Month: January 2016

Like other totalitarian regimes that have no legitimacy and no base of support, the Saudis are wrapping themselves in religion. Saddam Hussein in the 1990s and currently Bashar al-Assad – the heads of the Baath party in Iraq and Syria – both played the religious card. However, Baathist doctrine in Iraq and Syria is basically irreligious. The Saudis are using religion as their excuse now, labeling the recent mass executions as preserving their religion when they are actually a message to frighten their citizens into submission.

Early in the Arab Spring of 2011, out of fear of losing its grip on the country’s citizens, the Saudi government allocated $35 billion in open giveaways and services to Saudi citizens. Although this monetary inducement succeeded in tamping down any thoughts of revolution at the time, the Saudis only deferred the day of reckoning. The impulse to fight against the sense of injustice is strong among those who live in that police state, with no democracy, and obscene inequality (many Saudi residents are working residents, with no rights at all).

The Saudis began this new year by executing 47 citizens on January 2, some by the barbaric method of beheading. These executions came after a total of 158 in 2015. Presumably the Saudi government sought to begin the year with a warning that it will not tolerate the crime of opposing the Saudi regime. These executions, some of them for people who merely spoke out against the state, is a slap in the face of all those democracies in the world.

Continue reading “The US Should Not Accompany Saudi Arabia Over the Cliff”

One in 3.5 million: That’s your annual risk of dying from a terrorist attack in the United States, at least according to Cato analyst John Mueller. Rounded generously, that comes out to roughly 3 one-hundred thousandths of a percentage point, or 0.00003 percent.

And this, according to a recent Gallup poll cited by The New York Times, is the percentage of Americans “worried that they or someone in their family would be a victim of terrorism”: 51.

So that’s 51 percent of Americans who think a terrorist attack against themselves is sufficiently likely to warrant their personal concern, versus a 0.00003 percent chance it might actually happen. If you’ll forgive my amateur number crunching, that means Americans are overestimating their personal exposure to terrorism by a factor of approximately 1.7 million.

It’s no wonder people play the lottery.

A public mood that overestimates the risk of terrorism by upwards of 2 million times, you might imagine, is a pretty significant headwind for a presidential administration that – with a few notable exceptions, like the surge in Afghanistan and the free-ranging drone war – has generally sought to wind down the full-blown militarized response its predecessor took to terrorism.

Continue reading “Here’s the Thing About Terrorism Obama Won’t Tell You”

The two US Navy riverine command boats intercepted in Iranian territorial waters yesterday were sent on their way along with the crew of 10 US sailors after brief detention on Iranian soil. According to news reports, the well-armed warships either suffered mechanical or navigational difficulties which caused them to enter Iranian territory (although it may well have been a game of cat-and-mouse to test the Iranian response). The US sailors were apparently treated well, enjoyed what appeared a decent meal in relaxed surroundings, and in the end apologized for the mistake and praised their treatment by the Iranians.

Thanks to President Obama’s policy shift on Iran toward engagement and away from isolationism, Secretary of State John Kerry was able to telephone his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Zarif and quickly defuse what just months ago would have been a far more serious situation.

This should be a good-news story about the value of diplomacy and reducing tensions with adversaries, but Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was having none of it. That Kerry expressed his appreciation to the Iranians for swiftly releasing the American sailors only showed the Obama Administration’s “craven desire to preserve the dangerous Iranian nuclear deal at all costs evidently knows no limit,” said McCain in a press release.

Continue reading “Sen. McCain Furious That Iran Treated US Sailors Well”

Government is more than a territorial monopoly on aggressive force. It’s also the heir to a centuries-old manufactured mystique, reinforced through its schools and other institutions, regarding its sanctity and sacrosanctity. The mystique is generated by and tends to manifest itself in the dogma that one’s State is uniquely virtuous and deserves to be judged by standards applicable to no one and nothing else. This is hardly less true of secular states than it was during the time of the divine right of kings. In some important ways, people have not gotten over that principle.

It long been recognized that governments cannot reign merely through brute force. There are too few rulers. So they need help in achieving popular compliance, and they find it in ideology. It is state ideology, the indispensable dogma, that creates the aura of sanctity. Where once people believed the ruler was the deity’s representative, in today’s democratic republics, they believe their rulers are their representatives. But it’s the same scam, perpetrated by rulers and their high priests in the intelligentsia, to maximize subordination and minimize resistance.

Ideology in this context means something much deeper than what is usually meant. It does not refer to the approaches known as “conservatism” and “liberalism,” or the differences between those who want “big government” and those who want “limited government.” It refers rather to the deeper view that The State with its authority to threaten and wield violence is indispensable and intrinsically virtuous, as nothing else can be. Therefore it is not to be judged as we judge other people and institutions. When someone does wrong in office – a Nixon, say – it is chalked up as an abuse of power. Power itself is beyond reproach.

Continue reading “Sheldon Richman on The Pernicious State”