Hiding it away on back pages, newspapers across the country tried to keep the nation from the latest bad news about education, news that should have been on front pages everywhere. Both local newpapers, such as The Lawrence Journal-World, and national newspapers, such as U.S.A. Today, barely mentioned the results of  recent national reading tests by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Based on the testing of 270,000 students, the results showed that only one third of students in the three grades tested, fourth, eighth and 12th, were up to profiency standards in reading. Among high school seniors, 36% were proficient, down from 40% in 1998. One third of the students in fourth, eighth and 12th grades can not show even a basic understanding of civics at their grade level. Three out of four fourth graders could not name which part of government passes laws. Half of all 12th graders asked to pick an ally in World War II picked Italy, Germany, or Japan.

“I spent 30 years in the Philadelphia public schools teaching high school. When I began in 1965 the school was integrated and the students in my French class read Victor Hugo and Molière. When I escaped in 1995 there wasn’t a shred of knowledge, decency or honesty left in anyone’s heart, soul or brain, be it administrator, teacher or student. As you well know, 1968 was the cut-off point, like B.C. and A.D. (Before Counter-Culture and After Devastation). You went to bed one night with one set of values in place and you woke up in a strange new world. It was exactly like “The Invasion of the Body Snatcher.” Human beings had mutated over night into apostles of socialized education—the concept that education was a right, free from any attendant responsiblities. This meant caving in to every demand, no matter how outrageous, emanating from the most infantile and hate-filled kids one could possibly imagine. By 1972 the school was entirely Black and firmly entrenched in an irreversible policy of passing the greatest number even if they had no skills. This was presumably some sort of reparation for the past cruelties to Blacks and some sort of redemption for “ racist America who was waging a racist war in Vietnam.” In the classroom, we all began fighting for our survival in the same way—by pandering to the kids, appeasing them and diluting difficult subject matter on their behalf. The behavior in the classroom was out of control. Many teachers knew this was wrong but they put their heads in the sand and never came up for air. Many left the system—there was a mass exodus out of teaching back in the seventies. Sometimes a voice would be raised but the iron curtain of political correctness stifled all attempts to establish honest discourse among “professionals.” It was no longer a profession but a type of dull ritual devoid of meaning. My school was typical of the many once excellent city schools that fell into depravity over the 30 year period.”

“For forty years, leading educators and intellectuals have been saying and writing and teaching that the United States was no better and might even be worse than its enemies, that Western civilization was a mask under which one crime after another has been visited upon the poorer nations of the world, and that good and evil themselves are a matter of perspective, if not mere opinion. Some of the noblest ideas ever framed by the mind of man, including democracy, patriotism, honor, and freedom, have been systematically drained of meaning.”

Recently an acquaintance dropped this site link in an email with a note that it is a progressive group near a military base which got my attention. The Progressive Student Alliance (Pensacola) is active in the area but the fact that the location is encased in brackets means they are either spread out state-wide or across state lines.  This group may be very active in this area which is mostly military (Naval Air Station Pensacola) and a potential pool of members just waiting to be baited. Perhaps my take on these groups is somewhat hard but consider the fact that young minds are just as easily influenced whether they’re civilian or military. Sometimes being away from home is enough to encourage unhealthy alliances with people who appear to be mentors of a good cause but are hard core communists.

A look at this site quickly shows its purpose as the group is not exactly secretive about it; they just present their group not what they’re about but that was hidden in the site links they posted. I loved the pictures of the Israeli Anarchists Against the wall party goers (any guesses on what they’re about?) who look like the bathtub time machine malfunctioned and made them into a cross between 60’s hippie subversives (pardon the redundancy) and Tuareg tribesmen (no offense to the tribesmen).  Frankly if I were to see one of my junior personnel in the company of these people off base I would have to take some notice as the site does not give a physical address. However some of the links the site offers range from progressive supplies (hippie gear) to schools which were even more interesting. One link to a forum discussion is named School of the Americas but required member registration (may have to join soon) to view. Their videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8xTOadn1n0&feature=player_embedded#) are about social justice which can be misrepresented with catchy beats and a good picture collage; a very powerful recruitment tool indeed.

If this group does not seem to be a looming threat to the academic influence in these areas look at some of their supporters.  Links to Z-Magazine and South End Press websites will lead you to some of the most radical masters of leftist revolution such as Lydia Sargent and Michael Albert who were best buds with the late uber-evil historian Howard Zinn. Given the kind of radicals mentoring this group base commanders may want to monitor further and prepare for the potential influences of their brand of  ’education’ in relation to operational readiness of personnel.

For years Nebraska has been one of the top teams in college football. So it is no surprise when Nebraska Assistant Coach Ron Brown was recruited by Stanford Univ. in California to be interviewed for the head coach position. He didn’t get very far. He was not discriminated against because he is black. Not at liberal Stanford. Brown’s problem at Stanford is that he is a Christian, apparently with rather firm beliefs on matters such as homosexuality and abortion. Said Alan Glenn, Assistant Athletic Director at Stanford, “Brown’s religion was definitely something that had to be considered. We have a very diverse community with a diverse alumni. Anything that would stand out that much is something that has to be looked at.”

Stanford prides itself in being in the vanguard of institutions which value “diversity” and “inclusion” .In fact it helped crystallize the movement to emphasize these ideas when on Jan. 15 , 1987, everyone, in a massive protest , started chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Culture has got to go”, thereby launching the movement known as “multiculturalism.”

The Western canon, the generally accepted list of the greatest books of the West were now attacked as having been written by biased “dead white males” These books are generally based on universalism, the belief that there are universal truths that are potentially available to everybody. What Stanford now embraced was particularism, which says that what one may know is determined by the circumstances of one’s birth. Race, gender, and class became more important than ideas.

From this beginning there flowed out throughout the universities of America a whole new plague of totalitarian horrors, like “diversity”, “sensitivity training”, “political correctness”, “speech codes”, “dormitory re-education,” “deconstructionism”, and “gender feminism,” all under the general umbrella of “multiculturalism.”

That was 15 years ago. Lets take a look at a how it has all has turned out. Offhand, it looks like Stanford better hire every Christian it can find.

The brief comments that begin each section below are from “The Diversity Myth”, an almost definitive critique of multiculturalism by David Sacks and Peter Thiel, two former graduate students at Stanford University. (Independent Institute, $24.95) The book is especially recommended to students who wish to protect themselves from brainwashing by multiculturalists. Included are some other quotes, notably by Robert Bork, former Supreme Court nominee, along with comments by Mr. Magruder in parentheses, prefaced by LM.

(Sections of this article are reprinted with permission from the book , “The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance on Campus, by David Sacks and Peter Thiel. Copyright 1998. The Independent Institute , 100 Swan Way , Oakland , CA. 94621-1428;info@independent.org; )

Trustees, congressional representatives, alumni, and the general public have begun to perceive that the great multicultural experiment has brought the very opposite of higher learning. It has brought speech restrictions, a new kind of intolerance known as “political correctness” a hysterically anti-Western curriculum, the increasing politicization of student life, and campus polarization along racial and ethnic lines.

“It is impossible to imagine that academic inquiry flourishes where thought police abound. Indeed, the intellectual apparatus of the 60’s radicals now dominating the universities is built for intellectual oppression, not for inquiry” -Robert Bork

“Of the 55 top-ranked universities in the nation, not a single one requires a course in American history, and only 3 require a course in Western Civilization”-The American Council of Trustees and Alumni

Underneath a glossy veneer of open-ended and utopian rhetoric, multiculturalism depends upon very specific values to operate, and at Stanford the values that inform this process happen to be the radical values of the 60’s. Most of the multicultural faculty and administrators were student activists in the late l960’s.

( LM- Professors who were campus radicals in the 60’s love to begin the semester by bragging to students how idealistic they were in their betrayal of the 40 million people of Southeast Asia. The truth is, although they cloaked themselves in an aura of great moral purpose, the war protestors gave aid and comfort to the enemy, marched under the flag of the Viet Cong, allowed Hanoi to dictate their agenda, and turned their backs on the American soldier when they returned. Now they run the universities, teaching students how to betray the West, and to cover up their earlier betrayal they write history books riddled with lies about the Vietnam War and their role in it.).)

