WAR WITHOUT END
To Bush, the only answer to resistance is more force
BY LEW ROCKWELL

Lew Rockwell is a paleolibertarian political commentator and economist in the United States. Rockwell is the founder and President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama and Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies. Other stories by Lew Rockwell

George Bush, famous for outlandish claims that have no bearing on reality, has outdone himself by claiming that the problem with Vietnam was that the United States withdrew its troops rather than fighting harder and longer. 

In a speech to the VFW, he didn’t say how long America should have stayed, but he did claim that the reason for the bloodshed in Cambodia, and the prison camps in Vietnam following withdrawal, was not the war itself, but the failure to continue the war without end. 

Presumably, then, if Bush had been crowned president for life back then, we would still be in Vietnam, the draft would still be in place, and the bloodshed would have continued for decades.

My, what a vision!

You might think this is madness. In fact, it is the reductio ad absurdum of a particular worldview that he and his friends have adopted. 

Along the same lines, a few years ago, William Bennett, the former drug czar turned hyper-gambler, said that we shouldn’t have abandoned alcohol prohibition. Many on the Left say we should not have abandoned the 55 m.p.h. speed limit. Maybe we shouldn’t have backed away from the 93-percent income tax rate. Maybe we can do the same about wage and price controls during Hoover’s and FDR’s Great Depression or Nixon’s inflation? 

For that matter, let’s go back to the Civil War. The military occupation and counter-insurgency were going well, and what did we do? We cut and run, and left a whole region to languish in hate. 

It’s interesting how those who believe in force as an article of faith eventually go the whole way, believing that all the problems in the world call for one and only one answer: ever more violence.

We saw the extreme result of this mentality in the Soviet Union, which perused the path of force for 72 years, and blamed all existing failures not on socialism but on the failure to impose this system without any misgivings or regrets. 

In the case of Vietnam, there would have been no Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia had the United States not embraced Pol Pot. In the same way, al-Qaeda got its start during the Cold War because America saw radical Islamicists as anti-communist allies. 

So it is in Iraq. After the United States overthrew Saddam’s government, the plan was to jumpstart a new central government under U.S. control. That’s when the fighting starting. What group would control it? America has always thought the Shi'ites should run the show, religious law and all. But that plan hasn’t work out.

Why? If you are Bush, the answer comes as a matter of faith: These unruly people need more force. When that doesn’t work, the answer is additional force. When that doesn’t work, we need more force still — and so on. War without end. 

There is no refuting these claims since the matter of cause and effect requires a slightly complicated set of deductions. It is the same with all matter of government control. It was prohibition of the alcohol trade, not alcohol itself, that generated violence. It was price controls, not the market pressure for high and low prices, that caused economic problems. It was the 55 mph speed that made criminals out of 100 percent of drivers, not the normal propensity to want to get where you are going at a reasonable speed. 

And so it is with Iraq. The desire to get rid of a foreign military occupier is universal. To recognize the failure of force is to admit that the state cannot accomplish all that it claims it can accomplish. It is to admit the big lie. Doing so requires humility, a willingness to own up to mistakes, a desire to face reality and to think about the long term. These are traits that the state and its managers do not possess in large supply. Witness: George Bush. 

Iraq will not blossom like a rose garden the day after U.S. troops leave. There will be bloodshed, how much we cannot know. But these people will be governing themselves, and the thing that prevents progress today — the presence of the foreign occupier — will be gone. The solution is imperfect, but it is better than turning the entire world into a prison camp run by the U.S. government.