroix’s precious democracy).

The same situation is currently in place in Syria. The Assad regime is basically fighting against al-Qaeda and Hizbollah. The Assad regime is also the only thing stands between significant minority populations and the large Arab Sunni majority of Syria, a majority that has been violently kept out of the center since Assad’s father seized power over Syria’s center in 1970. If the US were to intervene on behalf of al-Qaeda and Hizbollah, what do you think the outcome would be?

Less bloodshed? Less cronyism?

These are fantasies. The states created and sanctified by imperial decree (British, French and UN) are by their very nature destined to be cradles of autocracy.

The best policy that the United States could pursue in regards to the Syrian question, and in regards to most post-colonial states, is to simply stop recognizing these polities as legitimate. The rest of the West would follow suite. This would relieve the pressure associated with seizing the center of these states and force the people of the Middle East to compromise. The United States should not recognize any government in the Middle East until a delegation of representatives – like the one in the interwar years – is sent to Washington, by the people of the Middle East, to argue their case for sovereignty and induction into the liberal international order.

In a world of second bests, it would be wise to eliminate all sanctions on the Syrian state, including weapons sanctions. This would have the effect of leveling the playing field (states often enjoy an advantage in weaponry once sanctions are imposed upon a warring area because a state’s resources are likely to crowd out smaller competitors [i.e. “the rebels”] in the black market). The usual diplomatic caveats apply as well.

Assuming, as Dr Delacroix does, that military intervention would do the Syrian people any good is as preposterous as it is condescending.

I would need some hard data to challenge my intuition (outlined above) on this matter.