When a stray look can lead to a charge of sexual harassment or an ill-timed joke to a charge of a racial slur, careers and lives are needlessly destroyed. Hapless innocents get thrown out of housing, lose their jobs because of “insensitivity.” or spend years fighting frivolous lawsuits. The multiculturalist hunt for nonexistent “oppressors” who can be held responsible for all of America’s ills leads to the vilification of innocents .

“Said Brown University “sensitivity” consultant Donald Kae, “If you are feeling comfortable or normal then you are probably oppressing someone, whether that person is a woman, or a gay or whatever. We probably won’t rid our society of racism until everyone strives to be abnormal.” (LM- What horse—- !).

The speech code never had to be enforced because it had not really been needed, at least not for the stated reason of combating an epidemic of fighting words and similar abuse. In March 1995, the Santa Clara County Superior Court agreed with the students and found Stanford’s speech code unconstitutional. Because of the ruling, Stanford students can now speak as freely as the residents of neighboring Palo Alto.

(LM- Judge returns basic American freedoms to student victims of multiculturalist tyranny. What a hoot ! Free Students Now from Multiculturalist Oppression! Turn on to Truth! Tune out the lies! Drop Out of Multiculturalism !)

In a widely discussed editorial in “The Stanford Daily,” columnist Andrea Park described the ritual clitorectomies performed in some African cultures but stopped short of condemning the barbaric practice. As a feminist Park wished to condemn the custom; but after much “soul-searching”, Park wrote that she realized she could not judge other cultures by her own standards. “Is it relevant that I, an outsider, may find the practice cruel ? As hard as it is for me to admit, the answer is no. To treat the issue as a matter for feminist outrage would be to assume that one society, namely mine, has a privileged position from which to judge the practices of another.”

(LM- How does one live with such hypocrisy ? This is a perfect example of the moral coma brought about by the cultural relativism embraced by multiculturalists.)

“Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the 60’s, it certainly deserves its own place in the halls of intellectual barbarism…women’s studies programs and courses are abysmal swamps of irrational dogma and hatred.” Bork

It is worth noting that all of these efforts have not had a positive impact on the level of AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, or abortions at Stanford, relative to American society at large. More than 100 Stanford women still have unwanted pregnancies each year, of which about 90 percent end in abortion. The resulting abortion rate at Stanford is about twice the national average. And as for AIDS, the rate of death at Stanford is perhaps four to five times that of the relatively “uneducated” society at large .One university residence now even has coed group showers.

(LM- What an inspiring example for American society multiculturalism is setting!)

“It is remarkable how vigorously the modern intellectual defends the descent of popular culture not merely into vulgarity but into obscenity… multiculturalism is barbarism, and it is bringing us to a barbarous epoch.”-Bork

In recent years race relations on campuses have taken a turn for the worse. King’s dream is rarely mentioned and the races remain divided There are even separate commencement ceremonies for Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans. It is not inconceivable that a minority student, if so inclined, could spend all four years at Stanford without ever eating, living, speaking, or graduating with someone from a different race.

“Multiculturalists have turned Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream into a nightmare. He asked that his children “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” But multiculturalists say, “Judge me by the color of my skin for therein lies my identity and my place in the world.” -Bork

“The result of multiculturalism can only be the fragmentation , resegregation, and tribalization of American life.”- the noted liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

The Western religious tradition seeks to redeem all of humanity, not just select subgroups. The multiculturalists, by contrast, are interested in the rehabilitation only of those of a particular race, gender, class, or sexual preference who happen to share their ideological commitments. Religious Studies 8 , “Religions in America”, devotes whole lectures to Shamanism, the Peyote Cult, and the Kodiak sect, but not one to the Catholic Church.

(LM- Multiculturalism is a massive assault on the Judeo-Christian values of the West at the very time that discoveries in physics and molecular biology are lending new support to natural theology and theism. Leftist academic thugs, however, continue to carry on the spirit of the 60’s by beating up dissenting guest speakers to keep students ignorant of the issues)

“The American university has become a culture of forbidden questions.” Leon Botstein – President of Bard College.

Despite its well-earned reputation as a school with perhaps the most competitive admissions process in the country, classwork at Stanford in many ways no longer demands the intellectual equivalent of sweat. Of all letter grades granted to students, about half are A’s, 39 % are B’s, only 10% are C’s and about 1% are D’s.

(LM- Pay-offs for buying into the multiculturalist agenda. As a college professor on three campuses over l5 years I’d say the true average grade of American students is a C minus. The juxtaposition of inflated grades with declining S.A.T. scores clearly exposes how educators, steeped in the values of the 60’s, are lying to both students and parents.)

“All have won and all must have prizes.” The Dodo Bird in “Alice in Wonderland”.

Western civilization and classical liberal arts education truly are dead, killed off in the same multicultural epidemic that expunged “dead white males” from the reading lists. To be certain, the buildings are well maintained, the lawns are well watered, the football team plays for cheering throngs of fans, the faculty and the staff are well paid, and the students attend classes and receive diplomas. The institution can keep going for a while on autopilot. But the heart of the university’s humanities program – involving the quest for universal truth – has decayed into dust.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
Everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Did we think it only rhetoric when Yeats asked us; “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” In multiculturalism we approach the logical outcome of the campus values of the 60’s- fascism.

Art after Art goes out, and all is Night
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled
Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more
Lo! Thy dread Empire, Chaos ! is restored
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries all. “Duncaid” -Alexander Pope

My high school history teacher used to say: “You think I am conservative; I am really an old-fashioned liberal.” We thought he was just making a joke, but the fact is, he was right on target. This article was written in 1955…before most of you ever had a chance to be liberal.

Liberalism

By Milton Friedman

Liberalism, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and flowered in the nineteenth, puts major emphasis on the freedom of individuals to control their own destinies. Individualism is its creed; collectivism and tyranny its enemy. The state exists to protect individuals from coercion by other individuals or groups and to widen the range within which individuals can exercise their freedom; it is purely instrumental and has no significance in and of itself. Society is a collection of individuals and the whole is no greater than the sum of its parts. The ultimate values are the values of the individuals who form the society; there are no super-individual values or ends. Nations may be convenient administrative units; nationalism is an alien creed.

In politics, liberalism expressed itself as a reaction against authoritarian regimes. Liberals favored limiting the rights of hereditary rulers, establishing democratic parliamentary institutions, extending the franchise, and guaranteeing civil rights. They favored such measures both for their own sake, as a direct expression of essential political freedoms, and as a means of facilitating the adoption of liberal economic measures.

In economic policy, liberalism expressed itself as a reaction against government intervention in economic affairs. Liberals favored free competition at home and free trade among nations. They regarded the organization of economic activity through free private enterprise operating in a competitive market as a direct expression of essential economic freedoms and as important also in facilitating the preservation of political liberty. They regarded free trade among nations as a means of eliminating conflicts that might otherwise produce war. Just as within a country, individuals following their own interests under the pressures of competition indirectly promote the interests of the whole; so, between countries, individuals following their own interests under conditions of free trade, indirectly promote the interests of the world as a whole. By providing free access to goods, services, and resources on the same terms to all, free trade would knit the world into a single economic community.

‘Liberalism’ has taken on a very different meaning in the twentieth century and particularly in the United States. This difference is least in the concrete political forms favored: both the nineteenth century liberal and the twentieth century liberal favor or profess to favor parliamentary forms, nearly universal adult franchise, and the protection of civil rights. But even in politics there are some not unimportant differences: in any issue involving a choice between centralization or decentralization of political responsibility, the nineteenth century liberal will resolve any doubt in favor of strengthening the importance of local governments at the expense of the central government; for, to him, the main desideratum is to strengthen the defenses against arbitrary government and to protect individual freedom as much as possible; the twentieth century liberal will resolve the same doubt in favor of increasing the power of the central government at the expense of local government; for, to him, the main desideratum is to strengthen the power of the government to do ‘good’ ‘for’ the people.

