From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> Sent: Oct 29, 2004 7:06 AM To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: Geodesic neoconservative empire

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It has always amused me that libertarians and anarcho-capitalists insist on using the language of the left to describe the things they don't like. One of the reasons that the right in this country has been so successful has been their development of a useful analytic apparatus, and corresponding language, over the past 50 years, certainly more so than the left, which is nothing but marxism, dilluted or otherwise.

Is there a better term than "empire" for what gets built when your country goes out, invades lots of other countries, takes them over, and runs them? I don't know about other peoples' objections to this, but mine mainly involve my belief that this is an expensive and not very effective way to deal with terrorism. ...

At the moment force-monopoly is, by definition of monopoly, a hierarchical market. Hence the "dance with the girl that brung ya" bit. They have already *stolen* my money, they might as well be doing something with it

Well, the question is, what ought they to be doing with it. Invading Iraq to build a democracy there, in hopes of somehow fixing the root causes of terrorism (as similarly goofy idealists on the left once thought they could do for crime in the US), looks like a waste of time and money. I suspect we're causing ourselves more problems, as Iraq is not only a place where terrorists can go to attack the US and be attacked by us in turn, it's also a place where there are lots of people learning the basic skills of being a terrorist, gaining some experience in doing so, etc. Do you think we're going to kill all of those people? Do you think they'll all abandon terrorist tactics when things quiet down in Iraq? I know the Republican line these days is that we're safer because the bad guys are all shooting at Marines in Iraq, rather than at civilians in Des Moines. But that only makes sense if we don't end up with a much bigger problem later, as a result. Perhaps we should all have rested more secure in our beds when the jihadis were streaming into Afghanistan, where they would be killed in large numbers by the Red Army. But it's not clear that was a long-term win.... Anyway, you sound like there's some willingness on the part of this administration (or the one Kerry may set up in January) to actually cut government spending to other things, in order to do the nation building thing. What evidence have you seen for that, so far? ...

Cheers, RAH