Lew Rockwell on the likely ratchet effect after 9/11

Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan, has shown how government grows the most during times such as these.  In a usual wartime situation, the government massively expands and then falls back only partially after it is over.  This creates a ratchet effect that guarantees a relentless march of the state.  Every new spending program creates a precedent said to apply in peace time.  How often have we heard calls for a "Marshall Plan" to solve this or that social issue?

~ Lew Rockwell, “What Not To Do,” Mises Daily, September 14, 2001

1987

 

Lew Rockwell on the aftermath of 9/11

The US government didn’t stop with wars.  It violated the civil liberties of Americans and established enormous new bureaucracies.  It trampled on the rights of states and localities.  It turned flying into a massive police operation.  It began a series of protectionist campaigns. 

The Bush administration busted the budget and saddled the country with the largest deficit in history.  Congress and the presidency engaged in a transparent logrolling whereby the warmongers gave the welfare statists what they want, in exchange for which the welfare statists gave the warmongers what they want.  The rest of us watched freedom melt.  We did what we could, in our writings and public advocacy, but the government tide was too high to hold back. 

 ~ Lew Rockwell, “Times Change, Principles Don’t,” Mises Wire, September 11, 2003

 

Lew Rockwell on Iraqi deaths before and after the 2003 invasion

What has been the result of our efforts to bring to Iraq the “benefits” of democracy?  There’s one thing Americans don’t talk about: the lives of Iraqis, or, rather, the deaths of Iraqis.  It’s interesting because we live in an age of extreme multiculturalism and global concern.  We adore international aid workers, go on mission trips abroad, weep for the plight of those suffering from hunger and disease, volunteer in efforts to bring plumbing to Ecuador, mosquito nets to Rwanda, clean water to Malawi, human rights to Togo, and medicine to Bangladesh. 

But when “we” cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence.  There is something odd, suspicious, even disloyal about a person who would harp on the deaths of Iraqis since the US invasion in 2003.  Maybe a person who would weep for Iraq is really a terrorist sympathizer.  After all, most of the deaths resulted from “sectarian violence,” and who can stop crazed Islamic sects from killing each other.  Better each other than us, right? 

Well, it’s about time that we think about the numbers, even though the US military has decided that body counts are not worth their time.  Here is the grisly bottom line: more than one million people have been murdered in Iraq since the US invasion, according to Opinion Research Business, a highly reputable polling firm in the UK.  Yes, other estimates are lower, but you have to be impressed by what they have found.  It seems very credible. 

In Baghdad, where the US presence is most pronounced, nearly half of households report having lost a family member to a killing of some sort.  Half the deaths are from gunshot wounds, one-fifth from car bombs, and one-tenth from aerial bombs.  The total number of dead exceeds the hugely well-publicized Rwandan genocide in 1994. 

Aside from the astonishing detail, what jumps out at me is the number of dead who are neither Sunni nor Shia.  It is also striking how the further geographically you move from US troop activity, the more peaceful the area is.  Americans think they are bringing freedom to Iraq, but the data indicate that we are only bringing suffering and death. 

If you have ever lost a family member, you know that life is never the same again.  It causes every manner of religious, social, and marital trauma.  It’s bad enough to lose a family member to some disease.  But to a cold-blooded killing or a car bomb or an airplane bomb?  That instills a sense of fury and motivation to retribution.

So we are speaking of some 1.2 million people who have been killed in this way, and that does not count the numbers that were killed during the invasion itself for the crime of having attempted to oppose invading foreign troops, or the 500,000 children and old people killed by the US-UN anti-civilian sanctions in the ten previous years. 

The US has unleashed bloodshed in Iraq that is rarely known even in countries we think of as violent and torn by civil strife.  It is amazing to think that this has occurred in what was only recently a liberal and civilized country by the region’s standards.  This was a country that had a problem with immigration, particularly among the well-educated and talented classes.  They went to Iraq because it was the closest Arab proxy to Western-style society that one could find in the area. 

It was the US that turned this country into a killing field.  Why won’t we face this?  Why won’t we take responsibility?  The reason has to do with this mysterious thing called nationalism, which makes an ideological religion of the nation’s wars.  We are god-like liberators.  They are devil-like terrorists.  No amount of data or contrary information seems to make a dent in this irreligious faith.  So it is in every country and in all times.  Here is the intellectual blindness that war generates.