The difference is much sharper in economic policy where ‘liberalism’ now stands for almost the opposite of its earlier meaning. Nineteenth century liberalism favors private enterprise and a minimum of government intervention. Twentieth century liberalism distrusts the market in all its manifestations and favors widespread government intervention in and control over, economic activity. Nineteenth century liberalism favors individualist means to foster its individualist objectives. Twentieth century liberalism favors collectivist means while professing individualist objectives. And its objectives are individualist in a different sense; its keynote is welfare, not freedom. As [Austrian-American economist Joseph] Schumpeter remarks, ‘as a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.’ The rest of this article is devoted entirely to ‘liberalism’ in its original meaning; and the term will be used throughout in that sense.

Political liberalism and economic liberalism derive from a single philosophy. Yet they have frequently led independent lives in application, which suggests that their relation to one another deserves examination in the realm of ideas as well. During the nineteenth century, many countries adopted large elements of economic liberalism, yet maintained political forms that were neither liberal nor developing at any rapid pace in a liberal direction. Russia and Japan are perhaps the outstanding examples. During the twentieth century, countries that have achieved and maintained most of the concrete elements of the liberal political program have been moving away from liberal and toward collectivist economic policies. Great Britain is the most striking example; certainly for the first half of this century, the general drift of British economic policies has been toward greater direct intervention and control by the state; this drift has been checked in the past few years but whether the check is more than transitory remains to be seen. Norway, Sweden, and, with a lag of several decades, the United States, exhibit much the same tendencies.

As already noted, liberal thinkers and writers in the nineteenth century regarded political reforms as in large part a means of achieving economic liberalism. The earlier political forms concentrated political power in the hands of groups whose special interests were opposed to such measures of economic liberalism as free trade. Let all the people have a vote, and there would be, so liberals like [British economist] James Mill argued, no special interest. And since the general interest was simply the interest of all the individuals composing the society, and these in turn would be furthered most effectively by economic liberalism, democracy could be expected to rid itself of the dead hand of government and to give maximum scope to the invisible hand of self-interest.

In the twentieth century, a group of liberal thinkers, especially [American economist] Henry Simons, [Austrian-born economist] Ludwig von Mises, and [Austrian-born economist] Friedrich von Hayek, have emphasized that this relation also runs in reverse: that economic liberalism is a means of achieving political freedom. Economic liberalism alone does not guarantee political freedom—witness the examples of Russia and Japan cited earlier. But economic liberalism is, it is argued, an indispensable prerequisite for political freedom. Historically, there are no countries that enjoyed any substantial measure of political freedom that did not also practice a substantial measure of economic liberalism. Analytically, the preservation of political freedom requires protection against the concentration of power; it requires the existence of largely independent loci of power. Political power by its nature tends to be concentrated; economic power can be highly deconcentrated if it is organized by means of an impersonal market; economic power can thus be an independent offset to political power. Let both economic and political power be in the same hands and the only protection of political freedom is the good will of those in power—a frail recourse particularly in view of the corrupting influence of power and the talents that make for political survival.

A few examples may clarify the asserted relation between economic and political freedom, though they cannot of course demonstrate it. A characteristic of a politically free society is that proponents of radical reform in the structure of the society are permitted to express their views and to seek to persuade their fellows. It is a testimonial to the freedom of the United States that socialist and communist magazines and papers are published. Suppose a change to a collectivist economic society with government control of the bulk of economic activity. How could the proponents of a return to capitalism secure the resources with which to publish a magazine urging their point of view? Through a government fund for dissidents? Through the collection of small sums from millions of government employees? If they had the resources in the form of funds, what guarantee could they have that the government would sell them paper on the same terms as it does to others? In an economically liberal society, it is possible to get the general resources with which to spread dissenting views either by subsidies from a small number of individuals or by selling a magazine or other publication to many; and if there is a reasonable chance that enough people will want to buy a magazine expressing the minority view to make it profitable, even people who disagree fundamentally with the view will in their own self-interest provide the resources to make its establishment possible. In effect, there are thousands or millions of independent loci of power to decide whether an idea is worth trying to promote, rather than the few or one in a political structure. And given the general resources, there is no further obstacle: in a thoroughly free market, the sellers of paper do not know whether the paper is going to the Daily Worker or the Foundation for Economic Education. Perhaps some similar impersonal and effective guarantees of freedom to promote dissenting views could be contrived for a collectivist society; certainly no proponents of such a society have yet suggested any or even faced this problem squarely.

As another example, consider those individuals who have lost or resigned government jobs in the United States in recent years because they were or were accused of being Communists. Government employment in our society is not a right and it is entirely appropriate that at least certain governmental positions should not be open to actual or suspected Communists. It is easy also to see how strong public feeling can lead to a closing of all government posts to Communists. Yet, the maintenance of political freedom surely requires that people be free not only to believe in but also to advocate Communism; those of us who abhor Communism do so in part precisely because we know it would not grant us freedom to express contrary views; our defense against Communism is to persuade our fellow citizens of its evil, not to suppress its advocates. But if government employment were the only employment, nominal freedom to express extreme views would be a mockery. The exercise of this freedom would be at a prohibitive price—namely, giving up the possibility of earning a living. By contrast, in the existing society, those who have left government employment have had a wide variety of other opportunities. The way a private market economy protects these opportunities is revealed most clearly by considering an individual who goes into farming and produces, say, wheat. The purchasers of the wheat do not know whether it has been produced by a Communist or a Fascist, a white man or a Negro; they could hardly discriminate if they wanted to. The competitive market in this way separates economic activity from intellectual or political activity and the more competitive the market, the more sharply it does so. It is a paradox that minorities who have in this way the most to gain from a competitive society have contributed unduly large numbers to the ranks of its opponents.

Many writers who emphasize the importance of economic liberalism as a prerequisite for political freedom have interpreted tendencies toward collectivism in recent decades as betokening a trend toward political ’serfdom.’ They may yet be proved right. So far, however, the relation they stress has manifested itself mostly in a very different way: namely, the collectivist tendencies have been checked because they tended to interfere with civil and political freedom; when the conflict has been reasonably clear, the collectivist policy has frequently given way. Perhaps the most striking example is British experience with the compulsory allocation of labor. Socialist economic thinking in the postwar period called for compulsory allocation of labor to achieve ’social priorities’; though some compulsory powers were provided by law, they were never widely used; the powers themselves were permitted to lapse; and the whole character of attempted economic policy changed because compulsory allocation of labor so clearly interfered with widely and deeply cherished civil rights.

We turn now to a more detailed examination of the content of liberalism, particularly economic liberalism, and of the role it assigns to the state. This examination deals primarily with the principles that liberalism provides for judging social action. Any set of concrete proposals that these principles lead liberals to favor will vary with the particular circumstances of time and place, and consequently are less fundamental and invariant than the principles themselves. There is some possibility of being reasonably comprehensive with respect to principles; none, with respect to concrete proposals.

Principles for social action must be based on both ultimate values and a conception of the nature of man and the world. Liberalism takes freedom of the individual—really, of the family—as its ultimate value. It conceives of man as a responsible individual who is egocentric, in the sense not of being selfish or self-centered but rather of placing greater reliance on his own values than on those of his neighbors. It takes as the major problem of modern society the achievement of liberty and individual responsibility in a world that requires the co-ordination of many millions of people in production to make full use of modern knowledge and technology. The challenge is to reconcile individual freedom with widespread interdependence.

The liberal answer derives from the elementary—yet even today little understood—proposition that both sides to an economic transaction can benefit from it; that a gain to a purchaser need not be at the expense of a loss to the seller. If the transaction is voluntary and informed, both sides benefit; the buyer gets something he values more than whatever he gives up, and so does the seller. In consequence, voluntary exchange is a way to get cooperation among individuals without coercion. The reliance on voluntary exchange, which means on a free market mechanism, is thus central to the liberal creed.

