A Cato forum featuring Gene Healy and Judge Andrew Napolitano will be broadcast as well this weekend. I haven't yet seen Gene's book, Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything, but I'm looking forward to reading it.

First, "The Drug War Toll Mounts," posted at the Cato site.

Second, "A Mania Called Horse," which is an amusing (I think) look at the media's penchant to label every new trend it doesn't like as"the new heroin."

Robert "Birthday Suit" Blackwill had a rather odd op-ed in the WaPo's Outlook section on Sunday that I think isn't getting nearly the attention in the blogosphere that it deserves.  In it, Blackwill -- in the throes of some painful transatlantic soul-searching -- asserts that:

Their Cartesian upbringing makes the French understand the consequences for France of an American defeat in Iraq. They know that it would give a profound boost to Islamic terrorism everywhere, including in France. It would destabilize Iraq and could lead to a fracturing of that country -- even to civil war. It would introduce another acutely destabilizing element in an already wobbly Middle East region. And it could lead to prolonged U.S. retrenchment as we sought the reasons for our catastrophic failure. In their minds and public statements, the French declare genuinely that Iraq must not fall to Islamic extremism.

Then he goes on to tell us that they hate Bush, too, and so are conflicted about what to wish for in Iraq, since the choice seems to be between Bush and Iraq failing and Bush and Iraq succeeding.  But let me put my Henry Kissinger, "international relations is amoral" hat on here for a second:

France shouldn't give much of a crap what happens in Iraq, and they sure as hell shouldn't send troops to fight.

Right, right, I know, there's the whole bit about Western Civilization, and common values...I get it.  But from a national interest standpoint, why should France care what happens?  Or, put more directly, would the benefits of French intervention in the Middle East outweigh the costs?

Yes, there's likely a point at which France would have an interest.  If Iraq got so bad that it became a hotbed of terrorism that stood to affect France directly either through attacks against France, or economic shocks transmitted from attacks against the U.S., then France would indeed have a stake in piling on and trying to bail out the U.S.  But as things stand now, what does France have to gain versus what it stands to lose?

They have a large, unintegrated Muslim minority that has, as yet, put up with the headscarf silliness and a growing perception that the West and Islam are at war.  There have not been large scale terror attacks in France by Islamic terrorists(not being a member of the Coalition of the Willing).  And why, again, would an American withdrawal/defeat in Iraq embolden Muslim terrorists in France?  Isn't it quite more likely that if France sent troops to Iraq, it would become a target like Spain was?  I mean, jeez, even some of the nuttiest extremists have said that French citizens are out of bounds for attacks because of their opposition to the war.  Bin Laden, for his part, put things thus:

Security is an important pillar of human life. Free people do not relinquish their security. This is contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom.

Let him tell us why we did not strike Sweden, for example. It is known that those who hate freedom do not have proud souls, like the souls of the 19 people [killed while perpetrating the 11 September 2001 attacks], may God have mercy on them.

We fought you because we are free and do not accept injustice. We want to restore freedom to our nation. Just as you waste our security, we will waste your security.

Bin Laden is becoming increasingly clear about the why and wherefore.  If I were French, I think I'd be quite content to let this fight pass me by and see how things shake out on the other side.

(Cross-posted at my place.)

Much of the debate was prompted by Dan Klein's and Charlotta Stern's recent study which found that leftists predominate, often overwhelmingly, in most fields, especially in the social sciences and the humanities.

In response to evidence of this type, some conservatives, most notably David Horowitz, have called for universities to expand the existing use of race and sex (biological diversity) as factors in hiring to include ideological diversity.

While I think that Horowitz makes a stronger case than many of his critics are willing to concede, I have never been sympathetic to the approach he recommends.

Increasingly forgotten by both sides is another, and, in my view the best, standard for hiring: merit, without apologies or compromise.

I plan to say much more on this but let me start with a couple of questions for professors who support the inclusion of biology or ideology (or both) as part of the hiring process.

