Occupation of Independence

Conspiracy theories have never interested me and I look down on those who are into them. So it's with some reluctance that I admit that there seems to be something fishy with the recent killing of Osama bin Laden and the recently announced (painfully gradual) draw-down of troops from Afghanistan.

Marketwatch.com is not one of my favorite financial websites, and I don't read that many editorials by Brett Arends, one of their columnists. But he certainly did a good job of taking bin Laden's demise as a good opportunity for summing up the "War on Terror". Good work, Brett.

In writing about all the turmoil in the Middle East, some pundits like to refer to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. This revived my interest in George Orwell, who volunteered for the (government) Loyalist side. In fact I checked out a 1300+ page collection of essays and magazine articles that he wrote during his short lifetime. It struck me how important it used to be that public intellectuals (like Orwell and Arthur Koestler) were not tenured professors or think-tank intellectuals. They put their beliefs into practice. You might disagree with their politics as I certainly do, and as they eventually did, later in life. But there was real integrity in an intellectual pushing back from his desk, and suffering the mud and stink of real war. Both were in physical danger. It's something that would never happen today. Imagine the suburban comfort of the interventionist today: their McMansions in northern Virginia or in fashionable areas of Maryland. They might have tenure at a uni

The Iraq War started with a lie about weapons of mass destruction. At the time it seemed hard to believe that the Bush administration would lie about something that they would so easily get caught at, so I tended to believe them while suspecting that they were exaggerating. That is where I was a naif and the neocons were brilliant. WMDs were revealed as a lie gradually . At no time was the lie Breaking News; thus it wasn't news at all, and there were no consequences for the liars. In contrast, the Obama administration is not providing false evidence of a genocide in Libya; it provided no evidence at all. The only thing it provided was a "what if", that is, Fear. And thus we have come to see the Change we can Believe in: starting wars on the basis of no evidence at all, rather than false evidence.

Immediately after spouting off, I regretted it. Outside the college library a fellow had merely asked about my heavy breathing and whether I needed assistance. With a scowl on my face and voice I pointed out that I had just bicycled up one of the steepest hills in town. The poor fellow must have gone away thinking that no good deed goes unpunished. What was it that caused me to react so ungratefully to his apparent kindness and concern? Perhaps whenever I am on a college campus I feel a latent hostility that always boils just below the surface, and it takes little to set it off. Meanwhile, off in the big world, liberal interventionists are bombing away in the name of humanitarianism. The commentariat is struggling to make sense of liberal interventionism and nation-building as a type of muscular social work. Is there a relationship between these two examples of meddling do-goodism: one a micro-version, the other a macro-version? Many people have noticed that the transition is

What can you say about a town in which all the car bumpers have the same stickers? On a recent ride through the Little Pueblo I noticed a bumper sticker that was cracked and sun-faded: "God Bless the Whole World. No Exceptions." This slogan was almost obligatory in this town, and I agreed with them. Presumably the bumper sticker was intended to be a refutation of those "God Bless America" bumper stickers that Fox News listeners installed after 9-11. Once again this got me rolling my eyes at the hypocrisy of the anti-war Left. The cracked and sun-faded bumper sticker was installed during the Bush II Imperium; the New Mexico sun had finally taken its toll. Why weren't all the "anti-war" people in town installing new bumper stickers with anti-war slogans, now that the Afghanistan war has become longer than Viet Nam? Why weren't they holding a protest march or a candlelight vigil because of the Libyan invasion? What about America's great ally Sau