After the Revolution

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“Democracy … arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects,” said Aristotle.

But if the Philosopher disliked the form of government that arose out of the fallacy of human equality, the Founding Fathers detested it.

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule,” said Thomas Jefferson, “where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49.” James Madison agreed, “Democracy is the most vile form of government.” Their Federalist rivals concurred.

“Democracy,” said John Adams, “never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

What is the proper role of military power for a Republic?

by Winston Elliott III

What is the proper role of military power for a Republic? Is it the role of a Republic to maintain a large military presence in foreign lands? For what purpose would a Republic expend large amounts of blood and treasure to promote "democracy" in far away nations? What does this say in relation to countries, such as Cuba, which are much closer to us and living under repressive governments? Would the framers of our governmental institutions (Washington, Jefferson, Adams) support a long term (10 years in Afghanistan, over 50 in Korea) placement of troops in foreign lands? Is it the Republic's duty to spend whatever is necessary (in lives and borrowed money) for as long as it takes to impose order in places where cultural mores and tribal hatred systemically undermine the conditions which are necessary for ordered freedom to flourish? Is the militarization of our foreign policy a reasonable price to pay for these efforts? Is it likely that our zeal to "make the world safe for democracy" will call for policies and expenditures which undermine republican principles in our own home? If we are in a state of fiscal & moral crisis in this nation is it responsible to make such expenditures even if the goals are determined to be legitimate? Are we truly in a position to tell other nations to get their house in order in light of the state of decay of our Republic?

Who Commissioned Us to Remake the World?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, Obama’s man in Moscow, who just took up his post, has received a rude reception. And understandably so.

In 1992, McFaul was the representative in Russia of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. government-funded agency whose mission is to promote democracy abroad.

The NDI has been tied to color-coded or Orange revolutions such as those that dethroned regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Lebanon. The project miscarried in Belarus.

The Democracy Worshipers

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“Your people, sir, is … a great beast.”

So Alexander Hamilton reputedly said in an argument with Thomas Jefferson. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Hamilton explained:

“Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship.”

In his column, “Democracy Versus Liberty,” Walter Williams cites Hamilton, James Madison and John Randolph, who wrote of “the follies and turbulence” of democracy, and John Adams:

“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

The Middle East Made Simple

by Stephen Masty

Who would have thought it possible to explain the modern Middle East in a single newspaper column? Yet Israeli writer Uri Avnery has done it here.

Entitled “Shukran, Israel” (or “Thank you, Israel” in Arabic), he explains how Israeli government strategy has weakened regional Christians and moderate Muslims, while strengthening extremists from Egypt to Lebanon to even Iran.

The 88-year-old commentator is a fascinating fellow who, despite his controversial positions, was voted among the 200 most important Israelis in 2005. Born to a prominent family of German Jews who fled Hitler to Palestine in 1933, he became a self-confessed terrorist for the Zionist paramilitary group, Irgun, in 1938 but left them four years later in opposition to their retaliatory killings of Arabs. He served as a squad commander in the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, but moved steadily Left as a journalist and parliamentarian, becoming in 1982 the first Israeli to meet personally with Yasser Arafat.  He founded the famous Gush Shalom peace-movement in 1993 and remains its leader while he writes for the prominent Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, and several American websites.

Mr. Avnery’s numerous and fascinating examples of “blow-back” include the Israeli state security agency, Shin Bet, helping to eclipse Egyptian Christians and strengthen radical Islamists: “Turning the Palestinians toward Islam, it was thought, would weaken the PLO and its main faction, Fatah. So everything was done to help the Islamic movement discreetly.”

He never pulls his punches, in 2010 having written: “The Government of Israel has insulted the Vice President of the United States, and spat in the face of the President ... they wiped the spit off their faces and smiled politely ... as the saying goes: when you spit in the face of a weakling, he pretends that it is raining."

A secularist and avowed atheist, Mr. Avnery’s enormous and moral volume of writing either shows that many roads lead to goodness and peace, or rather, how the Abrahamic religions continue to influence even those individuals who have suspended their memberships.

