I don’t really buy the argument that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is defensive and nationalistic. If the Iranian mullahs were content to only torture, murder, and rob their own people, like Hosni Mubarak, they would have nothing to fear from the U.S. If Syria’s Assad had similarly modest ambitions, like Ghaddafi, he would also have nothing to worry about. Heck, Iran might even get U.S. foreign aid if they would just cool it. The Palestinians get plenty of it, from Europe as well as the U.S., some of which is used for reward payments to the families of suicide bombers. It is hard to arouse the Great Satan as long as you stay within your own borders, or, if you must venture abroad, at least only blow up Jews a few at a time.

Acquiring nukes and threatening to wipe Israel off the map are not really very effective defensive measures. I think they have something else in mind, but then I’m only going by their words and actions. Here is some interesting background at frontpagemagazine.com on the subject of Israel launching a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Posted by Andy

But hey, picture the world as it appears from Tehran: Bellicose Great Satan ensconced just across both the eastern and western borders, with Hell’s chattering classes pondering the advisability of invading a charter member of the Axis of Evil. Nuclear-armed Little Satan only a few hundred miles away, its willingness to strike against its real or presumed enemies amply demonstrated in the past. Nuclear-armed Pakistan preoccupied with India and no current threat, but you never know. A long history of Western imperialists, British and Russian and then American, divvying up spheres of influence, forcibly manipulating internal politics and treating Iran like some impotent banana republic.

It is of course impossible to separate the Islamic fervor of the mullahs from the Iranian body politic in general, but I suspect that one reason they have so far prevailed, in that divided society, is an understandable and not entirely unreasonable appeal to Iranian nationalism, irrespective of religion. President Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel are certainly distressing, but from the limited accounts I’ve seen (mainly in the Times) I don’t think his Holocaust denial is quite unequivocal and in any case he’s right about one thing–the Palestinians have been forced to pay the price for the sins of Europe.

God knows nuclear nonproliferation is a worthy goal, but in practice the effort is sure as hell selective, in large part necessarily, and has not so far been notably successful in the world at large. Assuming the Iranians want nuclear weapons and not just peaceable energy, which I suppose we have to, I have no idea what to do about it either. As you suggest, I think the potential danger is less the use of nuclear weapons by Iran or any other national entity but the possibility of nukes falling into the hands of people like Bin Laden who would have no compunction about using them. But an invasion of Iran? Bombing of nuclear facilities, insofar as they can be pinpointed? Leave it to the Israelis? The ramifications seem to me to be prohibitive.

I read Mark Steyn’s article online in the Journal and was about to recommend it, then saw that you had already posted the link. A fat, self-indulgent West that’s lost its religious compass, committing demographic suicide? Given the unpredictability of history it may be a little dire, but it’s very well argued and impressively detailed–Steyn is a terrific writer–and it’s hard to disagree. Not exactly a new perspective though–Buchanan, for instance, explored much the same territory in “The Death of the West.” For that matter Jean Raspail did too, a few decades ago, though emphasizing immigration more than birth rates, which were not at the time so starkly ominous.

I haven’t read “Death of the West” or any of Buchanan’s other books, but I check out his column occasionally and hear him on TV. He’s not moronic, or even an isolationist in any Fortress America sense. Whether or not Bush’s neo-Wilsonian visions will ultimately bear bitter fruit remains to be seen–and I’m an agnostic–but Buchanan’s apprehensions about a hubristic and potentially disastrous over-extension of American power cannot in my opinion be easily dismissed.

What would I do about Iran? God knows. I don’t have access to the intelligence, whatever it is, about the locations and defenses of their nuclear facilities. Nor do I know lots of other relevant stuff. So I can’t possibly know what, if anything, a military response should look like. Bush has said that possession of nukes by Iran is unacceptable. I feel the same way. Of course we shouldn’t pay any price, but I do think we should be prepared to pay a fairly high one, to take them out, assuming it’s even possible. My guess would be that it is possible with some kind of military operation to, if not completely destroy their nuclear capability, to at least set it back significantly.

But we should just let Israel do it. They have to do it anyway. They don’t really have a choice, no matter what the blowback is. The president of Iran has called for them to wiped off the map, and there is every reason to take him at his word.

The other option is to foment revolution, but again I am far too ignorant of the facts of the matter to have any idea of the feasibility of such a thing. Assuming there is something the U.S. can do to encourage and support revolution, we should be doing it.

