Martin Radwin

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Giuliani has certainly mastered the art of Orwellian logic. But you've got to give the guy credit for honesty. He has admitted what has always been the real purpose of government schools. It's a rather pathetic indictment of the state of the modern objectivist movement that so many self identified objectivists are supporting this aspiring dictator as the next POTUS. Remember when objectivists believed in laissez faire capitalism, strictly limited government, and individual rights? Martin

Lew Rockwell is not someone I care to read. I will say, though, that these deaths can only be blamed on Saddam, Iran, et al. Since you are arguing as a moral principle that it is okay to start a war and subsequent occupation that leads to the death of a million people, the creation of several million refugees, and the near total destruction of the country's infrastructure, based on the sins of the country's leader, a leader who, incidentally, the US government supported in a war against Iran which led to the death of about a million Iranians, I'm sure you'd also agree that it is also okay to kill millions of Americans based on the sins of their leader. So, just as "these deaths can only be blamed on Saddam, Iran, et al.", the American deaths on 9/11 can only be blamed on George W. Bush. And if, in the future, an Iraqi or Iranian terrorist group launches an attack on American soil killing thousands or millions of Americans in retaliation for the American attacks against their countries, these deaths can also only be blamed on George W. Bush. Right? Martin

An interesting coincidence of names. I am quite familiar with another man with this same name. Jerry Sanders was one of the co-founders and long time president and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices. I am a long time employee of AMD. Martin

Is the warp drive engine or transporter in Star Trek more scientifically plausible than Galt's motor? Does their scientific implausibility detract from Star Trek as enjoyable science fiction? Martin

In mathematics, there is what is called a proof by induction. A simple example is the mathematical formula: 1 + 2 + 3 ... + n = n * (n + 1) / 2 If this is true for a particular value of n, then add n + 1 to both sides of the equation: 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + n + (n +1) = (n^2 + n) / 2 + n + 1 = (n + 1) * (n + 2) / 2 Therefore, if the equation is true for some value of n, it is also true for (n + 1). Since the equation is true for n = 1, this implies it is true for n = 2, which implies it is true for n = 3, etc. Therefore, it has been proven inductively that the equation is true for all integers. Is this a different meaning of the term "induction"? Martin

Martin, This is one of the big problems I have with this kind of mentality. They do not see the contradiction in their reasoning. How can Muslim opinion not be unanimous and be unanimous at the same time? Whatever happened to "A is A" with this Objectivist and those who sanction him? From this kind of thinking to "The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim" is but a hop. One thing that is disgusting me enormously these days is that I am perceiving Objectivism being used by many to justify primitive bigotry. And when you look deeper, that's all there is except fear. I have a caveat to your comments, though. I happen to be one who agrees with you about America's sins and inconsistencies with foreign policy because I have seen some of them with my own eyes. However, I do not take a one-sided view like you do because I have not only seen the innocent foreigners, but I have seen the guilty ones, too. They are not a pretty sight. If it comes down to their thugs or our thugs, I will take our thugs for now because I am here. That does not mean that I sanction thugery. I merely choose the best case for my survival between two evils. America's foreign policy is a holy mess of lies, inconsistencies, hypocrisy, crony politics, and all the rest. But there are some real evil bastards out there, too, and, despite the mess, America has done a great deal of good in the world. I used to argue with Brazilians that if the USA was buying Brazil for a song, that was because some Brazilians were selling it for a song. I certainly don't see anyone (neither American nor foreigner) with a diploma for sainthood on his wall. The more I look at all this, the more I see tribal warfare and very little else. That means the American tribe and the different foreign tribes. As human beings, we can do a hell of a lot better than that. I have a suggestion, which you are free to accept or not of course. Instead of constantly bashing the USA for not living up to its ideals, why not try a different approach and make a call for it to do so? It's a subtle difference but it is real. It is saying "We should not be doing this because we are better than that," instead of "Look how evil we are." This, at least, is what I intend to do. American ideals are worth fighting for. Michael If I seem overly negative and bitter, Michael, it's because I am. The reason I spend so much time bashing the US government is because I see it slowly destroying this country from within, more insidiously than anything Al Qaeda could ever hope to accomplish. The Iraq war has been a catastrophy. Many thousands of American soldiers have been killed or horribly wounded, physically and mentally. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. A sixth of the population of Iraq has been turned into refugees. Iraq has been totally destroyed, for no good reason, based on a series of lies propogated by the war criminals in the Bush administration. Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq before the US invasion and occupation; it's there now. The same propoganda used to sell the Iraq war to Americans is now being used to sell the American public on what will be an even more catastrophic war with Iran. All signs point toward the Bush administration planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, an attack that would be one of history's great war crimes and that is certain to trigger a series of catastrophic consequences and blowback. While all this is going on, the US is being transformed into a police state. Habeas corpus, one of the foundations of any free society, has been all but abolished. The executive branch now has the authority to arrest any American as an enemy combatant and lock them up forever without trial. Preparations have been made for the executive branch to commandeer the state national guards and to declare martial law in the event of another terrorist attack on Americal soil, something which is becoming increasingly likely to happen as the US government pursues its murderous policy. American ideals of liberty, freedom, and justice are indeed worth fighting for. But there is almost noone left to fight for them. Best wishes for liberty and peace, Martin