Stephen Masty lives in Kabul and London.

Saving America From Empire-Brad Birzer, Winston Elliott III & Host Mike Church

by Mike Church

20 December, 2011, Mandeville, LA -EXCLUSIVE AUDIO - in today's final episode of the 2011 Post Show Show, host Mike Church welcomes Prof. Brad Birzer and Winston Elliott III of The Imaginative Conservative to a round-table discussion of the American Empire and how it may be possible to bring it back in line with the Constitution and the republican way of life/tradition that Americans once cherished and defended.. Among today's thrilling conversation topics

How the classics from Greek & Roman literature are sorely missed today

How to work these back into our busy lives and our kids busy live

When the American military is called it should do its job and go home

Why the Founding generation was just as dirty with their politics and what we can learn from that

What does "conservative" mean and what should it do?

Link to the audio here or  Download the audio.

Posted by permission from MikeChurch.com. Mr. Elliott and Dr. Birzer interview begins approximately 10 minutes into the audio.

War Party vs. Conservative Foreign Policy: Let's Get Real

by Winston Elliott III

My post (American Imposed Regime Change), and those by John Willson (War for Libyan Oil) and Brad Birzer (The Unconstitutional President) have generated some interesting discussions. In the post below I summarize my criticism of the "War Party" position and expand on my view of a conservative American foreign policy approach. Every conservative concerned about American foreign policy should read Foreign Policy for Conservatives on this site. This brilliant description of a conservative foreign policy is excerpted from Russell Kirk's book The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft. It deserves to be spread, far and wide, by the Imaginative Conservative community via emails to friends, Facebook, Twitter and all available methods of distribution.

Those who wish to use the American military to effect regime change in foreign lands are sensitive to terms like "war party." They say this is an exaggeration of their position. Poppycock. Let’s go ahead and add “interventionist” and “lover of foreign adventure” for good measure. They do not like it because it accurately describes their approach to using the military might of the American Republic. They are open to spending American blood and treasure whenever they feel that people in a foreign country are “oppressed” or their leader is a “tyrant” or “dictator.”

They regard the $1,300,000,000,000 spent on Iraq and Afghanistan (spent so far, above and beyond normal military spending) as worth it relative to the amount of money the U.S. government spends annually. And they seem to feel that our dead (over 6,000) and wounded (over 33,000) soldiers from those wars are just an unfortunate price of spreading "democracy" across the globe. Well, I am an American. My primary concern, and responsibility, is for American interests, American soldiers and American citizens. I am not a citizen of the “world.” That term has no meaning in this context of relations between nations and war.

John Quincy Adams on U.S. Foreign Policy (1821)

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?

Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.

She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.

She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.

She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.

She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

Metternich vs. McEmpire

by Daniel McCarthy

Conservatism is poorly understood in the United States. It is not right-wing liberalism or nationalism; nor is it political Protestantism. It has nothing to do with a neurotic longing for an ideal past, and reactionaries who insist there is nothing left to conserve show that they don’t know the meaning of the word. Conservatism has always had to make the best of a bad situation—the human situation in general.

But conservatism earned its name in the context of a particular kind of bad situation, that of imperial Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The great conservatives of the time were all stalwarts of empire—think of British conservatives from Edmund Burke to Lord Salisbury and beyond, or of Clemens von Metternich on the continent struggling to uphold the Hapsburg order.

These statesmen saw that Europe faced a choice not only between empire and anarchy—or rather nationalism, which seemed to be the same thing—but also between different varieties of imperium. Would empire abroad be liberal and commercial—and thereby also extractive and conformist—or would it be traditional and tolerant of local custom? In the heart of Europe, would the model of imperial sovereignty be Napoleon or, say, Francis I of Austria?