My favorite blog these days, and for awhile, is The Belmont Club. I got to meet him at the pajamasmedia bash in New York. He was one of the only pajamasmedia bigwigs who enjoyed talking to the little people. He’s an Australian software developer, but also a serious political analyst and writer. His latest post is his commentary on two complementary takes on the end of the West, in The New Criterion, by Roger Kimball and Mark Steyn. Both articles and The Belmont Club’s commentary are well worth reading. The threat to Western civilization is not really from suicide bombers, but from suicidal tendencies.

It no longer looks like if, but when Iran comes into possession of nuclear weapons. This will bring us one step closer to the day when Osama Bin Laden, or someone like him, gets their hands on a nuke. I know, I know, Sunni don’t like Shia. But hatred of the Jews, hatred of the U.S., and a desire for nukes are things they have very much in common. This situation gives me great cause for concern. If I were President of the United States, I would hardly be thinking about anything else.

What bounds there are on the President’s authority in a time of war depends on the severity of the threat, as I’m sure John Adams and Abraham Lincoln would agree. Adams went too far. Lincoln didn’t. Adams used the threat to national security, which was real, to attempt to crush his political opposition with the Alien and Sedition Act. Does any reasonable person think Bush is doing that? I think the real disagreement is about whether we are really in a war for our national survival, and for the survival of Western civilization. Or not. The NSA has been data-mining phone and email communications for a lot longer than George Bush has been in office. It would be a gross dereliction of duty if they were not. I am not bothered at all by this. My freedoms are being threatened all right, but not by the American government. This whole kerfuffle is being politically manufactured by the New York Times and the Democratic Party, which is odd, because it’s very stupid politics.

Dick Morris has a good column today in which he explains that the Democrats are misunderstanding the isolationist bloc in the U.S., which he says is about 35%. Isolationists are against the war, but they are in favor of the Patriot Act and of wiretapping by the NSA. Isolationists are not all liberals. They are pretty much half and half, and they are against foreign involvement and for domestic protection. Add them to those who, like myself, believe that there is no domestic protection without foreign involvement, who support the war in Iraq, and you have a substantial majority who are not going to get their undies in a twist about the NSA spying on suspected terrorists.

The Democrats may be ready to commit suicide, but I don’t think the American people have quite reached that point.

Instapundit is talking about the SF Weekly whining about competition from craigslist for the classified business that has always heretofore belonged to the local papers. I was the technical director at sfgate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle web site, for the first five years of its existence. It was the first major newspaper to go online, and is still one of the best.

During the whole time I was there I constantly pleaded with the powers that be to do the online version of the classifieds right, the way it could be done with all the power of the web. At that time, 1995, craigslist was still a gleam in Craig Newmark’s eye. The Chronicle owned the classified space for the Bay Area. I created a classified section on sfgate, but it was just an online version of what was in the newspaper, no more, no less. I argued that we should add interactivity, let people purchase ads online cheaply, have pictures and links, make sfgate.com the goto place for everybody in the bay area to buy, sell, rent, and know everything.

But this was utterly impossible. It was a question of turf. There was a large department that sold and processed classified ads. It was a major source of revenue, employed a lot of people, and had a big budget. No way they were going to yield that turf to a bunch of weirdos over at the six person, unprofitable, experimental web site crew. Besides, online ads would cannabalize the whole business. Even as time went on, and craigslist grew and the sfgate website traffic and personnel grew, there was never any possibility of going up against the entrenched bureaucracy. Newspapers are the most old-fashioned organizations left alive in the marketplace. Even book publishing companies are more with it. Walk into any big-time paper in the country, and you expect to see Jimmy Cagney come storming out of the editor’s office.

Eventually the Chronicle hired an Israeli company to create a whole new online classifieds section. I supplied them with a detailed outline of the existing classifieds which they then turned into their own proposal, almost verbatim. The paper paid them something like a million dollars to create what was essentially a slightly inferior version of what already existed on sfgate.com. The purpose of this charade was not to create a new and better classifieds section. The purpose was to remove the classifieds from the website department, and place it back into the existing classifieds department. A million dollars was a small price to pay.

As you may have gathered I am not too sympathetic with any newspaper whining about competition from craigslist. Not just the SF Chronicle, but newspapers everywhere have had the opportunity to become the online goto place for practically anything that anyone wants to buy or sell or see or know in their local area. They just are incapable of rising above their ancient organizational paralysis to bend down and pick up what naturally belongs to them. Why? Because it might upset the way that they have always done things, and somebody might lose power.