The working model which embodies this vision of a society organized through voluntary exchange is a free private enterprise exchange economy. The elementary social unit—the family or household—is generally too small for efficient use of modern productive techniques. Accordingly, the productive unit takes the form of an enterprise which purchases productive services—labor, the use of capital, and so on—from households and other enterprises and sells the goods or services it produces to households and other enterprises. The introduction of such enterprises does not change the strictly voluntary and individual character of the cooperation, provided two conditions are satisfied: first, the enterprises are private, which means that the ultimate locus of authority and responsibility is an individual or a group of individuals; second, individuals are free to sell or not sell their services or to buy or not buy products from particular enterprises, which means, also, that they are free to establish new enterprises.

The final point deserves special emphasis in view of widespread misunderstanding of it. ‘Free’ in the liberal conception of free enterprise means freedom to establish enterprises, not freedom of established enterprises to do whatever they want. This is one of those familiar cases in which absolute freedom is impossible because the freedom of some limits the freedom of others: the freedom of existing enterprises to do whatever they want, including combining to keep new entrants out or to fix prices and divide markets, may limit the freedom of others to establish new enterprises or to make the best bargain they can. When such a conflict arises, the liberal tradition regards freedom of entry and of competition as basic; it therefore justifies state action to preserve competition and to make selling a product of higher quality or at a lower price the only means whereby existing enterprises can prevent new enterprises from being established. The most difficult practical problem in this area and one on which liberals have spoken with many tongues is combinations among laborers—the trade union problem.

In the free enterprise exchange economy envisaged by liberalism, the primary role of government is to preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, providing a stable monetary framework, and, as just noted, keeping markets free. Beyond this there are only three major grounds on which government intervention is justified: (1) ‘natural monopoly’ or similar market imperfections; (2) the existence of substantial ‘neighborhood effects’; (3) protection of children and other irresponsible individuals.

An exchange is ‘voluntary’ only when essentially equivalent alternatives exist; when an individual can choose whether to buy from one enterprise or another, to work for one enterprise or another. Monopoly means the absence of alternatives and thus is incompatible with strictly voluntary exchange. Monopoly may arise from combinations among enterprises in circumstances where competition is entirely feasible, and, as already noted, liberal tradition justifies state intervention to preserve competition in such cases. But monopoly may also be ‘natural,’ as in the textbook examples of a single spring providing drinking water, or of a product subject to such large economies of scale that the most efficient productive unit is large enough to serve the whole market. The only available alternatives are then all bad: government regulation, government ownership, or private monopoly, and the problem is to choose the least of these evils. As might be expected, liberals have no clear-cut answer. Henry Simons, after observing in the United States the consequences of government regulation of such alleged natural monopolies as the railroads, concluded that government ownership was the least of the evils when monopoly was inevitable. [German economist] Walter Eucken, after observing in Germany the consequences of government ownership, concluded that government control was the least of the evils. And some have argued that in a dynamic world private monopoly may well be, citing the case of the regulation of transportation in the United States as their prime example. The Interstate Commerce Commission was established to protect the public against the railroads when railroads probably did have a large element of natural monopoly. The development of highway and air transport has largely eliminated any natural monopoly element in railroads, yet instead of the abolition of the Interstate Commerce Commission, government control has been extended to these other transportation media. The ICC has become a means of protecting the railroads from the competition of trucks instead of the public from the absence of competition. Fortunately for the possibility of a liberal society, the area within which natural monopoly is a serious problem is exceedingly limited, so that no large amount of government intervention is called for on this score. In practice, the claim of natural monopoly is more often an excuse for intervention desired on other grounds than a valid justification for intervention.

A different kind of threat to strictly voluntary exchange arises from the so-called ‘neighborhood effect.’ This occurs when the action of one individual imposes significant costs on other individuals for which it is not feasible to make him compensate them or yields significant gains to other individuals for which it is not feasible to make them compensate him. A simple example is that of an individual polluting a stream. He has in effect forced other individuals further down the stream to exchange good water for bad; they clearly would have been willing to do so for a price; but it is not feasible to make this exchange the subject of voluntary agreement. Another, rather different example, is education. The education of a child is regarded as benefiting not only the child and his parents but also other members of society, since some minimum level of education is a prerequisite for a stable and democratic society. Yet it is not feasible to identify the particular individuals benefited by the education of any particular child, much less the money value of the benefit, and so to charge for the services rendered. In consequence there is justification on liberal grounds for the state requiring some minimum amount of education for all children, even though this is above the amount parents would otherwise provide, and for meeting some of the cost of education from taxes imposed on all members of society.

Of course, all actions of an individual involve some ‘unborne costs’ and ‘inappropriable benefits’ to third parties. It is always a question of judgment whether these are sufficiently great in any particular case to justify state intervention: the state too will be plagued by the difficulties of identifying costs and benefits that prevent voluntary exchange and there are other costs of state action. The liberal philosophy thus gives no hard and fast line separating appropriate from inappropriate state action in this area. But it does emphasize that, in deciding any particular case, one general cost of state action—one general neighborhood effect, as it were—must always be taken into account; namely, that the extension of state action involves an encroachment on individual freedom. The liberal regards this as a count against any proposal for state action, though by no means a fatal obstacle to it, and hence requires a clear net balance of gains over other costs before regarding the state action as justified.

The third ground on which liberalism justifies state intervention derives from an ambiguity in the ultimate objective rather than from the difficulty of achieving fully voluntary exchange. The belief in freedom is for ‘responsible’ individuals; and children and insane people cannot be regarded as ‘responsible.’ In general, this problem is avoided for children by treating the family as the basic unit of society and so regarding the parents as responsible for their children. In considerable measure, however, this procedure rests on expediency rather than principle. The problem of drawing a reasonable line between action justified on these paternalistic grounds and action that conflicts with the freedom of responsible individuals is clearly one to which no fully satisfactory—and certainly no simple—answer can be given.

A few additional examples may clarify the bearing of these principles in judging particular acts of social policy. Consider first a group of measures that clearly conflict with liberal principles: tariffs, direct controls of imports and exports, exchange control, general price controls. None of these can be justified on any of the grounds for state intervention that we have listed. Each represents an interference with the freedom of individuals to engage in any transactions that they want to, which do not have substantial effects on third parties, and thus involve a direct interference with essential freedoms. An extreme case which brings out this feature strikingly is the ‘tourist allowance’ incorporated in the exchange control regulations of a number of countries; as the Economist puts it, ‘it sets a limit on the length of time that even the most economical British resident can choose to spend abroad without asking the permission of some bureaucrat.’ Finally, most of these measures prevent the market from operating effectively and thus threaten the heart of the liberal system. For example, if a legal maximum price is established below the level that would otherwise prevail, a ’shortage’ will inevitably follow (as in housing under rent control); some method other than the free market will have to be used to ‘ration’ the available amount; and further government intervention replacing the market is set in train.

A second rather different example is medicine. As already noted, significant neighborhood effects justify substantial ‘public health’ activities: maintaining the purity of water, assuring proper sewage disposal, controlling contagious diseases. There is little or no justification on these grounds for state intervention into private medicine—the care and treatment of individuals. Under liberal principles, this is a function the market can and should perform. To the argument of the proponent of socialized medicine that there is great uncertainty about possible medical bills, the liberal will reply that the market is perfectly capable of providing private insurance; if people don’t want to pay the premium, that is their free choice. To the argument that people don’t get as much medical service as is ‘good’ for them, the liberal will reply that each man should judge for himself—not that he is necessarily the best judge but that he should make his own mistakes; insofar as we think he is making the wrong decision, there is no objection to telling him what we think and trying to persuade him, but there is no justification for making his decision.

A third example is public housing. It may be that certain types of housing, e.g., dense slum districts, impose higher costs of police and fire protection on the community. This literal ‘neighborhood effect,’ since its source can be identified, would justify higher taxes on such property than on others to meet these extra costs; it hardly justifies subsidies to housing. The main argument for public subsidy to housing is surely paternalistic: people ‘need’ or ‘deserve’ better housing, and it is appropriate to use public funds to provide housing. The liberal will object on two different levels. Given that some people are to be subsidized, why not give them the subsidy in general purchasing power and let them spend it as they will? Why say to them, we will give you a gift if you take it in the form of housing but not otherwise? Does this not involve an unnecessary restriction on their freedom? Second, he will question the redistribution of income itself that is involved in such a program—and, indeed, one advantage of making the subsidy explicit is that it would make clear what groups are being subsidized. Government relief of poverty, the liberal will support and welcome, primarily on the explicitly paternalistic ground of taking care of the irresponsible. But the more or less indiscriminate transfer of income involved in large scale public housing schemes, he will regard as undermining individual responsibility. The way to reduce inequality, he will urge, is not by the misleading palliative of sharing the wealth, but by improving the workings of the market, strengthening competition, and widening opportunities for individuals to make the most of their own qualities.