Empire made acute problems that conservatism was designed to answer. How could harmony be maintained not only between rich and poor, noble and common, merchant and farmer—divisions endemic to political society heretofore—but between Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic; Irish, Scots, and English; Hindu and Muslim; colonist and native? Neither faith nor blood nor citizenship, still less any national “proposition,” could unite the disparate peoples and sects of Europe’s empires. Unity was rather a fine balance to be sought, and peace required respect, in due measure, for every part of the whole.

Acknowledgement of authority supplied cohesion, and as Burke understood, this meant not only the periphery’s acknowledgement of authority at the imperial center but also the empire’s acknowledgement of authority in the provinces. When George III transgressed against the authority of America’s colonial constitutions, Burke sided with the colonists, for what the king could do to the Americans today he might attempt against the metropole tomorrow.

Empire made conservatism, and conservatism made empire durable and endurable. But the United States were born in rebellion against empire, and the most conservative Americans—the men branded Tories by the revolutionaries—opposed the breach with the mother country. The political labels tell the story. Americans from the time of the revolution called themselves republicans, Whigs, even democrats; their enemies were Tories or loyalists, words synonymous with “conservative” in old country.

Jefferson may have mused about an empire of liberty, but the Founding generation and their sons rejected the imperial ways of Europe: America would be an exception to the entangling alliances of the European state system. Unlike every great power of the Old World, America would not seek hegemony. Were she ever to become “dictatress of the world,” John Quincy Adams warned, “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath

Excerpt from: Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, Edited with an Introduction by George H. Nash (Hoover Institution Press, 2011)

The Blunders of Statesmen (From the Editor’s Introduction)

In November 1951, a public relations executive named John W. Hill met Herbert Hoover at a dinner in New York City. It was an unhappy time in the United States, especially for conservative Republicans. Abroad, the Korean War had turned into a bloody stalemate that President Harry Truman’s administration seemed unable to end. Earlier in the year, the president had abruptly dismissed General Douglas MacArthur, a conservative hero, from America’s Far Eastern military command, to the consternation of Hoover and millions of others. At home, Truman’s liberal Democratic administration was under furious assault from conservative critics of its policies toward communist regimes overseas and communist subversion within our borders.

How quickly the world had changed since the close of the Second World War a few years earlier. Then the future had seemed bright with promise. Nazi Germany and imperial Japan had been crushed; fascism as an ideology had been discredited; the birth of the United Nations had appeared to presage an era of global peace. Now, a mere six years later, in Asia and along the Iron Curtain in Europe, a third world war—this time against communist Russia and China—seemed a distinct possibility.

“Mr. Hoover,” said Hill that November evening, “the world is in one hell of a mess, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” Hoover replied.

“It has always occurred to me,” Hill continued, “that we are in this mess because of the mistakes of statesmen. Somebody ought to write a book [on the subject] like [E. S. Creasy’s] ‘Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World’; I think it would be a classic.”

“You are absolutely right,” Hoover responded. “That should be done, and I am going to tell you what should be the first chapter.”

“What is that?” asked Hill.

“When Roosevelt put America in to help Russia as Hitler invaded Russia in June, 1941. We should have let those two bastards annihilate themselves.”

Hill was delighted. “That would be a great book. Why don’t you write it, Mr. Hoover?”

“I haven’t the time,” Hoover countered. “Why don’t you write it?”

What Hill did not know—and what Hoover, that evening, did not tell him—was that for several years Hoover had been at work on a book with a similar theme: a comprehensive, critical history of American diplomacy between the late 1930s and 1945, with emphasis on the misguided policies of President Roosevelt. It was a volume in which the Roosevelt administration’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union would be subject to withering scrutiny.

Twenty years later, in 1971, in a conversation with an interviewer, Hill lamented that no one had ever written the book he had once proposed to Hoover on “The Fifteen Decisive Blunders of Statesmen.” “I have always wished somebody would do it,” he added. “It would be controversial because every one of the decisions the author stated would cause trouble, would cause somebody to come up and defend it, and the book would sell like hotcakes.”