Such blindness is always inexcusable, but perhaps more understandable in a time when information was severely restricted, when technological limits actually prohibited us from knowing the whole truth at the time.  What excuse do we have today?  Our blindness is not technological but ideological.  We are the good guys, right?  Every nation believes that about itself, but freedom is well served by the few who dare to think critically.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The War System," Against the State (2014)

 

Lew Rockwell why the neocons started the 2003 Iraq War

Why did the United States get involved? 

One of the key reasons was pressure from a group that has come to exercise more and more influence on American foreign policy — the neocons. Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and a number of others were not satisfied with American foreign policy. They disclosed their plans in an important book by Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan, The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission, published in 2003. These neocon authors said that foreign policy must avoid “realism.” The realists favored working within the balance-of-power tradition of European diplomacy. “This in turn led to the realists’ key recommendation: A state must limit itself to the protection of its ‘vital interests,’ lest it disrupt the balance of power.” 

A foreign policy realist will not hesitate to ally, if conditions require it, with an undemocratic state, but this strikes at the heart of Kaplan and Kristol’s ideas.  The key to their approach is that America should embark on a worldwide crusade for democracy.  To do so, they claim, will result in a world at peace.

They contend that the “strategic value of democracy is reflected in a truth of international politics: Democracies rarely, if ever, wage war against one another.”  Given this premise, isn’t the conclusion obvious?  If only we establish democracy everywhere, the millennium is at hand. 

Democracy should be spread worldwide, but one area is the most important for the neocons — the Middle East. Kaplan and Kristol hate all of the political systems of the Arab world, and they propose to replace them: “There is today not a single Arab state that qualifies as a democracy. ...  But promoting democracy in the Middle East is not a matter of national egoism.  It has become a matter of national well-being, even survival.”

In particular, the royalist government of Saudi Arabia must go.  Why not replace it as an American ally with a democratic Iraq?  “Iraq’s experience of liberal democratic rule in turn could increase the pressure already being felt by Teheran’s mullahs. . . .  Iraq could even replace Saudi Arabia as the key American ally and source of oil in the region.” 

America should therefore strike at Saddam Hussein — remember, they wrote before the invasion began.  Incredibly, Kaplan and Kristol predicted that the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms.  Then we could start preventive wars against other dictatorships.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The War System," Against the State (2014)

2014

 

President George W. Bush on motivation for 9/11 attacks: "They hate our freedoms"

Americans are asking, why do they hate us?  They hate what they see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government.  Their leaders are self-appointed.  They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

~ President George W. Bush, address to a joint session of Congress, September 20, 2001

 

Steve Eisman on stress cracks at Oracle

Blue Owl [Capital] is developing an AI data center called Project Jupiter for Oracle.  Oracle sent a notice citing force majeure, a legal term, to Blue Owl.  The notice is an attempt to put off payments if the data center gets derailed and fails to come online on time.  Now the debt tied to Project Jupiter was already trading at stress levels at around 90 cents on the dollar.  I'm sure it's under more pressure today, Thursday.  Although this shows Oracle is becoming increasingly nervous about its lack of cash flow, its high debt levels and its weak credit ratings.

~ Steve Eisman, "The Enron-Era Tricks Are Back in AI: How These Companies Are Hiding Their Debt," The Real Eisman Playbook, 3:45 mark, September 25, 2026

 

Peggy Noonan on whether Sam Altman can be trusted

In a less friendly profile for the [New Yorker] published this April, titled “Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?,” Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz wrote that Mr. Altman is “often described, either with reverence or with suspicion, as the greatest pitchman of his generation.” Many around him say he lacks extensive expertise in coding or machine learning. Messrs. Farrow and Marantz report “multiple engineers recalled him misusing or confusing basic technical terms.” 

Most of those interviewed shared the critics’ judgment that “Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart.” A board member who had worked with Mr. Altman told the authors: “He’s unconstrained by truth.” 

Messrs. Farrow and Marantz report that in the fall of 2023, when the OpenAI board famously fired Mr. Altman as CEO, the company’s chief scientist told another board member: “I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button.” Board members believed he had “deceived them about internal safety protocols.” 

Mr. Altman famously fought back and was reinstated. Still, “the colleagues who facilitated his ouster accuse him of a degree of deception that is untenable for any executive and dangerous for a leader of such a transformative technology.”

~ Peggy Noonan, "Sam Altman Is No Oppenheimer: Neither a scholar nor a scientist, someone like him shouldn’t be in charge of the future of humanity," WSJ, October 9, 2026