These two final examples illustrate how the central virtue of a liberal society is at the same time a major source of the objections to it: a liberal society gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want or thinks is ‘good’ for them; it makes it equally difficult for the benevolent and the malevolent to shape other people in their own image. At bottom of most arguments against the market is lack of belief in freedom—at least for other people—as an end.

[British philosopher] Adam Smith provides an excellent summary of the preceding discussion of the role of the state in a liberal society: ‘Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understanding: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.’

Since the sixties, Noam Chomsky has been calling the United States an imperialist nation and continues to do so, now saying U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are imperialist. The purpose of Mr. Chomsky’s’ philosophy is to destroy the legitimacy of any and all acts of force by an ethical, lawful state. In essence, Mr. Chomsky asserts that such a state is identical to barbarians who use force for self-interest, i.e. dictators and fascists. By doing this, Mr. Chomsky is willing to put heroes such as policemen and soldiers on the same level as villains such as murderers and terrorists.

According to Mr. Chomsky’s twisted reasoning, “…torture has been routine practice from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and then beyond, as the imperial ventures of the “infant empire” — as George Washington called the new Republic” (The Torture Memos, Chomsky, May 24, 2009). He believes that George Bush was simply following some “secret” mandate from Washington to expand the empire through the use of torture. To buttress his case, he cites the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, “Adams as the grand strategist who laid the foundations for the Bush Doctrine: the doctrine that ‘expansion is the path to security’” (The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism, Chomsky, December 3, 2009). Yes, John Adams (1735 – 1826) is responsible for the War on Terror, not the 19 terrorists who orchestrated the takeover of four commercial planes on September 11, 2001, killing thousands of innocent people. You can learn a lot at college.

Mr. Chomsky slanders Washington as a vile Machiavellian: “A prince that acquires new territories and removes the natives to give his people room will be remembered as the father of the nation (Machiavelli).’ And George Washington agreed. He wanted to be the father of the nation. His view was that ‘the gradual extension of our settlement will as certainly cause the savage as the wolf to retire, both being beasts of prey, though they differ in shape.” (Modern-Day American Imperialism: Middle East and Beyond, Chomsky, Boston University, April 24, 2008)

Mr. Chomsky bases this statement from Letter to James Duane dated September 7, 1783.  In his letter, Washington was appealing for a non-violent resolution with the Indians and to find peaceful means of living with them on a common land, not advocating war. “As the Country, is large enough to contain us all; and as we are disposed to be kind to them and to partake of their Trade…draw a veil over what is past and establish a boundary line between them and us beyond which we will endeavor to restrain our People from Hunting or Settling.” Washington’s intent to Duane was clear: peaceful means of coexistence.

His thought that directly precedes Mr. Chomsky lifted quote is this, “I am clear in my opinion, … of being upon good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country; which as we have already experienced is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest…”  In other words, if you make war with the Indians, they will scatter in the country side and return to hunt you down, as they are to be respected as is the wolf.

Mr. Chomsky lacks credibility because he has to rely on fabrication of events in order to support his opinions. Fabrication is part of the leftist anti-War movement which is really the leftist/socialist “Make America Surrender” movement.

The second part is asserting that equal actions (war and terrorism) are equal in ethics.  Everyone agrees that murder is evil, and murder is caused by killing. However, not all killing is evil—certainly, accidents and self-defense stand out as two exceptions.  Chomsky must assert, for his reasoning to be sound, all value judgments can be based on actions alone and not on intentions; he confuses actions and intentions. In contrast, Western ethics are quite clear in saying that a person can commit the very same action with more than one intent. Every child knows that you can step on someone’s toes with or without harmful intent, yet the action is the same.

Here is perfect example of his inability to separate actions and ethics: “…the most elementary principle of just war theory, universality. Those who cannot accept this principle should have the decency to keep silent about matters of right and wrong, or just war”(Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 2003, pg 202). He follows this assertion with the question, “Have Cuba and Nicaragua been entitled to set off bombs in Washington, New York, and Miami in self-defense against ongoing terrorist attack?”  His point is that any and all states have equal right to the use of force or no one has it, “universality.” This is a complete failure on his part to differentiate between fascist dictators and communist death-squads from those who have no other self-interested motive other than justice.

The greatest danger of Mr. Chomsky’s anti-war ethics and lies is that it fuels the anti-war movement. Moreover, it paves the way for the college student to believe that power exists without justice as a limiting factor. Thus, making it moral to quest for power for power’s own sake, which is foundational to Marxist thought. But all power must be subservient to justice and the law, especially when American national security is at stake.

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by Victor Padilla

The diversity of academic scholarship ensures the diversity of a student body. Scholarships for sports excellence, community service and academic merit allow for a rich pool of talent. While these endowments are meant to level out the playing for all, minority, female and hardship-facing students have access to many scholarships that reap higher dollar amounts in exchange for lower (or no) grade point averages .

Such racial coddling and rewarding of hardships only serve as a detriment to women and minorities. By showing students that less is more, we’re encouraging sub-par academic performances among ethnic groups and perpetuating a culture of victim-hood.

The gap between hard work, pay off and its correlation to race is evident in the scholarships offered by my college. The awards allotted to minorities and women under the “special criteria” category substantially out pay the “general academic merit” awards that require higher GPAs.

One example is the scholarship endowed by the National Coalition of 100 Black Women. The scholarship awards $500 to a minority female student with a 2.5 GPA. Coincidently (or not), the Grant Campus Longevity scholarship awards only $100 to any students bearing a 3.6 GPA. Less is more.

Another example is that of the Mena Ramirez Memorial scholarship which awards $1,000 to a Latina woman (double whammy here) and requires no minimum grade point average. Conversely, the Vincent O’Leary Scholarship awards a comparatively low-ball $350 to any student carrying a 3.7 GPA. Less is much, much more.

Single mothers are also lauded for low performances. The Jeannette Weiner Memorial shells out $500 to a “single, divorced or legally separated, female parent with dependent child/children” with a 2.8 GPA. There are no scholarships bestowed specifically to well-to-do, non-deadbeat, child support-paying fathers. Less, less.

Then there are scholarships that clearly reward victim-hood over heroism. The Liz Bowlay scholarship gives $500 to a cancer survivor with no GPA required. In stark contrast, the John Vigiano Memorial scholarship awards $200 to FDNY firefighters EMTs, police officers and combat veterans – who still have to maintain a respectable 3.25 GPA. Cancer survivors deserve support and compassion, but does illness really rank over serving and protecting our communities?

Although I believe that everyone innately means well, we’re actually imposing a detriment to social progress. By coddling to minorities, women and those with hardships, we’re suspending them in perceptions and mentalities of victim-hood. We’re saying, “What poor little blacks and broads. Have ye pity on them”. In this way, the effort to stop victimization overcompensates itself repeatedly and ends up victimizing them even more.

Understandably, the amounts of these awards are totally up to the donors’ discretion. More responsibility must be taken, however, in making sure that the award amounts are relative to the sizes and merits of other scholarships. This will encourage all students to do better, reduce perceptions of racial coddling, and help break the cycle of victim-hood.

While the scholarships offered at my school don’t represent what happens at every school (and surely there are scholarships for minorities and women that are more academically competitive), they’re definitely indicative of what goes on in our culture.

By not holding minority and female students to the same standards, we’re telling them that it’s OK to underachieve. By setting such a low bar, we’re insulting and telling them that we don’t expect them to do better. We’re perpetuating scholastic lagging and paying them more for it. We’re teaching them that less is more.

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[Because of the extraordinary response to Maj. Jim Gant's paper, One Tribe At A Time, I've decided to leave it up all week in the "Number One Slot."  My ongoing interview with Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai will pick again next Friday; the Chief has been in Kabul all week, meeting with U.S. and British commanders, and we haven't had time to speak. So all's well that ends well!]

