So the problem is not so much to make the poor stop envying the rich, it is to make them put aside their envy. Progress towards a more free society would be greatly enhanced if those like my leftist friend Kenny could be made to realize that the problems which concern them so much spring not from Martha Stewart’s wealth but from her prosecutor’s ambition and his willingness to use force to advance that ambition. However, Kenny’s envy and the envy of those who think like him cloud their analysis of the situation. William Marina is right, people will always envy the rich but that does not mean that they must continue to remain blind to where the real threat to their happiness and well-being comes from, the state.

Oh, I just cannot resist. I have no willpower at all. From today's New York Times:

Under intense American pressure, Iraq's leaders asked the United Nations on Wednesday to help them form a new government and prepare for nationwide elections.

Members of the Iraqi Governing Council said they sent a letter to the United Nations after a tense meeting with L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator, who reportedly gave the Iraqi leaders an ultimatum.

In a morning meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Bremer warned the Iraqi leaders that they risked isolating themselves and their country if they continued to snub the United Nations. According to Iraqi and American officials, Mr. Bremer pointedly warned them of a" confrontation" with the United States if the Iraqis failed to invite the organization back.

Well, that probably gives them more credit than they deserve. After all, they would actually have to connect two discrete pieces of information, and see the irony involved.

That doesn't seem too likely to happen, given the intellectual caliber of most hawks these days.

Still, it's a nice thought to carry into the evening. Just imagine hawk-husband saying to hawk-wife:"But...but how can we be insisting that the Iraqis go back to the United Nations? We hate the United Nations! And we can do whatever the hell we want! We don't need to ask permission from anyone! Screw the U.N.! Screw it!"

Ah, yes. Nice to think about alright. Poor hawks. It's just a tough goddamned world out there, isn't it?

In case you'd forgot, this despot has used threats, intimidation, bribery and military force to fend off legal attempts to have himself removed from office then 1000 miles from U.S soil. The Bush adminstration, obsessed with removing the guy who tried to kill Bush senior, has largely ignored Chavez primarily because he hasn't threatened to cut off the oil we need. The fact that he's invited in THOUSANDS of Cubans to"help" his country is getting virtually no play either among administration officials, conservative political commentators, or the press. It's stunning.

So kudos to the San Antonio Express News for trying to keep its audience appraised of this tyrannt's activities. As defenders of liberty we should do what we can to keep this story alive.

About the early part of the twentieth century (from a UPI story excerpted here some months ago):

The general impression one got from their writings, and from the pronouncements of President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and the other masterminds of the war was that Iraq, the legendary site of the Garden of Eden, had indeed been one, and that that state of innocence had endured until Saddam and his allies seized power to establish the Second Baath Republic in 1968 or, at least until the pro-Western monarchy with its trappings of parliamentary democracy was destroyed in the bloody coup of 1958.

But that was not the case.

The history of Iraq before the 35-year-long night of the Baath Republic descended upon it should have provided ample warning that once the lid was lifted off, those long decades of repression, more years of terrorism, assassination and massacre were only too likely to follow. For they were what had gone before. ...

Although Britain came to Iraq as its military conqueror in 1918 with a 300-year long record of imperial conquest and colonial administration unequalled by any other power in modern history, it failed to successfully transplant any of the institutions of freedom and Western democracy there, even though it tried hard to do so for 40 years. And almost as soon as they entered the country, the British faced a ferocious popular uprising of Sunnis and Shiite alike, though dominated by Sunnis, which it mercilessly crushed at the cost of thousands of dead. ...

Friday's frightful bombing in Najaf, coming so soon as it does after the destruction of the U.N. compound in Baghdad and the murder of the chief U.N. envoy within it, serves notice that the bullet, the knife and the bomb are reigning again in Baghdad, just as they did during all those four long decades of supposedly enlightened British rule. U.S. policymakers should cease laboring under the delusion that they are about to change it.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A large explosion hit a hotel in central Baghdad on Wednesday night, sending flames shooting into the sky. Witnesses said it was a bomb blast, and that the hotel was destroyed.