I think it is safe to say that, with only a few Ripley’s Believe It or Not exceptions, all human communities, large and small, in recorded and unrecorded history, have had one thing in common: If there are not enough brave, competent men, ready to lay down their lives to defend the group, then that tribe or village or dukedom or nation will cease to exist. It will cease to exist because some other band of humans will invade and kill the men, steal the goods, and rape the women, or, less harshly, simply enslave the population to a greater or lesser degree. Sometimes conquest can benefit the conquered, if the conqueror is more civilized and prosperous than the culture and economy that is absorbed, as was often true of barbarian tribes that became a part of the Roman empire. But, in any case, the undefended society disappears. It has always been this way. Maybe someday humanity will rise above its warlike nature, but that day has obviously not yet arrived.

It is true that in these modern, more enlightened times, there are nation-states in Europe and elsewhere who are essentially unarmed, but they exist because of the protective military umbrella of the United States, without which they would be part of Greater Yugoslavia or Russia or China. That they are allowed to continue without paying tribute of some kind to their protector is historically unique, but hardly a repudiation of the general principle of the necessity for self-defense. The only penalty they pay for lacking arms is that their voice carries no weight in international councils. If you do not have a credible military, you have no voice. If you have nukes, you have a very big voice indeed.

Given that this is how it is in the world, there is plenty of room for argument about how to proceed. But, arguments that ignore or deny this reality seem, to me, to be not worth my time. What is worth my time is noticing how many such arguments there are. The rich, enlightened Western world has been infected with a virus, the idea that “war is not the answer”. In its milder form, it becomes, war is not the answer if there are any casualties or exorbitant expenses. And in its much milder form it becomes, war is the answer, but Bush is doing it all wrong. If this point of view ever achieves majority status in this country, we are doomed. Yet, the three mutations of this virus encompass most of the Democratic Party base. Of course the “doing it all wrong” thesis could be valid, and inevitably is to some extent, but the alternatives proposed by its disciples consist of vague generalities like “train the Iraqis”,”withdraw troops as the Iraqis take over”, that have been government policy all along. It’s not constructive analysis and criticism, it’s just politics. While we are at war.

There are real arguments, most of them taking place among conservatives of one stripe or another. Is it possible to plant democracy in a traumatized culture that has never known it? Is Al Qaeda an existential threat, merely a serious nuisance, or something in between? Is the corrupt, incompetent, anti-American U.N. worth saving? The best case I have heard for saving it, by the way, came from a speech by Newt Gingrich on CSPAN. Why is all the serious discourse taking place almost exclusively on the Right? I’ve been a Democrat all my life. I’m not enamored with the Republican Party. But the Democrats have lost their soul. Even on issues where they should have something to say, like health care and alternative energy, they have no principles, any more than they do on the war. It’s all politics.

I am concerned for my country, and for Western Civilization, of which my country is the bulwark. I am concerned because if we, as a nation, ever fail to produce enough of the brave, intelligent, patriotic men and women who are serving in Iraq right now, we will be removed from history, and civilization along with us. I see so many tendencies in that direction that I am amazed that the people we depend on for our freedom still exist in sufficient numbers to man the barricades. I am astonishingly grateful to them, and to a country that still, in spite of everything, supports them.

If you read the newspapers and watch network TV, you have recently been made aware of riots in France, about a week after they began. Nobody knows who is perpetrating these riots, except that they are young, “youths”, to be precise. And they are the children of “immigrants”. And they are unemployed. Nobody knows exactly what they are rioting about, and nobody has any idea what to do about it.

If you get your news and opinion from the blogosphere, as I do more and more, then there are plenty of theories about what is happening, and there is even a smattering of reports from the front, bloggers in Paris (sounds like a song). Although there is no shortage of opinion in the blogosphere, nor is there much agreement. Which means that pretty much anybody’s opinion is as good as anybody else’s, at this point. So this is an opportunity for Just Opinions to tell it like it is, without fear of contradiction by reality, at least for a few weeks.

This is what I think is going on. The reason the “youths” are doing what they’re doing is because they perceived that they could, and they could get away with it. They’ve been doing it at a low level for many years. They live in a lawless subculture festering in the Stalinist highrises on the outskirts of all major French cities. What are the root causes? As Marlon Brando said in The Wild Ones, “Whattaya got?”. That is not to say that there are not many well-organized Al Qaeda cells in France, and radical imams in the “suburbs”, who are gleefully seizing the day, and attempting to make hay while the sun shines. I don’t know if they can pull it off or not, probably not. France has a serious problem that makes the inner-city ghettoes in the U.S. look almost tractable. I read one account on some blog (I am sorry I can’t remember where), that quoted one of the rioting “youths” to the effect that his heroes were “Osama Bin Laden and Rodney King”. This is key. This is a ghetto riot. Watts looked like fertile ground for Black nationalists and communists, and Paris looks like opportunity to Al Qaeda.

