The title of a U.S. Libertarian Party article captures the disbelief: Libertarians suggest Nobel announcements should be moved to April Fool’s Day.

Norman Horne of LibertarianChristian.com, also chimes in with his piece A Peace Prize for a War Hawk. He concludes with a good summation of the backwardness of recent Nobel Prize selections: “We live in a bizarro world, folks, when you can get an Economics Prize for supporting the destruction of an economy (Paul Krugman), a Peace Prize for frightening people (Al Gore), and now a Peace Prize for supporting war (Obama)”.

My thoughts are that Obama mainly got this on the basis of (a) not being George Bush, (b) having some ideas that people liked (but never really putting them into practice), (c) being an “inspiring” figure, and (d) not being George Bush.

Maybe I should enter the Mr. America body building contest this year. I’m starting to think I might have a chance.

As an Eric Margolis points out in The Ghosts of Vietnam Haunt Washington (September 22, 2009), mission Afghanistan is continuing to be a disaster for the U.S. He makes a comparisons to the old British imperialist failure in Afghanistan, except with the telling assesment that “[t]he British imperialists did it much, much better and with a lot more style”.

Margolis points out how American general Stanley McChrystal is “warning that the US risks being beaten by lightly armed Taliban tribesmen in spite of his 107,000 western soliders, B1 heavy bombers, F-15’s, F-16’s, F-18’s, Apache and A-130 gunships, heavy artillery, tanks, radars, killer drones, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, rockets, and space surveillence.” The U.S. has spent $250 billion (that’s approximately the cost of 10,000 F-15s!) in Afghanistan since 2001. And each wave has caused an increase of resistance and more power for the Taliban.

After 8 years and $250 billion, the Taliban still controls 55% of the country. And get this, the commanders are still asking for 40,000 troops, even after Obama has tripled the presence there. Margolis does a fine job of exposing the sheer lunacy of what is going on over there.

And all of this is not even getting into things he brings up in other columns, such as the illegitimacy of the “elections” that the U.S. has implemented in Afghanistan–stage managed votes with canadidates hand-picked beforehand. All parties were banned, only individuals were allowed to run. It has been said that even the Soviets allowed parties to run in the elections they imposed on Afghanistan in 1986 and 1987. In the U.S.-run election, only candidates who favored continued U.S. and NATO occupation were allowed to stand. Foreign observers reported extensive fraud and vote-rigging. As Margolis has said elsewhere, “Compared to this pre-determined vote, Iran’s recent elections almost look Swiss by comparison”. Is this the democracy being exported?

This is not merely a crazed empire, this is a crazed empire on a self-destruct mission.

May some day God bless the U.S.A. with a leader or leaders that will be capable of ending this non-sense. May God spare the people of Afghanistan and us Westerners from the present and future chaos that this is causing.

Jus ad bellum (the right to go to war)

• Just cause
• Comparative justice
• Legitimate authority
• Right intention
• Probability of success
• Last resort
• Proportionality

Jus in bello (conducting war)

• Distinction
• Proportionality
• Military Necessity

Applying this to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and potentially Iran in the future).. Even if we are to grant Just Cause, Comparative Justice, Legitimate Authority, and Right Intention (all of which can certainly be plausibly argued against), there is no way in the world these wars are wars of Last Resort, where all other options have been tried and failed.  In fact, very few options have been tried, and the ones that have been tried were purposely kept on a short leash. Furthermore, there is a marked lack of Proportionality. What the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan is disproportional to what it is allegedly responding to, even if we are to presume Iraq and Afghanistan were actually responsible for all recent terrorism.

“Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life itself, not when the safety of their country and its liberties may demand the sacrifice, but whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it?”

Rudd seems to remain on a similar page politically (as far as I can tell), though he appears to have renounced the violent aspects of his strategy (although, existing forms of socialism imply a certain amount of violence, the violence of the state, and he appears to remain committed to that) .

He said (a few quotes from the full paper, Che and Me):

“I was a Guevarista, a member of the cult of Che.  That meant not only putting up multiple posters with Che’s image on the wall in my room during college, but whole-heartedly accepting the theory that a small armed group could spark revolution by actually beginning military action.”

“One thing we hadn’t stopped to notice was that Che, in October, 1967, using precisely the same strategy that we proposed to use, had already been defeated and killed in Bolivia…Blinded by my love and admiration for ‘the Heroic Guerilla,’ as Fidel had dubbed Che, I didn’t want to see that there was a fatal flaw in the theory.  It didn’t work.”

“This is a tough thing to write, since it puts me close to the camp of right-wingers who have always attacked Che as a murderer and a terrorist, but I believe that by the end of his life, after the years of blood and to-the-death struggles of the Cuban revolution, Che had become both homicidal and suicidal.”

“…personally, I’ve long ago opted out of the cult of Che which I joined over forty years ago. It’s impossible for me to look on Che as the great revolutionary hero anymore;”

I find this interesting, because Mark Rudd was not your run-of-the-mill person who looked up to Che. He was trying to bring Che Guevara’s war to the U.S.A., he was an American Guevarista if there ever was one. The Cuban government even invited him over to visit as a delegate while he was with the SDS.

I’m certainly glad Mark Rudd’s vision was not imposed on America in the 1970s. I’m glad the Weather Underground was a failure and never got very far “off the ground” so to speak. Their case is a perfect example of  how out of touch with reality people can get in their own little subcultures.  Gee… Even the Black Panthers, Vietnam leaders, and Cuban leaders voiced major concerns and some of them warned the Weather Underground not to go ahead with this. And in the case of the Weather Underground, getting “out of touch” meant causing chaos, blowing up things, and becoming fugitives.

I’m also glad that Mark Rudd has lost his ‘rose colored’ glasses about Che Guevara. Now, if only he’d forsake socialism and its inherent violence and also stop dreaming that Obama is going to fix things!  If Arlo Guthrie became a Ron Paul fan, who’s to say Mark Rudd couldn’t come around some day and ditch socialism!

Also, you might be interested to check out the Cato Institute’s recent episode by Benjamin Friedman on Robert Gates (the Secretary of Defense for Bush and Obama).

I object to conscription the way a lobster objects to boiling water: it may be his finest hour but it’s not his choice.

(E.C. Gordon in Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road, Berkley Medallion Books, 1963, p11)