What Hill did not realize was that nearly eight years earlier Hoover had completed his own book of diplomatic blunders. Unlike the scattershot collection of essays that Hill had envisaged, Hoover’s tome was tightly focused. Originally conceived as the section of his memoirs that would cover his life during World War II, the “War Book” (as he called it) had morphed into something far more ambitious: an unabashed, revisionist reexamination of the entire war—and a sweeping indictment of the “lost statesmanship” of Franklin Roosevelt.

Hoover ultimately entitled his manuscript Freedom Betrayed. More informally, and with a touch of humor, he and his staff came to refer to it as the Magnum Opus. The label was apt. For nearly two decades, beginning in 1944, the former president labored over his massive manuscript, producing draft after draft, “edition” after “edition.” He finished the final version (save for some minor editing and additional fact-checking) in September 1963 and prepared in the ensuing months for the book’s publication. Death came first, on October 20, 1964. A little over two months earlier, he had turned ninety years old.

After Hoover’s passing, his heirs decided not to publish his Magnum Opus. Since then, for nearly half a century, it has remained in storage, unavailable for examination.

This volume, Freedom Betrayed—in its final, author-approved edition of 1963–64—is the book that is now in your hands. It is published here—and its contents thereby made available to scholars—for the first time.

Conveying Myth: What Still Works, What Doesn’t (I)

by Stephen Masty

No intelligent conservative doubts the necessity of promulgating myth to convey and sustain social values. However, both the physical structure and the rhythms of modern life are different than in earlier times, and this must be understood in order to revive myth in the West.

It may help to look first at the transmission of myth in a surviving traditional society, and then to draw contrasts with a more conventionally modern one.

Modern Afghans & Ancient Greeks

Today’s rural Afghans lead lives remarkably similar to Classical Greeks. While it would be rash to draw any causal relationship, both societies share the architecture, agricultural calendar and an oral tradition that kept Homer’s epics alive and culturally-central for two millennia or more, before literacy grew common among Greek farmers.

The poorest, modern, rural Afghans and Ancient Greeks have lived in single-room cottages where a family ate, slept and wintered together; more in single-family or small multi-family, mud-brick compounds offering a few rooms; and the wealthy fewest in villas. As agrarians, each have tended to grow two crops a year (usually cereals over winter, then fruits and vegetables through summer), affording them much leisure time among two annual cycles of planting and harvesting. Broadcast media, unavailable to Ancient Greeks of course, only reached Afghan cities a generation ago and is still unavailable in many rural areas.

So Ancient Greeks and many modern Afghans have spent much time crowded intimately among their families, with little else to do but talk and tell stories, repeat myths and convey values, until these grow quite unforgettable and become intrinsically second-nature to them.

As Greeks absorbed their pagan religious and Homeric myths, today rural Afghans all know their Aesop’s fables (brought by Alexander), plus ancient Iranian cycles such as the Shahnama or medieval love-stories of Leila and Majnoon, more indigenous and intrinsically Afghan mythic and historical tales together with vast quantities of poetry and proverbs, plus Islamic material reaching from the Holy Koran to Hadith (validated stories of their Prophet Mohammad), and mythic tales of various prophets and saints which are often as implausible as they are instructional, vivid and charming.

Among the Paynim: Losing the Plot

By Stephen Masty

Somewhere, Christopher Dawson observed that often the brightest people have so thoroughly imbued their own culture, its values and priorities, that they cannot comprehend another civilisation. Not only the brightest, I think.

Those of us who spend a lifetime living and working abroad are often mesmerised by how our friends back home, who never travel or who only travel briefly, just don’t get it. Sometimes we don’t get it either.

Back in my temporary office in Hyderabad, I’d switched off my cultural receptors because I was too busy and it just seemed too stupid: now, locked out of an Indian factory with my restive camera-crew, I was paying the price.

I had been busy making notes for the shoot and asking advice from my co-director, Amar Jyoti Mahapatra, when another Indian colleague materialised at my elbow: “if you are going to the ‘wehicle’ factory,” he said, “you should be seeing their anal-valve car.”