Do they use race or gender as factors in grading or do they use, or attempt to use, merit, pure and simple? If they do not believe in using biology or ideology as factors for grading, but do for hiring, on what basis do they justify the one but not the other?

Both of these questions were prompted by comments over at Cliopatria by Jonathan Dresner on a blog by Ralph Luker.

In part one, part two, part three, and part four of this series, I examined issues raised by Objectivist Peter Schwartz’s new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. I’ve addressed problems with Schwartz’s analysis of the U.N., foreign aid, Saudi Arabia, and the history of U.S. foreign policy. I now turn to his examination of the current war and his projection of a foreign policy ideal.

The Current War

To some extent, it can be said that Schwartz retains some vestiges of Rand’s “isolationist” predilections. He is careful to emphasize that the freedom philosophy of the U.S. “does not mean we ought to declare war on every tyrant in the world. Before we decide to wage war,” Schwartz explains, “there must exist a serious threat to our freedom. Our government is not the world’s policeman. It is, however, America’s policeman” (15). This is why, Schwartz maintains, foreign policy cannot be “divorced from the moral principle of freedom. If freedom is the basic value being safeguarded, then our foreign policy can give us unambiguous guidelines: we use our power to preserve that value—and only to preserve that value” (65). For Schwartz, then, thankfully, “it is not our business to resolve some distant conflict centering on which sub-tribe should enslave the other.” Indeed, when the proper moral goal is left undefended or undefined, “everything [becomes] our business,” and what results is an unprincipled, “ad hoc foreign policy” (67).

In terms of guiding moral principles, Schwartz’s argument is basically sound.

Moreover, by limiting the role of U.S. military action overseas, Schwartz justifiably leaves open the possibility for military response in the face of legitimate threats to security. Schwartz believes, however, that “Iraq ... was a threat to us—not nearly the threat presented by some other nations, but a threat nonetheless” (44), and on this basis, he supported the invasion of that country.

Alas, he and I disagree on this. In my view, Iraq was most assuredly not a “serious threat to our freedom” and should not have been invaded or occupied by the U.S. military. As I have argued in many essays over the past two years, Hussein could have been contained and deterred from future aggressive actions.

Though Schwartz supports the Iraq war, he maintains that it is Iran that is the “vanguard” for all those Islamic groups that are merely “parts of one whole.” Schwartz’s emphasis here on the “ideology of Islamic totalitarianism” (24)—and kudos to him for not using that tired phrase “Islamofascism,” which distorts the meaning of the word fascism—is important to note:

The promoters of Islamic totalitarianism wish to establish a world in which religion is an omnipresent force, in which everyone is compelled to obey the mullahs, in which the political system inculcates the duty to serve, in which there is no distinction between mosque and state. (25) ... America is a nation rooted in certain principles. It is a culture of reason, of science, of individualism, of freedom. The culture of the Muslim universe is the opposite in every crucial respect. It is a culture steeped in mysticism rather than reason, in superstition rather than science, in tribalism rather than individualism, in authoritarianism rather than freedom. (26)

Though Schwartz gets some crucial things right in this passage, I do think there are certain complexities he does not grasp; for example, it is not at all clear that the problems he cites are strictly the result of Islamic theology or some combination of that doctrine with specifically Arab cultures. (See this discussion with Jonathan Dresner and Gus diZerega on L&P, for example.) Schwartz readily admits too that, “[i]ronically, it was life in the Islamic countries during Europe’s Dark Ages that was further advanced and less oppressive—because the Muslims at the time were under the influence of a more pro-reason philosophy, a philosophy they subsequently abandoned” (27). In this larger ideological war, however, Schwartz argues that the U.S. “should always give moral support to any people who are fighting for freedom against an oppressive government.”

But it is Iran that remains “the pre-eminent source of Islamic totalitarianism today” (30), and it is therefore “the government of Iran that needs to be eliminated,” in Schwartz’s estimation (32). By targeting Iran, “the primary enemy,” “the chief sponsor of terrorism,” all the other “lesser” Muslim states—“Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan—will likely be deterred” (32-33).