Rescuers were seen pulling bodies out of the hotel damaged in blast.

Thick clouds of smoke rose behind a central square from the area of the blast. Trees were on fire, and flames jumped to nearby buildings. Several cars were destroyed. Ambulances headed to the blast site.

The explosion shook the nearby Palestine Hotel, where many foreign contractors and journalists are based.

The explosion occurred behind Firdaus Square, where a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein was felled April 9 with the help of U.S. Marines who had just entered the center of the Iraqi capital.

In fact, if one is concerned with underlying principles, long-range consequences -- and above all, with truth -- it changed precisely nothing.

Nothing.

(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)

Let me offer some comments on Pat Lynch’s thoughts in “More Madrid Madness,” below.

Eighty percent of the Spanish public was against Aznar’s decision to support the US in Iraq. Many Americans, who blather on about our modest immigration appear unaware of Europe’s problems in this regard, just as we have bombed the hell out of various nations -- nukes and otherwise -- during and after WWII, killings hundreds of thousands of civilians, its collaeral damage, you know, old chap, but can become righteously indignant when it was done to us in NYC.

While Europe in general suffers from a low birth rate with immigrants coming in, Spain’s, at 1.12 is now the lowest in the world, having displaced both Germany and Italy in this regard. There has been an effort to induce Spaniards to return from Latin America, and this has worked to some small extent with respect to Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela, where there are problems. Because of his Spanish father, Fidel Castro, for example, qualifies for a $200 subsidy, and instant citizanship, should he choose to return. Because I have Spanish paternal grandparents, I would have to stay a year before being given citizenship.

Thus, to keep enough workers paying into the system to keep the modest welfare state afloat -- sound familiar, Social Security fans? -- the Spanish are actually trying to lure Muslims back after 500 years and offering land in the process! 200,000 now reside in Spain, with a 100 mosques built in the last ten years.

In short, under such circumstances, with a country in such a population and identity crisis to the extent it must increasingly rely on Muslims from North Africa, Aznar was a damn fool to get into a confrontation in Islamic Iraq just to show his support for Bush.

In their mature phase Empires often show such declines among the old stock that originally created the wealth. Thus, in Rome, as the old Romans' birth rate declined, some have argued due to ingesting lead in their diets, and the Jews (10%) and others came in to join the Legions, etc., Augustus Caesar pleaded with the aristocratic Senate to beget more children. Too busy with the night life of the Gods seems to have been the reply!

Also, while the US has almost totally bought into the centralized, bureaucratic Statism that has been the hallmark of ALL Empires, the Spanish, quite apart from the Basque separatists, who are in a minority even there, have been redeveloping a regionalism that would have been the envy of the early American Confederation. Much of Europe is moving against Brussels centralism.

I guess the Imperialist Intellectual, Samuel P. Huntington, may be correct about Hispanics just not having the right genes for continuing the centralized Empire. My one grandfather was an Asturian anarchist who sold his yacht, with which he had run rum into Florida during Prohibition, in order raise funds to oppose Franco, and my other grandparents, from Alabama, descended from Confederate soldiers.

All I can say is, “Viva España, You all!”

Yes, David, that is what Senates are for -- well named for their Roman predecessors of the Empire, not the Republic period, who understood the job description, to suck up to Caesar and ratify his wishes.

I found this to be true in the case of my alma mater; see William Marina and Charleton W. Tebeau (my old teacher who did the 50 year history), Rendezvous With Greatness, a 75th anniversary history of the U. of Miami (FL), (2001). and also in my forthcoming Where Tomorrow Began, a forty year history of Florida Atlantic University, where I taught from 1964 (its first year) until retirement last year. You might find the final chapter of interest, “The American University in an Age of Empire.”

In 1973 I was having lunch with the Chair of the Comm. of Committees of the Senate, which selected all of the folk, in consultation with the Adm., who would be on the various and numerous committees, enough to pretty much dilute power throughout the institution. He informed me, he could get anyone on any committee he wished.