France will more than likely come up with whatever it takes to quell the riots. But then, obviously, some kind of painful re-examination of French policies and French politics is in order. If they decide that this is somehow Capitalism’s fault, as many Europeans seem to be saying, then they are doomed. They just don’t get it. In the United States, Anglo-Saxons, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Irish, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Africans, Vietnamese, and, yes, Muslims, to name a few, seem to get along fairly well, with the partial and gradually improving exception of African-Americans. The reason for that is because the American dream is not a nationalist or religious or racial or ethnic dream. It is a universal dream. In France it’s all about being French. In America, it’s all about being free, and seeing what happens.

I’ll be honest with you. I hope we kill every single one of those Al Qaeda bastards, everywhere in the world. But these riots in Paris are not really about that, unless Al Qaeda succeeds in co-opting them, which I kinda doubt will happen.

We must have some government, local, state, and federal, and government needs money to do the things that we need government to do. There are disagreements about how much government should do, but there is little or no disagreement that government is necessary to do some things. So how do you finance government? Currently we do this with taxes. Taxes not only impose an inescapable financial burden on individuals and corporations, they also impose an enormous bureaucratic and paperwork burden that severely impacts productivity at every level. The second burden is completely unnecessary.

The federal government is in charge of the money supply. Between the fiscal and monetary policies of Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve Board, they decide how much money there is. There is obviously little correlation between tax revenues and government expenditures at the federal level. Whatever the tax revenues, government spends what it needs to spend, by issuing interest-bearing notes to make up the difference.

The idea that individuals and corporations give some of their money to the government to carry out its duties is an illusion. There is no real exchange of money. It’s all smoke and mirrors. There is no reason for anyone to fill out all of those incomprehensible tax forms, or for the government to employ thousands of people to process them. All that needs to happen is to pass a law that says when the government writes a check, everyone is required to honor it. Abracadabra, no more taxes. Currency, printed by the federal government in quantities decided by it, are already such a government check. Maybe there needs to be some mechanism for putting a cap on how much the federal government can spend, but there is no such cap now and we seem to muddle through alright. Of course these government checks increase the money supply, thereby fueling inflation, but what else is new? Government deficits already do that.

A dollar is worth whatever people believe it is worth. It has no intrinsic value. The present tax system serves two purposes. firstly, it shores up the illusion that money is something real, rather than a convenient fiction for replacing the inefficiency of the barter system. Secondly it is a means of social engineering, encouraging such things as home ownership, marriage, and drilling for oil, and discouraging activities like smoking, alcohol consumption, and driving. But nobody, economists least of all, really has any idea how the tax burden plays out. Sure, you can tax corporations, but then they raise prices. So who is really paying? Are renters paying to support home owners? Are rich people paying more or less of their fair share? Nobody knows.

We should just eliminate taxes altogether, let the government write checks for what it needs to do, and quit bothering us with all this nonsense.

Now, because of the United States’ unique federal system which grants a certain degree of sovereignty to the states, this becomes more problematical at the state and local level. The states don’t have any control over the money supply. They used to be able to print money, in fact individual banks used to be able to issue their own brand of currency, but those days are long gone. States don’t get to run deficits. They can issue bonds, but sooner or later the piper must be paid, and the budget balanced. So the only way to eliminate state and local taxes is for the states to give up some of their sovereignty and have the federal government apportion some of the money to the states based on a formula of population and productivity. The states in turn could then apportion some of this money to county and municipal governments.

The result? A huge increase in productivity, enriching us all, and a huge increase in intangibles like happiness and peace of mind.

Below is a picture of a possum that lives in a tree in our backyard. Would he (or possibly she) make a good Supreme Court justice? Hard to say. There is no paper trail or other evidence about how he feels regarding any constitutional questions, including Roe v. Wade. And being nocturnal could pose some problems. On the other hand, he is a very traditional creature from an ancient bloodline, which should reassure conservatives. And I feel confident that he would never change his legal philosophy no matter how much pressure the liberal establishment brings to bear. I can say, from my long-standing personal relationship, that this is a possum of firm character, slow to jump to conclusions, or to jump to anything for that matter, methodical and detail-oriented in his decision-making. This is an honest, hard-working possum with much real-world experience. I don’t know the answer. I think we would have to wait and see how he performs in the Senate hearings.