I don’t believe it’s that simple. Schwartz tells us that a “principled foreign policy anticipates future consequences” (62). But, given the difficulties of invading and occupying Iraq, and the current drain on U.S. money, military, and munitions, I don’t believe that Schwartz has given much thought to the long-term consequences of invading and occupying Iran, which is nearly 4 times the size of Iraq, and has more than 3 times the population. (And if Schwartz does not envision invasion and occupation, then it is legitimate to ask if he, like some other Objectivists, envisions the decimating of the entire country—see here, for example.) Aside from the fact that a large-scale military option would almost certainly require the reinstatement of the draft and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, it would most likely short-circuit the existing and growing liberal tendencies among the vast majority of younger Iranians who yearn to topple the mullahs. It could very seriously destabilize Iraq as well. (See my various archived posts on Iran, here and here.)

It should also be pointed out that “Islamic totalitarianism” is no more of a monolith than Communism was. Just as there were deep divisions in the Communist “bloc” during the Cold War, so too are there deep divisions in the Islamic world. These divisions might be profitably exploited by U.S. policymakers, who must also be careful not to be consumed by them—as in Iraq, where Kurdish, Sunni, and Shi’ite forces might opt for civil war rather than the ballot box.

There are, of course, consequences for a policy of inaction in the face of a real or imminent threat. But those of us who have opposed the Iraq war and any current extension of that war into Iran have not embraced “inaction”; what we have embraced is a strictly delimited strategic vision focused on precise military targets, which seeks to marginalize extremist theocratic forces—and a much broader intellectual vision focused on the realm of ideas. Ultimately, this is an ideological and cultural conflict. And as Rand observed, while a military battle of any scope is like a “political battle”—“merely a skirmish fought with muskets[,] a philosophical battle is a nuclear war”—and only rational ideas will ultimately win it (“‘What Can One Do?’”).

The Folly of Nation-Building

To his great credit, however, Schwartz does recognize the futility of trying to impose liberal-democratic institutions on the Middle East, by empowering “various tribal and political factions” in occupied countries (49). Though he supported the Iraq war, Schwartz argues nonetheless that “[t]he U.S. government does not have a moral obligation to the Iraqis to make them free.” He observes insightfully:

[C]ontrary to the claims of the Bush administration, freedom is not universally desired. It does not automatically come into being once a dictator is overthrown. The history of the world is largely that of one tyranny replacing another. It took millennia before a nation—the United States of America—was founded for the express purpose of safeguarding the freedom of each citizen. Across the globe today, individual liberty is still the exception rather than the rule. Freedom is an idea. It cannot be forced upon a culture that refuses to value it. It cannot be forced upon a society wedded to tribalist, collectivist values. In Afghanistan, for example, the newly drafted constitution contains such laudable provisions as: “Freedom of expression is inviolable.” However, that same constitution mandates that “no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam”—that the government be responsible for “organizing and improving the conditions of mosques, madrasas and religious centers”—that no political parties may function if their views are “contrary to the provision[s] of the sacred religion of Islam”—that the national flag feature the phrase “There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet.” Is it conceivable that, under such strictures, the individual will be allowed to think freely? Freedom is such an alien principle in that culture of entrenched mysticism that it will take many years of rational education before it is understood, let alone accepted. (50-51)

But Schwartz subverts his own good insights with a dash of myopia:

To lead the Iraqis to freedom, whether in the next year or the next generation, requires that we “impose” our values on them—i.e., that we expose them to the philosophy of a free society. They need to be given the Declaration of Independence to study. Their schools must teach the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and John Locke and Adam Smith. The Governing Council must be instructed to eject the communists and the jihadists. (51)

With all due respect, not even U.S. schools teach Jefferson, Locke, and Smith with any regularity, and if our universities ever ejected communists and other left-wing fellow travelers from the classrooms, the country’s academic population would be decimated. How on earth is the United States going to promote an individualist ideological strategy in Iraq when it doesn’t embrace one within its own national borders?