”How is that?” I asked. “Simply by suggesting your name,” he replied, “the Adm. will accept anybody but you.”

Why was that? Because in 1969 I had risen in the Senate (all faculty could attend in those days) and given a talk against the Adm.’s plan to restructure the whole system, and asked for a secret ballot on the issue. It was the only time, I think, there was ever spontaneous and sustained applause in that “august” body. In the balloting that followed, the Adm. lost by one vote. The Prez, Provost & their minions were not pleased. I suspect they regreted I had just received tenure. I was fortunate enough 3 years earlier, when several administrators tried to fire me for my civil rights work and anti-Vietnam activities, that I was defended by other adminstrators, who were seeking to oust that group, and used my case as another reason for doing so. My group won, but was not happy with my breaking with them in 1969.

We made peace years later, because they eventually had it their way, and I was bringing in sufficient grant monies (they love that overhead rakeoff), so as to be tolerated for my entrepreneurship, but watched carefully.

Let me know if you ever find a university where these kinds of things are not the norm. We had an excellent president, however, in those early years, and that made all the difference, ultimately. He was not a hater, and appreciated what I had done with student activities despite our disagreements.

Also, I can't remember if I posted here, but I had a column on FoxNews.com last week about the morass of federal laws and regulations, and burdens of compliance and potential for corruption it imposes on the American people.

As most of you know, I am a staunch supporter of the War on Al Qaeda. I think the US should have staged an all-out campaign to destroy that group 11 years ago, when they first attacked the World Trade Center on US soil in 1993. They have been an imminent threat to US security and should have been squashed. (Of course, I do believe that the history of how that group became an imminent threat is important: for answers to that question, just take a look at the history of US interventionist foreign policy, which is an"incubator" for anti-American terrorism — a history of propping up regimes from the House of Sa'ud to the mujahideen in Afghanistan...)

This said, I have not been a supporter of the War in Iraq, because I believe that Iraq was (a) not an imminent threat to the US; (b) not in possession of imminently-threatening weapons of mass destruction; and (c) not in league with Al Qaeda. If it had been proven to me that the Hussein regime was an imminent threat and in league with Al Qaeda, I would have supported a war against Iraq. But I still would not have supported the Wilsonian"nation-building" campaign that the neoconservatives in the Bush administration have been championing: a campaign to build a political democracy, at the cost of many American lives, and billions of US taxpayer dollars, on the shaky foundation of a culture steeped in internecine tribalist conflict, which has no understanding of individualism or human freedom.

I have expanded on these subjects in at least two articles, and countless posts to the Liberty & Power Group blog. Check out my Not a Blog for a listing of essays, including A Question of Loyalty and Understanding the Global Crisis.

All of this said: IF it should happen that Al Qaeda was, indeed, involved in the bombings in Madrid, what did the War in Iraq do to undermine that group?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

If anything, the US toppled a murderous"secular" regime in Iraq that even Osama Bin Laden condemned as a home to"infidels." If anything, the possibilities of an emerging theocratic movement in Iraq have been multiplied. If anything, Al Qaeda is simply using this US occupation as a pretext for recruiting more and more terrorists to its murderous cause.

No, I'm not"implicitly" supporting the return of Saddam Hussein — who, I believe, was being, and could have been fully contained without a US invasion. But I live in the real world as it is, not as I would like it to be. Good riddance to him and his sons and to the Ba'ath killers.

Nevertheless, for those of us who are in support of the war against Al Qaeda, opposition to the Iraq war last winter was not a vote of support for Hussein; it was a strategic decision by some of us who believed that the Iraq war was a diversion from the true sources of Al Qaeda terrorism, with its roots in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, ironically: two US"allies."

I shudder to think that the Madrid bombings, 2 1/2 years to the day after 9/11, are a prelude to a similar multi-pronged attack on NYC subways in the coming months. If that were to happen during rush hour, Al Qaeda would take out thousands of Americans. They could conceivably cripple the city's underground transportation, destroy underwater tunnels, and fracture the city's infrastructure.

And the Iraq war would have done nothing to stop it.