The downloadable and open-able .pdf of One Tribe is here, on the right. On a personal note, let me say again that I consider it a privilege to offer this document in full, not only because of my great respect for Maj. Jim Gant, who has lived and breathed this Tribal Engagement idea for years, but for the piece itself and for the influence it is already having within the U.S. military and policymaking community.

One Tribe At A Time (85) Major Jim Gant’s “One Tribe At A Time” to your computer

One Tribe At A Time is by no means a super-pro Beltway think tank piece. What it is, in my opinion, is an idea whose time has come, put forward by an officer who has lived it in the field with his Special Forces team members–and proved it can be done. And an officer, by the way, who is ready this instant to climb aboard a helicopter to go back to Afghanistan and do it again.

Questions and comments

At the moment, Maj. Gant is at Fort Polk, Louisiana, getting ready to deploy to Iraq, where he will lead an Iraqi commando battalion. He’ll be available in the meantime, however (depending of course upon time demands), to answer questions or take criticisms. Just respond in the comments section below. And I myself have further thoughts I’d like to offer on this subject in the coming weeks.

Here’s a quick one:

The most common response I anticipate to the Tribal Engagement concept (and it’s a valid criticism, shared by Maj. Gant) will go something like this: “Yeah, this is a great idea–but where are we going to find the men to implement it?”

Men for the job

Tribal Engagement Team members, should this concept be adopted, would be called upon to commit for multiple tours under the loneliest, harshest and most hazardous conditions imaginable. To succeed with the tribe they are assigned to, they would have to demonstrate impeccable combat credentials and, even rarer, possess the “people skills” to establish and maintain rapport across a cultural chasm—Western to Tribal Afghan—that has defeated every outside entity from Alexander the Great to the British and the Soviets. The task would be extraordinarily difficult, dirty and dangerous, and in the end would almost certainly be rewarded neither by career advancement (because the enterprise would be unprecedented and outside the normal channels of military promotion) nor by recognition from the public at large, who in all probability will rarely hear of it and wouldn’t understand or appreciate it if they did.

How can we identify and attract such men?

Do you remember this tiny, three-line ad from the London Times, December 29, 1913?

Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honour and recognition in case of success.

5000 volunteers queued up in response to this advertisement, posted by Ernest Shackleton seeking crewmen for his Antarctic expedition.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think our young American warriors would respond with any less enthusiasm than their British cousins did a century ago to a similar call. Do you?

Again, many thanks to Maj. Jim Gant for writing One Tribe At A Time, to Printer Bowler for designing and editing the .pdf and to Callie Oettinger for managing the outreach. I’m proud to put this document in circulation with as much reach as this modest blog can offer. We all hope it proves of interest and of use.

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The US/CIA experience in Vietnam should give us plenty of evidence that there are more advantages to running COIN operations in today’s global war on terror than in conducting conventional warfare option. It is even more evident that if we were to plan and execute a sound ‘pacification’ plan in Iraq or Afghanistan, then there must be some elements of COIN at play to help balance out how we mitigate growing insurgent operations. They are smarter and faster at learning U.S. order of battle so how we fight is not a big secret.

In Vietnam the same problem was encountered by the CIA as the North Vietnamese already had extensive documentation of CIA doctrine in conducting air drops, employing stay-behind units, etc. without the benefit of helping that country make changes from within. Obviously, the CIA was fairly confident it could continue to make drops and lose team after team yet they did not factor in the possibility their teams had been compromised time after time. Maybe sheer dumb luck made some missions successful and still, they were failures for a long-term solution.

First, the CIA did not know the North Vietnamese had been consistently studying its methodology and quickly executing countermeasures and mostly obtained this information from the Chinese. Second, incursions carried out into a closed society must accompany a much more comprehensive plan. Once on the ground, units would have to depend on their limited training and then if they landed close enough to populated areas they were instructed to stay low for short periods of time gathering information. But then there was no plan in how to approach locals other than maybe clerics or family members and that alone always posed a great risk to the team members, thus really not accomplishing much but to get them killed or captured and tried.

There was little consideration for exploiting political and ideological angles within the population; at least just not right away. Eventually this reality would manifest itself fully. The suggestion by the CIA to President Kennedy was to engage the population with these psychological techniques, to create the illusion that there was a nascent revolutionary movement at play within North Vietnam and create the threat from within. This approach would have been a proper complement to paramilitary operations, since that could have been the second stage; to actually carry out clandestine operations, sabotage, and a direct attack on the government machine.

There was some of this work involved in the post-invasion stability operations in Japan and Germany, and these are two success stories that need to be studied more. When the allies moved in looked around and started to guide these countries into a post-war, they already had a plan, the intelligence base to tell them where to begin securing the population (borders) supervising local police and basically keeping track of everything the locals did before a turn-over could take place.

So how do we carry out these incursions and do we conduct part sabotage/assassination (just as the Israelis did) while we conduct aggressive PSYOPS campaigns? Even disinformation and propaganda efforts must carry a purpose and that is to engender in the local population the need to fight for their future. Initially the CIA’s intention was to help the Vietnamese become independent from any foreign intervention in the end and this is the basis for stability operations.

The employment of irregular forces (indigenous) is of great importance because they have a vested interest in not only fighting an insurgency such as Iraq, but also to gradually wean themselves from foreign intervention, which is the main purpose of introducing stability operations (nation-building). This has not always been a well carried out concept, as we seem to engage countries with cultures totally different from ours and often we fail to recognize that those differences will affect the outcome of any conflict and how that culture will survive post-conflict/invasion.

The absence of the rule of law is the first factor that must be either established or maintained if already present in the targeted environment. Efforts of pacification were disrupted constantly by the VCI by threatening those people and agencies working on re-building the country with military attacks. Though the allies were able to fight the VCI successfully and provide protection for these activities imagine any NGO working in the field or that matter civil affairs unit while under fire. The first thing that should be provided to the non-combatant population is security. They either get it from their government with foreign assistance or they fall under the rule of insurgent groups and historically the populations do not well at all. That was a critical development in Algeria where the French government allowed more than one political fringe group to develop and begin conducting counterintelligence operations separate from government support then had to try and control more than one group with civilians at greatest risk who were ultimately main victims of hostilities. The French allowed Algerian populations to be stripped of their identities in order to make counterintelligence efforts more difficult and people were chased away from their homes by all factions so there was no security for them.

The Iraq parallel

We’ve tried this endeavor before and had been successful which I wonder if much thought was given to the application of the principles involved in stability operations in addition to the rule of law is the continuity of governance, this includes social and government services, local services, trash pickup, electrical power, potable water, police, border/population control, etc. The greatest examples are post-invasion Germany and Japan. In both cases military police were deployed to conduct law enforcement operations while there was a controlled environment of the population and local government that enabled social growth and the beginning of rebuilding their infrastructure. This could not be done if hostilities were still a consideration, from either conventional or insurgent forces. In the case of Iraq those elements of security and of continuity of governance were absent, combat forces thrust into the realm of law enforcement duties were lacking in training and experience; the difference between fighting a shooting war and maintaining law and order have had a long-term impact on life here. Reconstruction efforts can easily slow down or stop in the presence of violence, whether from insurgent activity or rampant criminality or a combination of both. This has been the case in Iraq.

The VCI also operated openly in populated areas unlike insurgents in Iraq, who opt for a more covert approach but then in some areas they do make themselves known throughout neighborhoods. Iraq insurgents don’t show the highly organized military organization as did the VCI in that the Iraqis did not form a shadow government to run counter to the local government but then there was none to speak of for a while so I guess the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) at first tried to establish a fresh government once Saddam’s regime elements were removed causing a chaotic situation which grew out of control.