Yes, of course, I know: It’s all relative. The U.S. may not be a genuinely free society, but it is much freer and more individualist than almost any society on earth. Yes, of course, the Iraqis need to understand the principles of a free society, the social system that is “capitalism, the unknown ideal,” and the institution of private property that it subsumes. But how are Iraqis ever going to appreciate any of these principles when privatization is not on the menu for social change and crony corporatism for favored U.S. companies reconstructing Iraq is the meal of the day?

Schwartz is right to criticize the kinds of “ad hoc” policies that make for “irresolution and ineffectualness” in U.S. military campaigns (61-62). And he is right, and in sync with Rand, that the war we face is, ultimately, “a battle of ideas” (53). But how can the U.S. begin to wage this war when it has surrendered its intellectual ammunition, and routinely sabotages its own individualist political principles?

The Inextricable Connection Between Domestic and Foreign Policy

Rand argued that, to regain those principles, it is necessary to understand the inextricable connection between—and reciprocally reinforcing insidious effects of—government intervention at home and abroad. She insisted that “[f]oreign policy is merely a consequence of domestic policy” (“The Shanghai Gesture, Part III”). This led her to demand a complete “revision of [U.S.] foreign policy, from its basic premises on up,” which would entail a simultaneous repudiation of the welfare state at home and the warfare state abroad, an end to “foreign aid and [to] all forms of international self-immolation.” For Rand,“a radically different foreign policy” required a radically different domestic one (“The Wreckage of the Consensus”).

Schwartz comes close to recognizing, in an abstract way, the connections between domestic and foreign policy; he argues that America’s “philosophic default ... pervades all areas of American politics, domestic as well as foreign.” He recognizes, in one or two sentences here and there, that there is a relationship between foreign policy and “our expanding welfare state” (68). But he leaves unanalyzed all of the actual social and political relations that would make this connection fully transparent. In other words, he leaves unexamined what Rand thought crucial to the analysis.

In the end, Schwartz presents an unrealistic solution:

The challenge we face lies not in physically disarming al Qaeda, but in intellectually arming our politicians. If they truly grasp the meaning of freedom, they will readily undertake the steps to safeguard it. That is, if we can just get them to understand what it means to defend the individual’s right to his life, his liberty and the pursuit of his happiness, we will have little difficulty in getting them to defend us against the ugly threats from abroad. (69)

This won’t happen ... because it can’t happen, as long as America is ruled by a predatory political system. It is not in the narrowly defined “interests” of politicians or the groups they serve to “grasp the meaning of freedom.” As Rand argued so forcefully, the globalization of the predatory state and its neofascist political economy can only engender “parasitism, favoritism, corruption and greed for the unearned”; its power to dispense privilege, Rand emphasizes, “cannot be used honestly” (“The Pull Peddlers”). It will require far more than simply changing the views of a few politicians; it will require a comprehensive, systemic change.

What most strikes me about Schwartz’s book—and I’ve only been able to examine a few aspects of it— is that it tends to deal too abstractly, too rationalistically, with the principles of a “moral” foreign policy. That is, it provides us with good core moral premises and deduces an ostensibly moral foreign policy “ideal” for America, without paying much attention to the concrete context and historical circumstances that have led America so far astray from the celebrated ideal. Rand could also celebrate an “unknown ideal”—but rarely at the expense of a rigorous analysis of the past, and the present, the actual, as a means to evaluate the potential for real change.

I’ll offer one other observation in closing: I’m somewhat uncomfortable with Schwartz’s use of the phrase “self-interest” to describe any government’s foreign policy, especially one that exercises territorial sovereignty not over an ideal capitalist social system, but over a mixed economy, the very kind of “neofascist” or liberal-corporatist social system that Rand regarded as an institutionalized civil war. In such a system, the pursuit of individual self-interest is not even possible without sacrificing somebody else’s interests in the process. How, then, can a mysterious, ineffable government suddenly rise above this “orgy of self-sacrifice” in the realm of foreign policy and pursue the common “self-interests” of its citizenry? Governments are not separable from the groups and the individuals who compose them. “In a non-free society,” Rand stated—even in a society such as we have today, where freedom has been compromised by state intervention—“no pursuit of any interests is possible to anyone; nothing is possible but gradual and general destruction” (“The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests”).

