US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)

[James A. Donald]

    --
"R.A. Hettinga"
> > This is actually the running fantasy in Marxism since the
> > 1950's, when it turned out that that, instead of the
> > "workers" eating the "bourgeoisie" by the firelight or some
> > Glorious Revolution or another, would instead be come
> > "bourgeoisie" themselves.

John Kelsey
> I think this bit gets at the heart of why the Islamic
> fundamentalists are hard to deal with.  For most people I
> know, some notion of peace and prosperity is the thing we
> want from our governments. [...]
>
> The Islamic fundamentalists can't offer that.  [...] No
> peace, not much prosperity, but a lot of capital-P Purpose. 
> A place in history, a part of the Jihad.  In this sense, it's
> a lot like Marxism was, back when it had serious adherents;
> it's a mass movement, like Eric Hoffer talks about.

Mass movements of this kind require the promise of inevitable
victory. When communism suffered one decisive, uncomplicated,
unambiguous defeat, the dominos fell one after another all the
way to Moscow.  The remaining communists have made some
psychological recovery - see for example Tyler Durden's
peculiar version of recent history, where in his universe the
communists actually won and are still winning, and similarly
the Islamists have made a considerable psychological recovery
from Afghanistan, but the ideal of date with destiny tends to
lose its appeal when you keep picking yourself off the dirt
with a bloody nose.

In Iraq we face a guerrila movement, and discover, yet again,
that guerrilas can only be defeated by local forces - and the
boys from Baghdad are not all that local.  This gives the
Islamicists renewed hope.

So what do you do, if, like Israel, you face terrorists
embedded in a local population that supports thems sufficiently
they can melt into the people?  Withdrawal did not work, for
the terrorists keep sending car bombs and the like from their
stronghold, as in Fallujah.

What worked in Afghanistan was to find some local warlord we
could live with, someone in no hurry to get his six pack of
virgins, someone who might want to put sacks over the heads of
the women of his town, but had no grandiose ambitions to stuff
all the women of the world into bags, and then we cut a deal
with him - we help him his slay his enemies, he helps us slay
our enemies.

Unfortunately the US plan to bring democracy to the middle
east, and to preserve Iraq as a unitary state, keeps getting in
the way of this sort of deal. 

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         James A. Donald
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