I wonder, and would like to get some feedback on this, if some of you who have worked in this field directly could clarify how coalition forces could have gained more ground here by utilizing a COIN approach after the invasion and early enough in the game. Before the mass exodus of government personnel, the sacking of businesses and attacks on police stations and police elements – and I do consider the fact that the potential for those attacks was unfortunately ignored as a possibility – would have been more advantageous because the people of Iraq, though living in authoritarian but controlled environment, would have been more keen on participating in their own liberation afterwards. COIN can easily influence positive or negative political and social change in a country and an effective tool to aid in establishing the stability process.
A combined approach

I don’t want to complain without offering some sort of theoretical plan just as a mental exercise. I could see introducing COIN operations during conventional hostilities to help build an intelligence foundation we could use once things de-escalate enough to begin the stability phase. I’m not saying that using elite units to carry out sabotage missions while others carry out pure SPYOPS within the population could not work. First we would have to link up with the locals and build the necessary networks and we know from experience that native forces and other government structures will have to come into play because the nature of nation building is to return that country to an improved state of peace.

By removing the threat to security in this effort we’re increasing our success rate, of course, this cannot be edged in stone as the nature of warfare is ever changing and not every threat to our operations can be mitigated ahead of time. Perhaps there should be a series of scenarios, preferably worst case scenarios already worked out to aid in the introduction of NGOs as well as a trained and capable constabulary waiting to deploy. Combat troops should have some exposure to law enforcement training but that is not their main purpose and only a civilian constabulary should be in place to assist with these duties.

In essence, had we employed of COIN action before the loss of law and order as it stood before the invasion, the overall environment might have been more accommodating to a continuation of routine life in Iraq while helping them re-build. It’s just a theory but COIN would have been more effective in pushing the Iraqis into wanting their situation to return to some level of normalcy. Just like the Northern Vietnam PSYOPS campaigns, the objective would be to create a real or illusionary revolution or political movement to get the population to be more receptive to change and to reject helping the insurgency. A strong government in place is another necessary element which did not exist in Iraq post-invasion unlike the Vietnamese who had at least strong leadership from the top and was able to rally the people to be part of the fight. This could only be done with the balanced combination of COIN and local support. I think if this is not currently the doctrine to use COIN along with all other military and clandestine resources then that could be the future of warfare; prepare them ahead of time for what’s to come – whatever many outcomes we can devise – unlike current doctrine which to me, appears to mitigate problems as they come up…little or no vision of potential issues.

Sources:
The Coalition Provisional Authority’s Experience with Governance in Iraq, Celeste Ward, United States Institute of Peace, May 2005, www.usip.org
The Coalition Provisional Authority’s Experience with Public Security in Iraq, Robert Perito, United States Institute of Peace, April 2005, www.usip.org
U.S. Police in Peace and Stability Operations, Robert Perito, United States Institute of Peace, August 2007, www.usip.org

Targeting the Taliban
By Michael Fowler

The simplest and safest way to thwart an enemy’s ability to conduct war is to destroy their supply lines. This is an old and useful tactic from the time of King Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562) of Babylon. His armies would surround their hapless victims who had taken refuge in forts, cut off all supplies, including water and food, until famine weakened their army, and then attack. This is a brutal but effective military ploy. We have been in Afghanistan for eight years—and neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has effectively utilized this strategy.

The solution to winning the war in Afghanistan is to destroy the Taliban’s ability to make war, causing the decimation of the Taliban war machine. The Taliban’s supply lines are the poppy fields. Eliminating those fields as a source of income would strike a fatal blow to the Taliban.

The Taliban are mafia drug-lords wrapped in Middle-Eastern freedom-fighter apparel. They generate $100 to $150 million annually by imposing “taxes” on opium farmers.Selling and exporting opium raises $700 to $800 million annually for the Taliban. This allows for the purchase of arms for insurgency, terrorism and black-market tyranny. Worldwide, Afghan heroin fuels 93 percent of a $65 billion trade, far surpassing all of Mexico, Southeast Asia and South America combined. The United Nations estimates between 15 to 21 million people use this highly addictive drug. Afghan heroin alone kills over 100,000 people each year, outweighing the U.S. combat losses of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Grenada and Vietnam combined.

Our current policy of agricultural transformation allows the cultivation of opium poppies until economic incentives prompt farmers to take up other crops such as pomegranates and grapes. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2009 Annual Report, opium production has doubled under U.S. occupation and is so bountiful that the Taliban has reportedly stored 12,000 tons of opium, which can supply the entire world for three years. We need a new plan.

If the poppy fields in Afghanistan were eradicated, this would annihilate the Taliban’s primary source of funding. This in turn would eliminate their ability to corrupt the Karzi government, buy arms, cause terror, protect al-Qaeda and buy foreign influence. It is the single, clearest solution and would end the havoc in southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan while devastating world heroin trafficking in a matter of weeks. This is a win-win strategy.

Proponents against the eradication of Afghanistan’s poppy fields argue that world demand will only increase production in other areas, making poppy destruction a useless endeavor. “If Afghanistan were suddenly wiped out as a producer of opium—by bad weather or a blight or eradication efforts—other parts of the world would simply emerge as new producers,” said Founding Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance Ethan Nadelmann. This assumption, while based on the law of supply and demand, ignores the difficulties associated with expanding any type of production from clearing and preparing new land and setting up irrigation. Moreover, counter-drug operations performed in the United States and elsewhere use crop eradication as a means. Focused on the drug factor alone, Mr. Nadelmann misses the larger point: Destroying Afghan’s poppy fields would bankrupt the Taliban, preventing them from resupplying arms and killing Americans.

Others believe increased Taliban recruitment is the primary objection to field destruction. U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are both on record saying that destroying the poppy fields would strengthen the Taliban and that every disenfranchised farmer would become a Taliban recruit. That may be the case with the devastation of one or two fields, but it will not be the case with total destruction of any and all poppy fields.

A counterargument to this is that when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan almost three decades ago, opium production increased in response to increased arms expenditures. This shows that the economic needs of the insurgent army drive production. Moreover, eight-years of permissiveness have allowed the Taliban to strengthen their forces to an all-time high. In fact, 2009 was the highest loss of life for U.S. and NATO forces. Permitting opium production did not eliminate or curb the Taliban. Another point is that when seasonal cultivation ends, the Taliban gains strengths as most of the opium farmers become fighters and take up arms after the harvest.

One of the fiercest arguments against the destruction of Afghanistan poppy fields is that if opium production is eliminated it will destroy the Afghanistan economy. First, no one makes that argument for Mexican drug-dealers or marijuana cultivators in California. Second, if the crops were removed the Taliban would collapse, Afghanistan would become safe and foreign investment money would flow into that country. More to the point, Afghan farmer’s gross revenues from opium is about $1 billion dollars according to 2007 U.N. estimates, while our 2007 U.S. Military operations cost taxpayers $35 billion. Therefore, the plan should be: burn the fields, crush the Taliban, send the boys home, send one billion in aid and save $34 billion a year.

The U.S. dominates the air in Afghanistan. Poppy fields grow in full sunlight, and forests do not obscure the poppy fields. Eradication efforts will not be hampered by a lack of discovery. Modern herbicides are quite safe and effective, as well as the use of tractors to plow the fields under. When the Afghan farmer is faced with the choice of taking U.S. assistance to grow legal crops or face total eradication of his crops and imprisonment, he will be far more motivated than he currently is to switch his crops.

In the past, the United States did not have the ability to eradicate those fields. Now, we are the occupier of Afghanistan and have the capacity and the duty to destroy this trade. Every poppy that grows empowers the Taliban with more artillery that will be used to kill American soldiers and Marines. No one has more power than Mr. Obama to dispatch the largest source of heroin export in the world. If he really wants get out of Afghanistan and cares about our troops, he must destroy those fields.

-Michael Fowler is the director of Veterans for Academic Freedom, a former Force Recon Marine, instructor of Christian apologetics, author and talk-radio host.

Vietnam, the Media and Lies

by Bill  Laurie

“There were some worthy, honest, and intelligent reporters in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Dickey Chapelle, Robert Shaplen, Liz Trotta, Peter Braestrup, Hugh Mulligan, Keyes Beech, Neil Davis, Denis Warner, were among those who objectively, and without resort to sensationalism, conveyed elements of truth, parts of the puzzle, to the American public. Their efforts notwithstanding, the fog of nonsense spewed out by others obscured and effectively censored honest, logical, comprehensive reporting, denying the American public information needed to develop accurately informed opinions. News media malfeasance was complemented by brilliant manipulative Hanoi propaganda, and a corresponding U.S. government inability or unwillingness to make a case for its own efforts. The American public could not hope to understand what was taking place, and does not today.