This is not a prescription for inaction; one cannot expect everything to change before anything can be done to thwart serious attacks on America. But Rand’s insights provide us with a “warning label” for those who think that today’s government, as currently constituted, can act as a panacea for our global woes. If we are to aim for “a moral ideal for America,” then it will take more than a “foreign policy of self-interest.” It will take a veritable philosophic and cultural revolution, one that radically overturns the welfare-warfare state and its sacrificial, collectivist ideological underpinnings: root, tree, and branch.

See also Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

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Introduction

For several years now, I’ve been engaged in a critique of the foreign policy writings of various Objectivists, who, I believe, have abandoned Ayn Rand’s radical insights on the nature of U.S. politics. For those who are not Ayn Rand fans or who don’t care one iota what Objectivists have to say on U.S. foreign policy, this week’s five-part series (which begins today) might not provide the requisite excitement. But for those readers who are classical liberals and libertarians, and who see, on a daily basis, the erosion of the noninterventionist tradition of liberalism, this series will have some merit. Suffice it to say: In fighting for Rand’s radical legacy, I’m fighting simultaneously for that noninterventionist tradition that stands opposed to the welfare-warfare state, while seeking to comprehend the inextricable relationship between the “welfare” and the “warfare” part of that equation.

In my essay, “Understanding the Global Crisis: Reclaiming Rand’s Radical Legacy,” I argued that too many Objectivist writers in the post-9/11 era were suffering from historical amnesia. It’s as if they have forgotten most of what Rand said on the issue of foreign policy; one will be hard pressed to find any quotes from Rand’s various foreign policy essays and lectures in any of the books, journals, and online periodicals to which Objectivists have contributed.

It’s not fair, of course, to suggest that a lack of references to Rand is a sign of abandonment. Clearly, these writers have been influenced by Rand’s broad ethical and political precepts, especially those concerning egoism and individual rights. But there is a disturbing pattern among Objectivist writers to ignore Rand’s actual foreign policy pronouncements, which continue to have relevance for the modern world. When such writers are writing explicitly on the subject of foreign policy, that ignorance has far-reaching implications for the quality and persuasiveness of their arguments.

This pattern is on display yet again in the newest book by Objectivist writer Peter Schwartz, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America (Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2004)—which has exactly one quote from Rand, and this quote does not derive from any of her work on foreign policy. In his preface to the Schwartz monograph, Ayn Rand Institute Executive Director Yaron Brook tells us that this work is part of a series on “The Moral Foundations of Public Policy.” For Brook, “[f]oreign policy is neither a starting point nor a self-contained field. It is, rather, the product of certain ideas in political and moral philosophy. ... It has failed because of the bankrupt moral philosophy our political leaders have chosen to accept: the philosophy of altruism and self-sacrifice” (5). Schwartz’s work goes a long way toward explaining these ideas, and it succeeds in highlighting some very important issues. (Some of this work derives from a series of articles that Schwartz published back in March and April 1986, “Foreign Policy and the Morality of Self-Interest,” in The Intellectual Activist.) Objectivist Harry Binswanger has gone so far as to say that Schwartz has provided us with “the foreign policy Bible for America and any other free society.”

Ultimately, however, the book fails to recapture Rand’s radical framework of analysis, which, from a political standpoint, seeks to understand and overturn U.S. government policies at home and abroad.

Of course, Rand’s radicalism is not primarily political; it is a methodological radicalism, a radical way of thinking upon which political and social change is built. Karl Marx once said: “To be radical is to grasp things by the root” (“The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”). Though Rand repudiated Marx’s communism and its collectivist premises, she championed the notion of the “radical in the proper sense of the word”; as she explained: “‘radical’ means ‘fundamental.’” For Rand, “the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt ‘conservatives,’ but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists” (“Conservatism: An Obituary”).