I didn’t even ask what it used for fuel. Besides, this vehicle sounded unpleasant, possibly painful, utterly daft and quite unlikely to exist. I said thanks and ignored him.

Now, someone inside the factory gates had mislaid our request, or possible one of my crew had forgotten to send it, and their security-guards would not let us inside. Moreover it was a day’s drive back to Hyderabad. Typical for India, some completely pleasant person turned up out of nowhere, with no apparent purpose in life other than making visitors feel happy and comfortable.

“I will be taking-making you to see their head of security who is a most agreeable fellow to be sure,” promised our heavily-accented saviour. “He is being named Brigadier-retired Anil Valvekar.” It was a name, not a vehicle, and after a quick cup of tea with Brigadier-sahib we were set up to film. Stop listening to local people and opportunities are missed.

Months later in London, I showed the little documentary to an old teacher of mine; a conservative-libertarian wise in all things economic at home or abroad. I thought he might be as impressed as I was with the ultra-modern, glistening, Indian factory, its prosperous workers, and how the trade-unions and management were equally dedicated to manufacturing tough, affordable little trucks ideally suited to India’s bumpy roads.

Foreign Policy Made Simple

By Stephen Masty

Many of our readers ask how they can understand the complex world of diplomacy and geopolitical strategy, and how they might explain it to their children. It is not nearly as difficult as it seems, and this short and clear introduction uses simple facts from current news coverage.

This week the Pakistan Army has been shelling civilian villages in Afghanistan, presumably to teach the Afghans just who runs the region. This week the Pakistan Army has also been removing Pakistanis from Khyber villages on their side of the border, before invading those areas to kill Taliban insurgents. The Pakistanis pay the Taliban who terrorise Afghan villages, and the Pakistanis shell the same Afghan villages that the Taliban terrorise, and now they are about to attack the Taliban as well. This means that the Pakistanis are fighting on both sides, or in other words, fighting themselves.

Thus it remains possible that the soldiers in the Pakistan Army assigned to help the Taliban may need to turn their cannons on the Pakistani soldiers assigned to attack the Taliban. This could allow the Afghan villagers, and their enemies in the Taliban, to take a holiday while the Pakistan Army proxies of each side duke it out with one another. Simple enough so far.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just returned from Pakistan after warning them to stop helping the Taliban, but the pot may be calling the kettle black.

For 10 years, America has spent billions on the Pakistan Army, some of which the Pakistanis spend helping the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, American-paid contractors pay off the Taliban to let their supplies through to US forts, and the Taliban use that money to kill American troops.

In both cases, the American Government is using American money to kill American troops, while paying American troops to keep from being killed by American money. So, like Pakistan, America is supporting both sides and fighting against itself (although the US weapons industry urges us not to condemn it prematurely).

Up to now, at least, the Americans have neither paid American contractors to kill American troops, nor paid American troops to kill American contractors (although the latter option has certain attractions). By now, you should realise that there is nothing particularly complicated about all this.

Let us turn to the Afghans. Pakistan, when it is not busy fighting the Taliban, says it supports the Taliban because their enemies, the democratic Afghans, are pals with their arch-enemy, democratic India. Caught between anti-Pakistan India and pro-India Afghanistan, Pakistanis feel that, without supporting terrorists, they will become the filling in a very hostile ham-sandwich (although, being Muslims, they often prefer another analogy).

Afghans have recently signed defence treaties with India, which makes the Pakistanis even more nervous, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai reassured them last month by saying that “India is our friend but Pakistan is our brother.” This means that his friends will train his army to protect him from his brother.

Meanwhile, India deploys a fiendishly clever strategy to keep Afghanistan on side, something that would never occur to the Pakistanis. India sends foreign aid and food, and welcomes Afghan students into its universities, while Pakistan funds terrorists and shells Afghan villages. Different strokes, one imagines.

This week, the US Secretary of State, the CIA director, and every American official short of Smokey the Bear, pitched up in Pakistan ordering them to lay off the Afghans. The next day, Afghan President Karzai announced that if his ally, America, went to war with Pakistan then Afghanistan would fight on the side of Pakistan, its enemy, against America its friend.