Not if we are thorough. It is not possible to be that thorough, short of nuking the entire planet. How many Muslims do you propose to slaughter in order to protect the US from a possible terrorist attack? Even if the US government were ruthlessly competent with infallible intelligence, it could not bomb its way into insuring the safety of the US against possible terrorism. And the US government security apparatus is anything but ruthlessly competent. I would propose a far more rational, humane, and effective guide to US foreign policy: 1) Mind your own damn business. Stop interfering in the affairs of other nations. Stop creating enemies. 2) Do not go abroad searching for monsters to destroy. 3) Free trade and cultural exchange with all, foreign military entanglements with none. 4) Stop selling weapons to dictatorships. 5) Stop befriending dictators and then preaching about freedom and democracy. 6) The only legitimate purpose of the military is to defend the nation against attack, not to establish a worldwide empire. 7) Set an example for the world of what a free country is all about by being a living embodiment of freedom. Martin

Apparently, according to the ARI view of things, there are only two alternatives for US foreign policy: 1) Heaping public affection on Islam, by declaring that "we are all Muslims now" and stand ready to submit before the will of Allah 2) Continuing the existing policy, followed by the US for over half a century, which has involved overthrowing democratically elected governments and installing dictators friendly to the US, complete with Soviet style secret police trained by the CIA, selling WMD to a dictator and supporting this dictator in a war against a rival Muslim country, leading to the death of over a million people, then imposing sanctions which have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of more people, in order to remove the dictator formerly supported by the US from power, and providing billions of dollars in military aid to some of the world's most brutal dictatorships while professing a love for freedom and democracy. God forbid we should avoid "any new military action in the Muslim world". It is obviously our God given right to engage in any military action against anyone we want, for any reason we want, until the entire Muslim world bends to our will. As for shutting down Guantanamo, perhaps this should be done, not to appease Islam, but in the name of simple human decency and respect for human liberty. In fact, many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and guilty of nothing. The US government was offering bounties for every "enemy combatant" turned in, so bounty hunters were grabbing innocent people off the streets and turning them in as enemy combatants, in order to collect their rewards. Many of these innocent detainees have been released after years of imprisonment. In Iraq, at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal, it was estimated that 80-90% of the prisoners being held at Abu Ghraib were completely innocent, merely swept up in waves by American soldiers unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and insurgents. ARI has not a word to say suggesting even the slightest impropriety by the US government in these areas. ARI is shocked, shocked to discover that many Muslims have double standards when it comes to behavior inflicted by their government and by the US government. Of course, Americans would never be guilty of such a thing. Never mind that Americans look on with shock and horror at terrorist acts committed by Muslims, while being utterly indifferent to the US government carpet bombing Iraq or imposing sanctions which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. As to the ARI assertion that "the hatred being heaped on America is irrational and undeserved", given the history of US government involvement in that region of the world, hatred of the US government by the millions of people who have been victimized by it is quite rational and deserved. The fact that some of the reasons for the hatred of America may be totally irrational does not mean that other reasons may not be completely rational. And hatred of the US government and its brutal policies should not be equated with hatred of the American people. ARI claims that Muslim opinion is not unanimous, then proceeds to claim that all Muslims who oppose the US do so unanimously because of their fundamentalist interpretation of their religion. The obvious reality is that some Muslims oppose the US for cultural reasons based on its perceived irreligious nature, some oppose the US because of its foreign policy, for which they have very legimitate grievances, and some oppose the US for some combination of these reasons. It's also pretty obvious that it's a lot easier to recruit terrorists to wage holy war against a country that has been killing your people and occupying your lands than to recruit terrorists to wage holy war against a country that enjoys too much sexual freedom and makes movies that you don't like. ARI's idea of how to "dispense justice accordingly" is to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, to bomb, invade, and occupy a country that never attacked us and never threatened to attack us. Now that we are done destroying Iraq, they encourage us to go on to destroy Iran as well, bombing the hell out of that country and killing hundreds of thousands of their people. We'd better hope that the Muslims who have been victimized by us don't decide to "emulate our ways" by launching terrorist attacts killing thousands of Americans in retaliation. This is really funny. So, according to ARI, we have sacrificed American soldiers to save Iraqi civilians. So far, there have been about 3,000 American soldiers killed in the Iraq war and subsequent occupation. While this war and occupation have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. According to the Lancet study, an estimated 600,000 Iraqis have died as a result of this war. The exact figure can only be estimated, and may be as high as 1,000,000. But even conservatively assuming that the Lancet study is too high by a factor of 2, this war would have caused 300,000 Iraqi deaths, meaning that the ratio of Iraqi to American deaths is 100 to 1. Apparently, this ratio is just too low for ARI. Perhaps each American life is worth 1,000 or 10,000 or 1,000,000 Iraqi lives. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths caused by this war, the war has also created an estimated 4,000,000 Iraqi refugees, half who have fled Iraq and half who have become refugees within their own country in order to escape the widespread ethnic cleaning produced by our "liberation" of their country. In a country with a population of about 25,000,000, one out of every six Iraqis has been forced to flee their home and become a refugee. A proportionally equivalent war in the US would kill millions of Americans and produce 50,000,000 American refugees. But, darn, we have just been too darned altruistic toward those Iraqis. That's just what we've been doing in Iraq, buying the love of the Iraqis by bombing them back to the stone age. We'll soon be buying the love of the Iranians by bombing them back to the stone age too. Actually, the policies advocated by ARI, in addition to being crimes against humanity, greatly increase the likelihood of more terrorist attacks in the US. Martin

