That ‘Libertarian Moment’

The failures of foreign interventionism litter the world stage. Libya is disintegrating into an inter-tribal battlefield, with rival militias shooting it out Wild West style. Iraq is collapsing into chaos, as the country’s postwar order frays and splits along sectarian religious lines: and in Afghanistan, scene of our initial foray into the endless abyss we call a "war on terrorism," the trumpets are sounding the call to retreat.

Going further back into the history of America’s obsessive foreign adventurism, let’s revisit Kosovo – a Mafia-run "state" that is the cold sore on Europe’s lower lip. It’s the center of Europe’s booming heroin trade, its Prime Minister a gangster straight out of "The Sopranos."

Yet still the War Party presses ahead with its prescriptions for certain disaster: Syria, Iran, Russia, China – the world is filled with endless enemies, "rogue states" requiring a little "shock and awe," just enough to make them fall in line with Uncle Sam’s plan for "world order."

One would think that, with this record, the interventionists among us would have long since been discredited – but no. The abolition of history is one of the War Party’s signal achievements: no sooner have we suffered the consequences of our reckless hubris than the memory of it is erased, like a hangover "cured" by the hair of the dog that bit us.

Is Baghdad in flames? Then on to Damascus! Is Kabul a ruin? Next stop – Tehran!

The discovery that Iraq’s fabled "weapons of mass destruction" didn’t exist – and never existed – failed to provoke a general reexamination of the policies that culminated in the worst strategic disaster in American military history – or, indeed, any interrogation of the policymakers who made it possible. There was no criminal investigation, no congressional hearings, not even much of a journalistic probe into how we were lied into war and by whom. Just as there was no inquiry into and prosecution of those who instituted a torture regime and set up what previous generations would have scoffed at as impossible – an American gulag. 

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