Are you with us so far? Afghan people are finding this a little confusing, particularly if they live in villages being shelled by Pakistanis.

A Christian at War & Peace: Leif Hovelsen

By Stephen Masty

As he was led away to two years of solitary confinement and torture by the Gestapo, his mother called from the door, “Lief, never forget Jesus” and Hovelson, recently dead at 87, apparently never did.

Betrayed by a colleague in the Norwegian Resistance, his torturers offered freedom in return for the same treachery, but the underground radio-operator, who had spread broadcasts from the exiled King Haakon VII, refused. He recalled: “I felt in my heart there was no other option than a clear 'No'. As I was about to take this deep resolve, something extraordinary took place. I experienced the contradiction of being truly free at the unique point of having lost everything."

When he was liberated in 1945, British officers gave him a chance to turn the tables on his captors and choose their punishments: he refused.

Soon afterward, the Telegraph reports, “he offered forgiveness to one Gestapo officer who had tortured him, the man said nothing ‘but his body shook all over.’ Just before his subsequent execution, the torturer had asked to take Communion. Hovelsen was to write: ‘When I answered the Nazis with the same treatment meted out to me, their spirit had conquered me. When I forgave I had conquered National Socialism.’”

Once Norway and Germany were reconciled, he adopted the cause of Soviet dissidents, befriending Vladimir Bukovsky and campaigning for Andrei Sakharov’s Nobel Prize.

His funeral on 30^th September, at the Central Lutheran Church of Oslo, was full of mourners.

Requiescat in Pace.

Stephen Masty lives in Kabul and London.

The Iranian Falcon: Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

By Stephen Masty

I said show her in and Thelma sashayed to the door in her tight satin dress: that dame had more moving parts than my Benrus watch.

Moments later, my first client in weeks tottered in on stiletto-heels, worrying a tissue in her fingers while periodically blowing her nose like a Frisco fog-horn. This broad was upset; or if she caught a cold NyQuil was heading into a new tax bracket.

Eldorado Schmendrickson had splashed out for the togs and accoutrements right enough, but she was still the Tenderloin District trying to pass for Pacific Heights. The peroxide blonde turned up her cute nose-job at my half-bottle of rye, even though it was the real deal and aged a full two weeks.

“Gimme the bird!” she exclaimed: usually I had to start divorce proceedings before reaching that stage. I asked her to explain and she started in.

“I must have it! It’s priceless!” she gasped. “Made by the 12^th Century Knights of Malta but left behind at Tel Aviv airport when the Crusaders flew home. The Saracens lost it to the Persians in a poker game but if the US Government got it, that would pay for another round of Quantitative Easing. So it all comes down to Mansour Arbabsiar.”

I cut her short: “Look, Toots, my credit-rating may be even worse than Ben Bernanke’s but I still got a dime for a newspaper.” Everybody on the street had heard of the Iranian-born, Texas schlemozzle who the flat-foots accused of trying to biff some diplomat camel-jockey.

“But it’s all true,” the dame insisted. “The Iranians, the Saudi ambassador, Arbabsiar, the Mexican drug cartel.”

“Says you,” I replied, breaking the filter off my Marlboro before applying my trusty Kuwait War Zippo. I never understood the point of filter-tips; like condoms for cigarettes.

”If Iran is so full of dangerous nut-jobs,” I asked, “why not use one of their own guys with an exploding jock-strap instead of contracting out the dirty work to the Mexicans? It’s like going from the Axis of Evils to the Excess of Weevils.”

Eldorado stared in silence: we hadn’t even discussed my fee.

I blew a smoke-ring toward the ceiling-fan and thought aloud: “If they don’t want to use an Iranian then why not do the hiring abroad instead of here in America, where 99.6 percent of supposed terrorists are undercover cops? Couldn’t the Iranians more safely cook up a terrorist deal in the Middle East? Or was that the week when all their suicide-bombers go on vacation, or hold their annual convention like the Shriners?”