But the power of Rand’s methodological radicalism went beyond a search for roots. In seeking to understand the system of contemporary statism, Rand shows how various factors often mutually supported one another in sustaining the irrationality and injustice of that system. It was only by clarifying the various relationships at work that we could begin to alter them fundamentally.

Schwartz’s Core Argument

Peter Schwartz certainly hopes to clarify the moral premises at work in U.S. foreign policy. Schwartz states “that self-interest can be successfully defended only if it is embraced as a consistent, moral principle—a principle in keeping with America’s founding values” (12). He continues: “Just as in ethics it is maintaining his own life that should be the individual’s ultimate purpose, in politics it is maintaining its own citizens’ liberty that should be the government’s ultimate purpose” (14). For Schwartz, “[i]n both domestic and foreign policy, the proper role of government is to protect the citizen’s basic political interest: freedom” (19). As such, Schwartz disavows “nationalism [as] a collectivist idea” (19). He rejects “diplomacy” as “the opposite of justice,” because it presumes that “we must maintain cordial relations” with dictatorships and treat all regimes with respect, regardless of their moral legitimacy (20). He renounces appeasement, and the “pragmatist” policy of buying off “allies” with economic aid. In Schwartz’s view, a practical foreign policy identifies liberty as the “central value,” and develops the “basic means” to defend it.

For those who want the “bottom line,” here it is: Schwartz may have correctly defined some key principles here, but his discussion is marred by a rationalistic streak. Such principles make the most sense only in a context where the government is strictly limited; today’s government, however, is not focused on protecting individual rights, but on doling out privileges to those who are most adept at using the political process.

Schwartz is so caught up in his pan-and-scan black-and-white picture of foreign policy that his model fails to comprehend the full widescreen technicolor portrait, which his philosophic mentor grasped with relative ease.

I will begin to explore these topics in greater detail tomorrow, in part two of this five-part series.

See also Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.

Check out Not a Blog.

In part one and part two of this series, I outlined a few core points in Objectivist Peter Schwartz’s new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. After discussing inadequacies in Schwartz’s analysis of the U.N. and U.S. foreign aid policy, I now turn to his examination of the problem of Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia

The ever-expanding “neofascist” process that Rand identified in her critique of contemporary politics is further illustrated by the U.S. government’s socialization of corporate risk across the globe, granting corporations access to American taxpayer dollars—and the U.S. military if need be—to protect their foreign investments. Schwartz seems to approve of this. Looking at how Western-developed oil fields have been expropriated by foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia, Schwartz would have us believe that it is the U.S. government’s duty to “safeguard American lives and property” abroad “by using retaliatory force against the initiators” (15). Hence, for Schwartz,

America could readily take over the oilfields [in Saudi Arabia] militarily (they properly belong to Western companies anyway, which developed them and from which they were expropriated decades ago by the Saudi state). The only explanation is that we have morally acquiesced to the Saudis. We are reluctant to pronounce judgment on them. We don’t believe we are entitled to assert our own standards. We have concluded that we must compromise those standards—i.e., that we have to give up some of our freedom—in order to accommodate the wishes of tyrants. (38)

Well, this is not “the only explanation.” Again, Schwartz misses the underlying dynamic at work in the current political system. That’s because, almost without fail, he focuses on moral issues acontextually; he insists on pronouncing sweeping moral judgments on various global phenomena but frequently brackets out any discussion of the actual history—the actual context—within which these phenomena have evolved. We are left, in the end, with moral generalizations that are disconnected from the concrete circumstances with which Schwartz attempts to grapple.

I’ve long argued that U.S. companies short-sighted enough to enter into contracts with foreign governments like those of the former Soviet Union or Saudi Arabia—which had/have a poor history of upholding private property rights—should not have the right to hold American taxpayers and lives hostage to their stupidity. “We” do not have an obligation to bail out Western oil companies whose property was “expropriated” by the House of Sa’ud. A cursory look at the history of oil development in Saudi Arabia would show us, in any event, that the Western oil industry has been in bed—“embedded” if you will—with their ‘expropriators’ from the beginning. Nothing much has actually changed since the Saudi government ‘took over’ the oil by successively increasing its share of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO); U.S. administrators, technicians, and personnel are still firmly in place and U.S. oil companies like Exxon-Mobil remain at the forefront of all new oil exploration in the country.