Ba'al Chartzaf wrote: I assume you read the word "deport". That means sent out of the country. Overseas areas which are free fire zones. No death camps in North America. We send foreign born fifth columnists abroad where they will be killed eventually. Of course, what could possibly go wrong with giving the government the power of life or death over all foreign born people, after which they will use this precedent to demand the power of life or death over all native born people as well? After all, the government has demonstrated such competence and commitment to justice. Some day, it may even be able to deliver the mail competently. Federal bureaucrats are the ultimate end of human evolution. If we really want to live in freedom, we must give these godlike beings ultimate power over all of us. War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength! Ba'al Chartzaf wrote: Native born Muslims will present a bit of a legal problem. They will have to be watched very closely and excluded from certain critical occupations. I know this sounds unpleasant but we are currently at war, de facto. In a war one does what one must do to survive and observing niceties and legalities can be counter-productive. Absolutely! Of course, native born objectivists and libertarians will also present a bit of a legal problem. They will also have to be watched very closely and excluded from certain critical occupations. Ayn Rand, the founder of objectivism, advocated terrorism in her novels. Howard Roark blew up a government housing project. Ragnar Danneskjold was a terrorist pirate who went around seizing government relief ships. And John Galt withheld technology vital to the survival of the US and led a conspiracy of industrialists to withdraw from society, thereby precipitating its collapse. This obviously constitutes an advocacy of terrorism against the United States. Not only that, objectivists and libertarians advocate laissez faire capitalism and the abolition of the income tax. Ayn Rand has advocated the abolition of all taxes and the financing of government from voluntary contributions. How could the US military industrial complex, the American empire, the roughly 800 - 1000 US military bases around the world, the Iraq War, the Iran War, the global war on terror, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the TSA, the DEA, and the thousands of other absolutely essential federal government bureaucracies continue to exist without all of these wonderful taxes that objectivists and libertarians propose to abolish? These objectivists and libertarians are dangerous people. Deporting them, locking them up in Guantanamo style prison camps, even executing them, all seem like reasonable measures. We are, after all, at war! Ba'al Chartzaf wrote: During WW2 Native born folk with Japanese parents were shipped out to Utah and Colorado and interned in camps. Eventually the government folk were convinced these people weren't dangerous and they were let out bit by bit. Initially it was not known just how dangerous these folk were going to be so no chances were taken. A smaller number of ethnic Germans and Italians were also interned during WW2 especially members of the Bundt and their families. Absolutely! It's most unfortunate that a hundred thousand or so innocent people were locked up in concentration camps and had their lives destroyed. But, you know what they say, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs! I suggest that we start rounding up all of the objectivists and libertarians and doing the same thing to them. Of course, there may be many objectivists and libertarians who don't explicitly identify themselves as such, so this creates a problem of knowing just how many of these potential terrorists are out there. I suggest we solve this problem by gathering the names of all people who post to libertarian or objectivist web sites. We can then send federal agents out to arrest all of these people, along with their friends and family. You can never be too careful. After all, we are at war! Martin

I will lay a fifty dollar bet the Ron Paul is not nominated to run for POTUS as a Republican. Since the amount is modest you can be sure I will pay up if I lose. Are you up to a bet? I will bet a further one hundred dollars that if he is by some odd chance nominated he will lose to whoever the Democrats nominate. Care to take the bet? Ba'al Chatzaf I'll Bet. Dustan, Brant is absolutely right. You are taking a sucker bet. Ba'al should at the very least offer long odds, since the chance of Ron Paul winning either the GOP nomination or the presidential nomination (should he win the GOP nomination) are extremely low. To take this bet at even odds is not very prudent. Be prepared to lose your hundred dollars. By the way, of course, I really hope you win! Martin

Wolf, My view of this is that just because the Bush administration made a gross misuse of the USA intelligence institutions, that does not invalidate them. That only invalidates his misuse of them. I believe the proper answer to your question is to retaliate against those identified by the USA's intelligence and military advisers to the President. That is their job. Even with all the mishandling, mistakes and political football playing, the USA intelligence organizations and the USA military are the best there is in the world. The inclusion of checks and balances within the system is one of the reasons for its reliability. The President should make good use of the USA's military and intelligence capacity instead of trying to override the information he receives from them. On the Ron Paul issue, I am not sure where he would stand with this. I haven't followed too closely, but I haven't seen any candidate really come out and say he/she trusts the information our specialized institutions provide and will use it above his/her own personal biases. If such a candidate stated that (and meant it), that is the candidate who would receive my vote. Michael Intelligence is almost never used by the executive branch in the manner you have described. Almost invariably, the president has already made a decision about what foreign policy to follow, generally for reasons that are far more irrational than those that motivate domestic policy decisions. The intelligence is then fixed around the already chosen policy. The intelligence is typically either fabricated, cherry picked, or ignored by the president in order to justify a decision he has already made. This is certainly the case with the Iraq War. Bush was looking for an excuse to attack Iraq long before the 9/11 attacks ever took place; 9/11 simply gave Bush the excuse to do what he wanted to do all along, not to mention an excuse to viciously attack the civil liberties of all Americans via a series of abominable pieces of legislation passed by a Congress that never even bothered to read them. Martin Martin, I am currently reading the 911 Commission report, and that is not the picture that is painted concerning intelligence. Clinton and Bush may have underestimated Bin Laden, but they were open to the intelligence. If it wasn't for Clark, we would be in much worse shape than we were in. --Dustan Dustan, I definitely don't have time to read the 911 Commission report, so I'll certainly be interested in reading your analysis of it, but keep in mind that this report was created by the government itself, and the Bush administration did everything it could to obstruct the investigation of facts for the report. And anything deemed either a threat to national security or simply embarassing to the government (these are often the same thing) was undoubtedly not included in the report. So take it with a grain of salt. Regarding 9/11, everything I've read about it suggests gross incompetence and malfeasance on the part of US security agencies. There were repeated warnings about a potential attack on the US homeland, warnings about Muslim foreign nationals attending flight school and learning only how to fly the jets, not how to take off and land, etc. Good police work should have been able to stop these attacks before they ever happened. If I were more of a conspiracy theorist, I just might think that the government deliberately let the 9/11 attacks happen, since it has greatly benefitted from them, using them as an excuse to trash the civil liberties of the American people with barely a whimper of protest from anyone. But I don't think the evidence exists to support such a conclusion, so I chalk it all up to plain incompetence. The point is, whatever intelligence was gathered concerning the 9/11 attacks was subsequently ignored, leading up to the tragedy of 9/11. The Iraq war was a perfect example of intelligence being ignored by the executive branch, because the intelligence conflicted with the desire of the Bush administration to go to war against Iraq no matter what. So the Bush administration cherry picked the intelligence provided by the CIA, demanding that the CIA provide an excuse for launching an invasion of Iraq. A bogus link was created between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, even though it was well known that these two were enemies and that no operational relationship existed. As a result of this executive branch propoganda, by the start of the Iraq war, a majority of Americans falsely believed that Saddam had a connection to 9/11, and many believed that Saddam was actually responsible for 9/11. The Bush administration also spread the lie about Iraq's attempt to buy yellowcake from Niger, based on a document that was well known to be a forgery. When this lie was exposed by Joe Wilson, who was sent to investigate, the Bush administration decided to out Wilson's wife Valerie Plame, who was working as an undercover CIA agent. The Bush administration also spread lies about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, even though it was pretty well known that these WMDs had been destroyed several years earlier (it was also never mentioned that the US was one of the countries that had originally supplied the WMDs to Saddam, whom we supported during the Iran-Iraq war). The bottom line is, the US didn't go to war with Iraq because of the intelligence; rather, the intelligence was cherry picked and fabricated in order to justify a decision to go to war that Bush had already made. Martin