Her eyes teared up and her shoulders began to heave but I continued without mercy: the broad was only playing for sympathy.

 “Okay, Babe,” I explained, “say that they can’t find a suicide bomber because the Persian ones want expensive medical benefits for after they blow themselves up: maybe it’s a union thing. So Iran, which the Federales say runs a huge network of spies across Latin America, really needs a Texas used-car salesman to find a Latino gangster? Their embassies in Bogota, Caracas or Mexico City could have made a local phone call and it would have been cheaper.”

Imperial Corruption: Letter to a Patriotic Neo-Conservative

By Stephen Masty

Dear Sir or Madam,

Some very few of your Neo-Conservative colleagues may be deeper in love with Israel than with America. No doubt a much greater number including Christians and Jews, however naive, believe that the best interests of America and Israel are ever identical and that somehow the needs of these two states will never conflict. Whether or not that describes you, I’ll make the likely guess that you are a patriot ultimately prepared to put American interests first.

Since you identify yourself as a Neo-Conservative, I take another risk in presuming that you believe in traditional Judeo-Christian values and fear the unintended consequences of the welfare state, but think that some of the legitimate reasons for expanding the size, cost and power of American Government are to keep Americans safe, to vanquish her enemies wherever possible, and to spread American-inspired or even American-directed political systems across the world. If I missed the mark, you may stop reading now.

Plenty has already been written of the unintended consequences of government action, from socio-economics – such as New York City removing curb-stones to facilitate wheel-chair users that left the blind unable to find the curbs and be mowed down in traffic - to complaints of a counterproductive foreign policy that, say, props up dictators and drives suppressed moderates into the arms of extremists. So I won’t repeat the arguments.

What I will do is describe something that I see first-hand.

Governments pay private contractors to run development programs in poor countries, including Afghanistan where I have lived for some years. European and other non-US governments tend to hire small or medium-sized specialist firms, with an annual turnover of perhaps US$ 15 to 50 million, which take profits of around 20-25% on technical advisors excluding housing, security and airfares all billed at cost. Globally, an estimated 40% of civilian foreign-aid returns to the country of origin in terms of salaries for donor-nation nationals, company profits, etc. – which is nothing to be proud of.

Stinger Missiles, Stinger Cocktails

By Stephen Masty

Some 25 years ago this week, a few nervous young men walked hesitantly into a barren, autumn field and lifted heavy contraptions onto their shoulders as they tried to remember their training. They knew that failure would bring near-certain death as well as lasting shame to their surviving families. Mouthing silent prayers, they fumbled with the controls and trembled from the force and the roar as their projectiles wiggled and wove into the sky, and two heavily-armoured Soviet Hind helicopters burst into flame and went crashing to earth.

Afghanistan’s freedom-fighters had launched the first Stinger surface-to-air missiles against the Russian invaders, signalling the end of what the American President who provided the weapons called the Evil Empire.

For six years the beleaguered Afghan resistance had been helpless against the Soviet air-war, and Russian helicopters had hovered over their villages and mountain redoubts for hours at a time, firing rockets and machine-guns with impunity. Eventually a million Afghan civilians and freedom-fighters would lose their lives, and a million more would lose arms and legs to the communists – a higher percentage of casualties than the USSR suffered in its much-vaunted “Great Patriotic War” against the Nazis.

With the introduction of Stinger missiles, the Soviets scrambled to change air tactics but not fast enough to escape the American high-tech weapons and the Afghans who wielded them. Every week, we journalists read intelligence briefings that reported examples of USSR military might shot down in twos and threes across the embattled country. The Wall Street Journal reports: “One Soviet squadron lost 13 of 40 planes in the year that followed, 10 to Stingers.”

With four million Afghan refugees camped around them in Peshawar, Pakistan, Western expatriates from around the world gathered in what was effectively the only bar in town, The American Club, comprised of  “mercenaries, missionaries and misfits.”

