Hi Steve,
Yes, I should have been more precise and said "battle" not "war." My son asked
me if the war would last 30 days. I told him 30 years. That's like a fact-of-
life. To see the attack on Iraq as a stand-alone-war is shortsighted. The mass
murders of the terrorist enormity of September 11, 2001 started a very long war
and we are but at the beginning of it.
(Maybe it started with the invasion of Kuwait. Maybe it started with the 1948
Arab/Israeli war. But we're in it now. It's not like Islamists will stop
murdering Westerners if we make nice).
Governments make war like the sky makes rain. Wars make governments stronger
(unless they lose). That pendulum has swung. The way to reduce government's
power is to cut off the money. If we spend away on war our national borrowing
power we'll have to stop spending money on the DEA, EEOC, FDA, and the whole
regulatory, criminalizing apparatus. That stikes me as a good outcome from a
bad situation.