You are much too forgiving. Congressman Paul is at home with the idea of making women of childbearing age into brood-mares. Nifty! He won't tax a female Unconstitutionally, but he will compel her to give birth if the political outcome should be that. If thirty seven states pass a "right to life" amendment he will -gladly- conform. It is his gladness that I find unforgivable. If he is elected I will invest in companies that make wire clothes-hangers. Ba'al Chatzaf I must say, Ba'al, that I find some of your beliefs to be so bizarrely contradictory that I'm amazed that you could simultaneously hold them all. On the one hand, you stand passionately in defense of the absolute right of women to have an absolute right of liberty over their own bodies. You are morally offended at the idea of conscripting women as unwilling wombs and equate this to their enslavement at the hands of government. I agree with you unreservedly about this. Here, you are arguing as a hard-core libertarian, in the tradition of the great early libertarian feminists. On the other hand, you shown a callous disregard for the lives and liberties of anyone living outside the United States. You have argued that the US government is justified is slaughtering millions of innocent foreigners if there is any even remotely plausible possibility that the country in which they live might be even the slightest threat to the US, thereby granting to the US government a moral blank check to go to war with anyone at any time for any reason and to murder with abandon. You have argued that, in response to Iran's taking of not quite seventy hostages at the American embassy, the US government should have nuked Tehran, killing millions of innocent Iranians and horribly sickening millions more. You have stated repeatedly that you wish the executive branch of our government to be inhabited by a bunch of merciless killers, disregarding both the disgusting immorality of such a stance and the very real possibility that these merciless killers might just end up turning their guns on you and your friends and family. Our merciless killer government, whom you have entrusted with the power of life or death over all foreigners, now has the power to declare martial law at any time, thereby having the power of life or death over all of us too. Martin

Wolf, My view of this is that just because the Bush administration made a gross misuse of the USA intelligence institutions, that does not invalidate them. That only invalidates his misuse of them. I believe the proper answer to your question is to retaliate against those identified by the USA's intelligence and military advisers to the President. That is their job. Even with all the mishandling, mistakes and political football playing, the USA intelligence organizations and the USA military are the best there is in the world. The inclusion of checks and balances within the system is one of the reasons for its reliability. The President should make good use of the USA's military and intelligence capacity instead of trying to override the information he receives from them. On the Ron Paul issue, I am not sure where he would stand with this. I haven't followed too closely, but I haven't seen any candidate really come out and say he/she trusts the information our specialized institutions provide and will use it above his/her own personal biases. If such a candidate stated that (and meant it), that is the candidate who would receive my vote. Michael Intelligence is almost never used by the executive branch in the manner you have described. Almost invariably, the president has already made a decision about what foreign policy to follow, generally for reasons that are far more irrational than those that motivate domestic policy decisions. The intelligence is then fixed around the already chosen policy. The intelligence is typically either fabricated, cherry picked, or ignored by the president in order to justify a decision he has already made. This is certainly the case with the Iraq War. Bush was looking for an excuse to attack Iraq long before the 9/11 attacks ever took place; 9/11 simply gave Bush the excuse to do what he wanted to do all along, not to mention an excuse to viciously attack the civil liberties of all Americans via a series of abominable pieces of legislation passed by a Congress that never even bothered to read them. Martin