French doctors, filthy from weeks behind enemy lines, bellied up to the bar beside taciturn Omaha agriculturalists, guarded Washington spooks, noisy British photo-journalists and journo-wannabes from everywhere in the Free World, alongside a United Nations of young volunteers washing down the internal dust from long days in refugee camps. Nurses and young diplomats rehearsed cabarets on the balcony, while inside the resident Irish band, “The Boys of County Khyber,” sang how far it was from Clare to here. At tables, wiry old men in civilian jobs made oblique references to their days in Vietnam, sure that everyone would draw the correct conclusions but certain that no one would blow their covers.

The Sun Also Sets: Legacies of Empire

By Stephen Masty

The British broadcaster and ‘household-name’ Jeremy Paxman is the BBC’s most fearsome interviewer. He also hosts ‘University Challenge’ which is easily the world’s most high-brow quiz show; and he writes books and essays of often interesting socio-history, the most recent being perhaps a useful warning to Americans - a writing on the wall, so to speak, along the lines of the Prophet Daniel’s “mene, mene, tekel upharsin.”

Mr. Paxman’s newest effort explores the legacy of the British Empire, chiefly on modern Britons themselves, although he can still be depended upon to exhume delightful anecdotes from far and wide: “’One Basuto king is said to have told Victoria: “My country is your blanket, O Queen, and my people the lice upon it.’” (Although I can say from experience that Lesotho’s bed-linen is now up to international standard). Here in Afghanistan I’ve only read the excerpts (linked above) and Mr. Paxman seems splendid as he tracks the psychology of loss of empire summed up a half-century past when “then US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson made the only remark for which he is remembered in Britain, that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’”.

The author cites a credibly imperial legacy at arms: “When, for example, the Grenadier Guards were sent to Afghanistan in 2007, they arrived sporting battle honours from the Crimean War, the Opium Wars, a campaign against Islamist forces in Sudan in the 1890s, another to subdue the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, and a “temporary” British intervention in Egypt which began in 1882 and lasted until the middle of the 20th century. Once you’ve got that sort of pedigree, you’re keen to measure yourself against it. And perhaps, at another level, this history of involvement overseas also helps to explain why it is that British charities play such a disproportionately large role in international development and disaster relief.”

Still, British children of the upper-middle-classes or better often spend a “gap year” between school and university gallivanting the world, riding horses in Central Asia, working for a South American charity, or taking the global equivalent of the Georgian ‘Grand Tour’ of continental Europe. This is usually no bad thing, and this habit might help to break Americans of their notoriously self-satisfied insularity. But, as it assumes that the world is but a playground for spoiled rich British kids, it stems from an empire upon which the sun never set. Other European nations have no similar tradition even though some travel.

Mr. Paxman continues: “When the British went to live in the lands they conquered, they were confronted immediately with the question of what made them distinct from the people among whom they lived. Indeed, when you read the popular literature of the period, its most offensive characteristic is the assumption of racial superiority over “brutes” and “savages”. As Cecil Rhodes put it, ‘We are the finest race in the world and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’”

This unquestioned sense of nationalistic superiority, racial no longer, is now more American than British, and in Afghanistan every step of interaction from American officials is calculated to diminish, insult or express official disdain for the foreign subjects of Empire.

Quote of the Day: Russell Kirk on Foreign Affairs

In the affairs of nations, the American conservative feels that his country ought to set an example to the world, but ought not to try to remake the world in its image. It is a law of politics, as well as of biology, that every living thing loves above all else—even above its own life—its distinct identity, which sets it off from all other things. The conservative does not aspire to domination of the world, nor does he relish the prospect of a world reduced to a single pattern of government and civilization.

Quote of the Day: The Purpose of American Foreign Policy

I do not believe it is a selfish goal for us to insist that the overriding purpose of all American foreign policy should be the maintenance of the liberty and peace of our people in the United States, so that they may achieve that intellectual and material improvement which is their genius and in which they can set an example for all peoples. By that example we do an even greater service to mankind that we can do by billions of material assistance--and more than we can ever do by war.

-Robert Taft