As I’ve argued here, the formation of the Rockefeller-controlled ARAMCO depended upon a 60-year monopoly concession from the Saudi Arabian government; that government didn’t have the moral right to grant such monopoly concessions to begin with.

Let me emphasize a key point here: This was not homesteading. Western oil companies didn’t simply arrive on the Arabian peninsula so as to “mix their labor” with the land in order to attain Lockean acquisition rights. They were granted monopoly concessions in advance of drilling. Such concessions entail monopolizing all the oil in a vast land area through state force, which bars competing oil producers who might seek out oil in that area. The monopolist, in other words, uses the host government to gain control over a land mass through ownership claims granted by that government, which has no such legitimate authority to grant ownership rights (see Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty).

ARAMCO, as such, was born of a political relationship. And the U.S. government facilitated this Saudi-Western oil arrangement over time. In the early days, the Rockefeller-influenced U.S. Export-Import Bank even paid $25 million to the Saudis to construct pleasure railroads, while Franklin D. Roosevelt provided $165 million in secret appropriations out of war funds to help in the construction of ARAMCO pipelines across Saudi Arabia. Over the years, the money made by the House of Sa’ud in granting the monopoly concession was pumped into the creation of institutions dedicated to the dissemination of fanatical Wahhabi ideology, which has been exported to the rest of the Arab world—fueling fundamentalism and terrorism throughout the region.

Schwartz himself bemoans this Saudi Arabia-U.S. alliance and the financing of “an array of Wahhabi indoctrination schools, or madrasas, where new crops of Islamic holy-warriors are continually cultivated ...” But instead of focusing on the money that drives the establishment and growth of these schools, Schwartz is simply disgusted by the “utterly perverse” U.S. “readiness to grant [the Saudis] a moral endorsement” (34). That “moral endorsement” goes hand-in-hand with a politico-economic endorsement. And this is why it is a virtual certainty that the Saudi government will never be touched by the U.S. in the current “War on Terror.” As I wrote in my essay, “A Question of Loyalty”:

And throughout this whole “War on Terror,” the poisonous soil from which Bin Laden emerged—Saudi Arabia—remains untouched. While the U.S. is busy fighting in Iraq, it sleeps with the Saudis, continuing a 60+ year-affair that most likely led the Bush administration to blot out 28 pages from a report on the failure of 9/11 intelligence, which might have embarrassed its Saudi “allies.” U.S. corporations engage in joint business ventures with the Saudi government—from petroleum to arms deals—utilizing a whole panoply of statist mechanisms, including the Export-Import Bank. The U.S. is Saudi Arabia’s largest investor and trading partner.

In the history of ARAMCO and the U.S.-Saudi partnership, we find the kind of “pull-peddling” that Rand condemned as “neofascist.” And it is the U.S.-Saudi-Big Oil Unholy Trinity that continues to sustain an autocratic, undemocratic Saudi regime, one of the breeding grounds of Islamic terrorism. Yes, that regime finds itself increasingly at odds with the fanatical elements in its midst. As I argued at length here, “the fundamentalist ideology that the House of Sa'ud has long funded and exported is now undermining its very rule. While the failure of the Saudi state at this point in time would be an utter catastrophe, those who would take power—the fanatical fundamentalists among them—are, to borrow a Randian phrase, 'the distilled essence of the [Saudi] Establishment's culture ... the embodiment of its soul' and its 'personified ideal'." (An interesting article on this subject,"Al Qaeda on the March" by Ehsan Ahrari, was published today.)

None of these complexities are even mentioned by Schwartz in his book.

Tomorrow: The History of U.S. Foreign Policy.

See also Part I, Part II, Part IV and Part V.

Check out Not a Blog.