Into a New Quagmire

The worst news of the week from a substantive perspective was the U.S. Senate's approval of the vast bulk of the Clinton administration's request for more money to conduct the misbegotten and unwinnable "drug war" in Colombia. The worst news from the...

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On State-Strengthening Wars: Part I

In my last two columns on Murray Rothbard, I named a couple of books as important contributions to a Rothbardian analysis of the connections between statism and war. One is Martin Van Creveld's The Rise and Decline of the State (1999), around which the Ludwig von...

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Korean Surprises

To be sure, viewing last week’s meeting between President Kim Dae jung of South Korea and Kim Jong il, the dictator of North Korea as historic, heartening and a possible breakthrough for peace must be somewhat conditional. Mutual hostility stretching over 50...

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Who Could Deplore Peace Prospects?

I had called Leon Hadar, the libertarian Cato Institute's resident expert on the Middle East, to get some comments on the death of Syrian dictator-for-life Hafez-al-Assad, and he gave me plenty of information. But he kept pushing the conversation in a more interesting...

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Defending General McCaffrey

General Barry McCaffrey now has some defenders of the actions during the Persian Gulf war for which Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker had criticized him. The more usual approach has been to ignore the Hersh allegations and act as if they had no credibility or held no...

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Onward and Upward

A WORTHY TRADITION? Many foreigners have written books about American culture, life, politics, foreign policy, and the like. Many of these works have been rather awful and, therefore, rudely received this side of the water. The exceptions would include those of Alexis...

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