Just because it is alleged that Ron Paul said something doesn't mean that he did! Here is some copy from the link supplied by Dustan. >>>"The Politico’s Brazen Lies About Ron Paul Saturday, July 14th, 2007 in News by Justin Raimondo| The Republican smear machine is revving up its motors, getting ready to launch a typically vicious campaign against Ron Paul, the only real threat to their death-grip on the GOP. Since the first assault, a piece by Ryan Sager in the New York Sun, failed — the charges of “racism” were based on tenuous documentation and fall apart when examined up close — the second wave has been launched: a piece in The Politico, headlined: “Ron Paul Warns of Staged Terror Attack.” It links to a clip of a radio interview with Ron, conducted by Alex Jones, and hosted on the Breitbart.com site – part of the neocon-Drudge propaganda network. If you listen to the interview, one thing is clear: Paul said no such thing. Jones asked him a 5-minute-long question that melded together all sorts of disparate elements, including the possibility of a staged US government-sponsored terrorist attack and a US military attack on Iran. Ron focused exclusively on the latter, and said that the great danger comes from a “Gulf of Tonkin“-type incident involving Iran. No mention is made by Paul of a staged terrorist attack on US soil. Ron spends the rest of the interview talking about what a disaster an attack on Iran would turn out to be, and then launches into his favorite subject: the economic consequences of our spendthrift ways, and the impossibility of maintaining our empire of debt. The Politico is telling a lie: their headline is a lie. What’s amazing about this particular smear is that it is so transparently obvious: after all, in this day and age, we don’t need intermediaries and “gate-keepers” telling us what Paul said, we can refer directly to it by linking to it. And anyone who listens to what Ron says in this interview cannot come away thinking that he said the US government is going to stage a terrorist attack on its own people on American soil or anywhere else."<<< Ron Paul still has my vote if I have to join the Republican Party just long enough to cast it in the Primary and then change back to unenrolled. galt Well, as Barbara pointed out in post #28 on this thread, Paul has pretty strongly suggested that the US government is trying to provoke Iran into launching an attack and might just stage a phony Gulf of Tonkin type incident in order to justify going to war against Iran, something that the Bush administration clearly wants very badly to do. I agree absolutely with Paul about this and think that it is an eminently reasonable conjecture. In an earlier post, Barbara condemned Paul for this and insisted that he provide convincing evidence for this allegation. The point I was trying to make above is that asking for proof of a hypothetical event that has not yet occurred is rather difficult; short of leaked documents or testimony from Bush administration officials, how could one prove what the Bush administration was going to do in the future? Martin

Here I was trying to get a discussion going about whether Ron Paul's anti choice stance trumped his other pro free market, pro Constitution postition when Barbara comes along with a spotlight stealing issue. That makes me feel like I am guilty of context dropping. I thought that Ron Paul's opposition to the Iraq War was just that Congress never declared war! I can see him speaking to the Congress in the event of another attack to declare war and then vigorously pursuing the attackers and any regime which harbored the perpetrators. Besides maybe the allegation is true. I tend not to believe it but generally I wouldn't put anything passed these politicians. galt Ron Paul's opposition to the Iraq War was not just that Congress never declared war, though this was certainly a valid reason to oppose it. More fundamentally, he opposed the Iraq war because there was absolutely no justification for it. Iraq never attacked or threatened to attack the US, Iraq was no threat to the security of the United States, and Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, the Iraqi Bathist regime of Saddam Hussein was a bitter enemy of Al Qaeda, despite the propoganda of the Bush administration attempting to establish a link between these two. Regarding Ron Paul's suggestion that the US government may be setting up Iran via a Gulf of Tonkin type incident, this is more of a prediction and a warning rather than an allegation, since it refers to a hypothetical event which has not yet happened. It seems obvious to me that the Bush administration is doing everything it can to provoke Iran into launching some kind of attack against the US, and I would certainly not put it past these scummy lying bastards to fake an Iranian attack in order to provide justification for the US going to war with Iran, as the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident provided the US with an excuse to escalate the Vietnam War. But there is no way to prove that the Bush administration intends to do this, short of obtaining leaked administration documents affirming such a plan. Martin

If the United States is attacked by Saudi and Egyptian commandos again, like 9/11, who should the US retaliate against? W. That's an easy question. If the US is attacked by Saudi and Egyptian commandos, we should retaliate by attacking Iraq and Iran, neither of which had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks and both of which are bitter enemies of Al Qaeda. Haven't you studied any logic? Martin

Paul asserts his belief that a fetus has rights to life. But it is just an assertion and he gives no rational basis for his assertion. No one asked him what his grounds are for his belief so he gets away with it. He said that it is an act of violence, refering to abortion and says that it becomes a state issue not a federal issue. Notice who is not mentioned in all this discussion, the pregnant woman. I wonder if Paul considers her rights such as the right to determine whether her own body will continue to sustain the existence of the embryo or fetus within her, or not. Paul does not believe that anyone should be compelled by the government to support the life of another when it comes to taxation. He should apply the same principle to the abortion issue in which he appears to advocate that a woman be forced to continue to sustain the life of another which happens to be growing within her body. One might hope for consistency in our candidates for president. galt Consistency from presidential candidates or from politicians in general? You must be joking! But seriously, about the abortion issue, I agree with you absolutely. Even though there are some libertarians who are "pro life" and have attempted to argue for a ban on abortion on libertarian grounds, all of the arguments I have ever seen fall far short of justification from a libertarian perspective. An individual's right to sovereignty over his or her own body is about as fundamental of a libertarian principle as there is. Ayn Rand herself discussed the fundamentality of this principle in one of her essays in "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal". My only defense of Paul is that his integrity and belief in limited, constitutional government is such an incredible contrast to almost all of the human scum who now inhabit both the executive branch and congress, that I am willing to forgive him his anti-libertarian stance on abortion. Despite his largely libertarian beliefs, Ron Paul is running as a traditional limited government conservative, not as a libertarian. This explains why Paul is now in a position to run a presidential campaign as a credible candidate. Were he a hard core libertarian, he never could have been elected to Congress even once, let alone multiple time. Such political experience is mandatory is establish credibility as a presidential candidate. The most consistently libertarian candidate is Steve Kubby, who's running as a candidate from the Libertarian Party. But most people have never heard of Kubby, whereas I've already seen "Ron Paul revolution" signs on several occasions, and the Paul campaign has generated quite a bit of excitement among a wide segment of people who are fed up with big government and, especially, the bloodthirsty warmongers from both parties who have taken over control of our government. Martin

