You’d barely know there’s a war on from Reason magazine’s online commentary on the State of the Union speech: only Ron Paul devotes his remarks to foreign policy, and is, as usual, great on the subject. Bob Barr mentions the “war on terrorism” in the context of the regime’s subversion of civil liberties, and the rest of them — a narrow range of neocons and libertarian economists — have nada to say about it, except Michael Young, whose byline is fast becoming a byword for utter cluelessness:
“Will Bush in his second term stiffen his back and again insist on making Iraqi democracy (assuming that phantom comes alive) a linchpin for regional pluralism, helping undermine the Islamist militancy that caused 9/11? One must hope so, since otherwise the Iraqi adventure will have been a spectacular waste of life.”
Yeah, we sure wouldn’t want that to happen, now would we?
All I can say is thank the gods we have “libertarians” like Young around to tell us how and why we ought to expend human lives on foreign adventures. And it’s a good thing we’re “undermining” Islamic militancy by handing Iraq over to the tender graces of the militant Islamic electoral ticket dominated by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the fundamentalist Dawa party — both backed by Iran.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Max “We Haven’t Suffered Enough Casualties” Boot hails “the edifying spectacle of Iraqis rising up to rule themselves” — a spectacle that becomes even more instructive as they rise up to rule each other.
Boy, I sure hope Bush makes with the democracy-building already — after all, everyone should have the right to vote their society into slavery. Otherwise the whole thing will have been a spectacular waste …