No one, least of all South Vietnamese, American, or other allied forces, was oblivious of or happy with the endemic corruption and incompetence, yet, because of flawed and narrowly focused “reporting,” the story of South Vietnam’s progress and improvement remains untold. American reporters never wrote or televised stories about DR, Phan Quang Dan, Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, Gen. Nguyen Khoa Nam, the 81st Biet Kich, the Hau Nghia RF, Col. Mach Van Truong, Gen. Le Minh Dao, Tran Ngoc Chau, Col. Ha Mai Viet, writer Nguyen Manh Con, or RVN Marine Sergeant Van Luom, who stood alone on the Dong Ha Bridge and knocked out the lead tank in an NVA armor column with a shoulder-fired antitank missile, an act, in the words of an American witness, of inspiring “defiance and bravery.”
Knowing little of this, the American public was understandably disenchanted.

The news media seldom, if ever, accompanied American or Australian troops on MEDCAPS or DENTCAPs (Dental Civic Action Projects, extremely welcome to rural people with painful tooth conditions). In the first six months of 1969, more than 200,000 villagers received medical care and 15,000 received dental care from the 3rd U.S. Marine division alone. Instead, the American public was subjected to repeated coverage of the My Lai atrocity, which, like the photo of Gen. Loan, was considered symbolic and representative of the entire war.

Wolfgang Leonhard, a Soviet communist agent before defecting to the West, was tasked with analyzing Western news media stories. He and his colleagues were puzzled over superficial news coverage predominating in the newspapers they read. “Generally, we could only shake our heads over them, and often we were exceedingly disappointed. There was usually not even mention of the really significant events that were causing endless discussions amongst ourselves and on which we were passionately eager to read a serious Western commentary. ‘They don’t seem to know what is going on’ was the main theme of our conversations when we talked to each other on the subject.”

One of the more tragic ironies of Vietnam and the news media failure is that there were many fascinating and positive stories to be told. The American people would have appreciated seeing hour-long specials on, for example, U.S. Marine Corps CAP units, a squad of 14 Marines living in one hamlet for their entire tour, working with and defending “their “ hamlet alongside local PF. USMC CAPs had a higher voluntary extension rate than among their line unit counterparts. Why? It would have made for a good story. It would have been equally enlightening to see programs showing U.S. troops helping an orphanage, or volunteering to teach English. The American public deserved to know about a VNAF Skyraider pilot who had been shot down five times, and continued flying, despite his several fused vertebrae. They deserved to know that American forces could take on the NVA, in their own backyard, and prevail. Something might have been learned from Americans who volunteered for three, four, five, six, or even seven tours as advisors, choosing to serve in Vietnam again and again, not as bloodthirsty and uncaring killers, but as very normal, decent human beings who could eloquently and convincingly explain their motivations, which was ultimately to see Vietnamese people have a life of peace and decent government. Geopolitics and the Cold War, all relatively abstract concepts, were not a primary concern, taking a back seat to basic human concerns for that which is fair.

Americans would have benefited by hearing of Captain Nguyen Quy An, Lt. Vu Tung, and Warrant Officer Nguyen Quang Hien of the famed 219 Kingbees. Were it not for the action of these men, John Litter, Bob Stratliff and Wiley L . Craney, by their own testimony, would have been killed or captured after their helicopter had been shot down in Laos. They were rescued by Captain An and his crew while under fire and surrounded by NVA. Captain An would later lose both his hands by keeping control of a burning helicopter, saving the lives of others on board who would have died had the flame-engulfed chopper fallen from the sky.

Americans were mesmerized by the NVA’s (North Vietnamese Army) 25-day hold on Hue City in 1968, and presumably would be similarly impressed by the 92nd Ranger Battalion 400-day stand at the remote base of Tong Le Chan. Completely cut off, resupplied only by air, the 92nd held, with ambulatory wounded refusing evacuation. Had an NVA unit held out for over 400 days, surrounded and cut off, it would have made headline news. The 92nd Rangers did it and nothing was said.  Had a handful of VC (Viet Cong) high school boys held off an allied attack, it would also would have made headlines. A handful of high school boys did resist VC/NVA forces at the “Truong Tieu Sinh Quan,” a junior high school military academy for sons of RVNAF (South Vietnamese) military fatalities. They resisted to the end in 1975, with twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys sending younger kids home, staying in their barricaded school and fighting on. Many of them were killed and when the Communists came in, they fought them. The Communists could not get into that academy. NVA forces eventually surrounded the school, threatened to level it with rockets, kill everyone inside, and negotiated a surrender. This last stand would presumably have had all the drama and “human interest” for a “big story,” and had VC adolescents been involved opposing RVNAF, the story would undoubtedly have been trumpeted to the American public. To this day, next to nothing has been said or printed, and the cadets at Truong Tieu Sinh Quan are not even a footnote to history.

Coverage of these stories could have gone on and should have gone side-by-side with negative reporting on corruption, civilian casualties, drug use, and other presumed universal evils of American involvement in Southeast Asia. It is neither suggested nor desired that blemishes or morally repugnant aspects be ignored or covered up. It is asserted, however, that it would have been far more honest to have contrasted examples of deplorable behavior with other aspects, not in the least rare, of which many Vietnam veterans are familiar with and participated in. Fairness and objectivity also demand that equal coverage be applied to the VC/NVA shortcomings and ruthless excesses shown in proportion to their existence and occurrence. Had all this been done, the American public would have been able to understand something, and certainly much more than the psuedo-understanding derived from the “shoot-em-up-bang-bang” reporting they were continually exposed to. For any number of reasons, “positive” news did little for a reporter’s career or ego, a career based on finding or inventing “stories” accentuating the negative while heightening public discontent.

Ignorance of military and Southeast Asia matters, of communist revolutionary warfare, fueled by potential for lucrative career advancement, unwilling or unable to report on South Vietnamese or Laotian troops except in cases of failure, apparently enthused by the visual impact of war and the destruction it causes, sometimes disdainful of South Vietnamese if not American troops while ignoring Australian, Korean, Thai, and New Zeland forces, the news media proved incapable of depicting Vietnam, and Hanoi’s War, in its entirety . The American public saw the same “bang-bang” every year, and were misled into assuming nothing had changed, nothing was accomplished. Allied temporary defeats were portrayed as permanent setbacks, while victories and accomplishments went unreported, or were, with smug theatrics, cast aside as government propaganda.

News media misrepresentation not only misled and uninformed the American public, but also prohibited its ability to think and make logical inferences on its own.

In the final analysis, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Hanoi’s war, and American involvement could not be, and cannot be, understood, in good part because of media failings, moral, intellectual, and otherwise. Without recognizing this, and knowing that what was reported was not the all-comprehensive truth of the matter, the subject itself cannot be understood. Overall, and efforts of responsible reporters notwithstanding, the nature and extent of news media failure in Vietnam exceeds that of allied military forces who were attempting to and succeeding, despite documented lies and bumbling, to stop Hanoi’s War. Many people died and millions more have greatly suffered simply because the whole story was never told. And because what was portrayed in media reporting was demonstrably not, to use the famous Cronkite phrase, “the way it is.”  This bitter judgment is itself based on beliefs articulated by Robert Elegant, himself a journalist :

“Illusionary events reported by the press as well as real events within the press corps were more decisive than the clash of arms or the contention of ideologies. For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen.”

Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said that South Vietnam and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the “native” guerillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi, and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance.”  Elegant, a highly acclaimed British reporter on Vietnam, later added these terrible words:

“Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.”

Could this possibly be the truth about the performance of the U.S. media in Vietnam? In ending this series, from my extended observation and study of the media while on the home front during the war, this is certainly the way it looked to me. And many others. Said Senator Margaret Chase Smith, “The press has become more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own national interest.” (Congressional Record, June 16, 1971)

—Bill  Laurie -Vietnam War historian