As far as I can tell Ron Paul is not the man we need for President now because of the big mess the US has made in the world and now has to deal with. I don't think he is up to it. I may be wrong, but it is a common enough perception that he has no real chance, but maybe his campaign will be educational, even for me. --Brant If the previous generation of presidents had the stature of Ron Paul, the US would not have made the big mess of the world that it has. Instead of becoming a raging empire on its way to bankruptcy, the US would have returned to its roots as a limited government republic. The catastrophic US policies in the middle east would not have happened. The US would have disengaged its military from the volatile middle east. American troops would never have been stationed in Saudi Arabia. The 9/11 attack would almost certainly never have happened. There would be no Patriot Act, no Military Commissions Act, no Guantanamo Bay, no torture as official US policy, no "extraordinary rendition". Habeas corpus would still be a proud symbol of a still free society, rather than a dying remnant of a society that has sold its liberty for the pathetic illusion of security. Martin

I want a government that will KILL MUSLIMS. The more the better. If that is treason then make the most of it. Ba'al Chatzaf Let's see. There are about one billion Muslims in the world. You want a government that will kill Muslims, the more the better. So your ideal government would kill all one billion or so Muslims; any less than killing all of them would be a suboptimal solution by your standards. Your "final solution" to the "Muslim problem" makes Mao, Stalin, and Hitler look like pikers by comparison. If you were president and presumably had the power to implement this policy, you would become by an order of magnitude the greatest mass murderer in the history of the world. Martin

I think it's important to maintain perspective on the Ron Paul candidacy. The first thing to recognize is that Paul is not running as a libertarian; rather, he is running as a very traditional, old right, limited government, constitutionalist conservative, in the tradition of old right conservative Robert Taft. In all of his campaign literature, Paul refers to himself as a conservative, not a libertarian. At least a couple of his positions violate libertarian principles. In addition to the abortion issue, Paul has also come out strongly against illegal immigration and any notion of open borders. He has been every bit as much of an immigration basher as the most rabid of the "right wing" conservatives. Also, his voting record in Congress has not been one of fully consistent libertarianism, and he has voted in favor of measures which are clearly unconstitutional by his own standards. In other words, in addition to being an old right conservative with strong but not fully consistent libertarian leanings, Paul is also a politician. That Paul is running as a conservative rather than a libertarian is not at all surprising. There are a lot more small government conservatives than libertarians. Libertarianism is still a small, "fringe" movement that has simply not entered the mainstream of political thought. There aren't nearly enough libertarians to elect any candidate to Congress, so appealing to small government conservatives is probably the only viable strategy for electoral success. And without the existing electoral success that Ron Paul has already achieved in being elected to Congress multiple times, he would not now be considered a credible candidate. Despite his flaws, Ron Paul is so vastly superior to every other republican or democratic candidate for president, that he may reasonably be forgiven for his deviations from pure libertarianism. His foreign policy views alone, in an otherwise unanimous field of republican and democratic warmongers who are not satisfied with the catastrophy in Iraq but are determined to drag the US into even further bloody wars, makes him eminently worthy of support. My favorite candidate, based just on considerations of political ideology, is Steve Kubby, who is running as a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. But Kubby has no chance to reach more than a fraction of the potential audience that Ron Paul can achieve via his national campaign. Martin

Ron Paul is not going to be nominated by the Republican Party. Furthermore the Republicans are going to lose big time. Why? Because a -Republican President- got us into a war which we are losing. Americans hate losers. Look what happened to Lyndon Johnson. He would not even run in 1972 because the Viet Nam war became a disaster. We got Tricky Dicky. The Democrats lost big time 1972. Same reason. A lost war. If Georgy Porgy had gotten bin Laden in Afghanistan instead of wasting time in Iraq anyone he designated could have run for President and won handily. Ba'al Chatzaf Ron Paul is going to win the nomination, and it will be a sad day for war mongers like yourself. And he will defeat Hillary or Obama, because they are for the war as well. Dustan, I would be thrilled if Ron Paul won the GOP nomination, let alone becoming the next president of the United States. But I think you are being wildly optimistic about his chances, which I rate as only marginally above zero. I think the best we can hope for is that his campaign will pick up some serious steam and really give Paul a forum with which to expose many Americans to some seriously limited government, constitutionalist, even quasi-libertarian perspectives. If you turn out to be completely right and I completely wrong, I will happily celebrate just how wrong my prognostications were. Martin

Ba'al Chatzaf wrote: But it worked! There is no more Saddam regime. If the objective was regime change, it has been achieved. All Saddam had to do was resign and no further deaths would have occurred. Clearly the blame lies with him. The relatively secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein has been replaced by a theocratic, Shiite Muslim dominated government with close ties to Shiite death squads, who are engaging in ethnic cleansing of Sunni Muslims, who are themselves ethnically cleansing Shiites. Iraq has been plunged into a violent, sectarian civil war. We have transformed Iraq into hell on earth. Iraq had never had suicide bombers before the US invasion; now, it is swarming with them. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by the sanctions, hundreds of thousands more Iraqis have been killed by the US bombing, invasion, and subsequent civil war. At least two million Iraqis have fled Iraq and become displaced refugees, mostly in Syria and Jordan. But what the hell, what's a couple of million refugees with shattered lives, hundreds of thousands of dead, a devastated country with bombed out infrastructure, over three thousand dead American soldiers, and over 500 billion dollars spent so far on a futile war. For all of this horror, we've achieved the noble goal of replacing one dictatorship, which we previously supported, with another dictatorship. Ba'al Chatzaf wrote: If pedestrians are killed during a high speed police chase, it is clearly the fault of the one who was running away. All he had to do was stop and surrender. Then no pedestrians would have been killed. As long as we charge our police with the task of arresting the bad guys there will be collateral damage. So just exactly how many pedestrians does a police officer have the right to kill in pursuit of a fleeing criminal? If, in pursuit of the criminal, the police officer runs down and kills 100 pedestrians, is that okay? How about if the police know that a violent criminal is hiding somewhere in a neighborhood where 10000 people live. Do the police have the right to bomb the entire neighborhood into rubble in order to kill the criminal? Ba'al Chatzaf wrote: As long as we charge our soldiers with the task of fighting wars against aggressors primarily for national defense there will be collateral damage. There will also be "friendly fire" casualties. It cannot be avoided as long as the bad guys do their evil and struggle against being removed. So let me get this straight. The US imposed sanctions on Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, in order to depose a dictator whom the US had previously supported. During this time, the US was continually bombing Iraq. The US was one of several countries that provided chemical weapons to Iraq, which were used to kill an estimated hundred thousand Iranians during the Iran - Iraq war. The US then demanded that Saddam disarm and destroy the chemical weapons that we gave to him. Saddam complied; the stockpiles of chemical weapons were destroyed, as verified by UN weapons inspectors. The US went to war against Iraq anyway, dropping thousands of tons of bombs on the defenseless country in a brave showcase of "Shock and Awe". Then the US invaded Iraq with 140,000 soldiers, disbanded the Iraqi army, and plunged the country into civil war. The Lancet study estimated that the second gulf war led to the deaths of an additional 600,000 Iraqis, although this figure has been disputed and may be too high. The US has devastated Iraq, a small third world country that never seriously threatened us, just so that we could install a dictator friendly to the US who would let us build permanent military bases there. But after all the death and destruction we have leveled against Iraq, they are the aggressor against us, and they are evil? An objective observer might just conclude that the US is the aggressor, and that the US government is evil and has committed war crimes against Iraq. Ba'al Chatzaf wrote: The alternative to avoiding collateral damage is to let the bad guys do whatever they damn please. Is that what you want? Of course not. Only the US should have the right to do whatever it damn well pleases. We should have the right to bomb whoever we want, whenever we want, for whatever reason we want. We should have the right to go to war with anyone we want, for any reason we want, whether the victim nation has attacked us or not. We should have the right to kill as many innocent people as we want and call it collateral damage. It's only right that we should have a thousand military bases all over the world, so that we can make sure that the rest of the world lives up to our high ethical standards of behavior and bomb the hell out of them if they don't. It's our job to liberate all the poor, oppressed people of the world who live under governments that are not friendly to us, even if we have to kill them all of them in order to liberate them. Of course, if they live under despotic governments that are friendly to us, that's perfectly fine. God bless America! Martin

Chris, Exact numbers are not known for either deaths from the sanctions or deaths associated with the regime of Saddam Hussein, so all figures are only rough estimates. Saddam Hussein, during the years that he ruled Iraq, is estimated to have killed about 200,000 Iraqis. During the 8 years of the Iran - Iraq war, Iran is estimated to have suffered about 1 million deaths, including an estimated 100,000 killed by Iraqi chemical weapons. Some of these weapons or their precursors were provided by the United States. As for the sanctions, as I indicated in an earlier post on this thread, estimates of deaths caused by these sanctions range between about 100,000 and 1 million. So, not counting the deaths from the Iran - Iraq war, it is quite possible that the sanctions killed more Iraqis than did Saddam Hussein. This is typical of the kind of "help" that the US government frequently provides. The sanctions, which were justified as being necessary to destroy the Hussein regime, may have killed more Iraqis than the Hussein regime itself. Martin

With all due respect, Michael, I could not disagree more with your assessment of the nature of the type of international trade sanctions imposed on Iraq. Imposing an embargo on a country should rightfully be considered an act of war. From a libertarian perspective, stopping the residents of a country from trading with their neighbors from other countries is just collectively violating the right of every one of these individuals to engage in free trade. If such an embargo deprives the country of products that it needs to properly survive, and if large numbers of the country's residents die as a result of this embargo, this certainly constitutes murder on a massive scale. In one sense, it's much worse than direct murder, since the governments who impose this embargo can deny moral responsibility for the resulting deaths, as you have denied that the US government bears any responsibility for the horrors than resulted from the sanctions. You say that "Iraq was left free to produce its own goods and values and trade all it wanted to among its own citizens, just like any country is. If Saddam Hussein was so incompetent a ruler that manufacturing and industry under his rule were not allowed to progress, the USA should not be blamed for that." So if some gang of thugs were to seize control of the neighborhood where you live, and to tell you that they were imposing sanctions on your neighborhood, such that everyone living in your neighborhood would have to exist in isolation from the surrounding community, and if many neighborhood residents, unprepared to live in such isolation, were to die, the thugs who imprisoned and forcibly isolated the residents would not be guilty of mass murder? Essentially, you are arguing that it's okay to make innocent Iraqi residents, including children, suffer and die for the sins of Saddam Hussein. Would it be equally okay to kill huge numbers of Americans as penalty for the sins committed by George W. Bush? Regarding Barbara, she was not particularly respectful to me either. She stated, falsely, that the figures I gave for number of deaths caused by Iraqi sanctions were nothing but propoganda spread by Michael Moore. I don't appreciate being wrongly accused of spreading false propoganda. Among other things, Barbara didn't even get my name right. Martin

Like hell they are "Michael Moore figures". You are attempting to discredit the figures by equating them with Moore, when there are many independent sources who have researched this issue. The exact number of Iraqis who died as a result of these sanctions can never be known, but estimates vary conservatively from over a hundred thousand to over a million. And the idea that imposing sanctions killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis was necessary to save our lives as Americans is absurd. Iraq was never a threat to the United States. Here we are, the most powerful nation the world has ever known, with a military that spends more money than the militaries of the rest of the world put together, with a nuclear arsenal of over 2000 nuclear warheads, with at least 800 military bases spread all over the world. And we are somehow so threatened by a third world country torn by ethnic divisions, ruled by a tinpot dictator that we previously supported in the Iran/Iraq war, that we just have no choice but to impose these brutal murderous sanctions, which caused unspeakable suffering for the Iraqi people but did nothing to remove Saddam Hussein from power. From Wikipedia, which itself links to many independent sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions Introduction On August 6, 1990 the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 661 which imposed stringent economic sanctions on Iraq, providing for a full trade embargo, excluding medical supplies, food and other items of humanitarian necessity, these to be determined by the Security Council sanctions committee. After the end of the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi sanctions were linked to removal of Weapons of mass destruction by Resolution 687.[1]. The United Nations economic sanctions were imposed at the urging of the U.S. to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The New York Times stated: "By making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people, [sanctions] would eventually encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power" (Seattle-Post Intelligencer August 7, 2003, archived at: [2]). In as much as the economic sanctions were designed to topple Saddam they were a failure, however the sanctions caused the death of between 400 000 and 800 000 Iraqi children (Seatlle-Post Intelligencer August 7, 2003, archived at: [3]; Hartford Courant, October 23, 2000, [4]). Effects of the sanctions The sanctions crippled the Iraqi economy during the time they were imposed; much of Iraq’s infrastructure ran into disrepair from lack of materials and Iraq's capacity for aggression was all but destroyed. The initial purpose of the sanctions, and of all diplomatic sanctions, was to force Iraq's hand in cooperation with the United Nations and possibly cause a change in its previously aggressive foreign policy and abuses of human rights. Critics of the sanctions say that over a million Iraqis, disproportionately children, died as a result of them, [5] although other researchers concluded that the total was lower. [6] [7] [8] UNICEF has put the number of child deaths to 500,000.[9] The reasons include lack of medical supplies, malnutrition, and especially disease owing to lack of clean water. Among other things, chlorine, needed for disinfecting water supplies, was banned as having a "dual use" in potential weapons manufacture. On May 10, 1996, appearing on 60 Minutes, Madeleine Albright (then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) was presented with a figure of half a million children under five having died from the sanctions. Not challenging this figure, she infamously replied "we think the price is worth it", [10] though she later rued the comment as "stupid."[11] Here is a description of the effects of the sanctions from one of the reference papers listed in the Wiki article: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011203/cortright The two most reliable scientific studies on sanctions in Iraq are the 1999 report "Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children," by Columbia University's Richard Garfield, and "Sanctions and Childhood Mortality in Iraq," a May 2000 article by Mohamed Ali and Iqbal Shah in The Lancet. Garfield, an expert on the public-health impact of sanctions, conducted a comparative analysis of the more than two dozen major studies that have analyzed malnutrition and mortality figures in Iraq during the past decade. He estimated the most likely number of excess deaths among children under five years of age from 1990 through March 1998 to be 227,000. Garfield's analysis showed child mortality rates double those of the previous decade. Ali, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Shah, an analyst for the World Health Organization in Geneva, conducted a demographic survey for UNICEF in cooperation with the government of Iraq. In early 1999 their study surveyed 40,000 households in south-central Iraq and in the northern Kurdish zone. In south-central Iraq, child mortality rates rose from 56 per 1,000 births for the period 1984-89 to 131 per 1,000 for the period 1994-99. In the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, Ali and Shah found that child mortality rates actually fell during the same period, from 80 per 1,000 births to 72 per 1,000. Garfield has recently recalculated his numbers, based on the additional findings of the Ali and Shah study, to arrive at an estimate of approximately 350,000 through 2000. Most of these deaths are associated with sanctions, according to Garfield, but some are also attributable to destruction caused by the Gulf War air campaign, which dropped 90,000 tons of bombs in forty-three days, a far more intensive attack than the current strikes against Afghanistan. The bombing devastated Iraq's civilian infrastructure, destroying eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and disabling vital water-pumping and sanitation systems. Untreated sewage flowed into rivers used for drinking water, resulting in a rapid spread of infectious disease. Comprehensive trade sanctions compounded the effects of the war, making it difficult to rebuild, and adding new horrors of hunger and malnutrition. As you read these descriptions of what actually happened in Iraq as a result of the sanctions that our government imposed, does it make you proud to be an American? Martin