You Keep Using That Phrase, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

An article published this week in Foreign Policy brought to mind the memetic line of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, "You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means."

Writing under the headline "Economic Rights Are Human Rights," Yale University's Samuel Moyn shows by the second paragraph of his article that he doesn't know what he's talking about:

For 40 years, America’s human rights policy has focused narrowly on political and civil liberties and has been coupled with a free market libertarian agenda for the world. By neglecting social and economic rights and the vast disparities both within and among nations, U.S. policy has exacerbated many of the evils it set out to eradicate. It needs an overhaul.

A "free market libertarian agenda for the world" is exactly what has promoted economic rights and liberties for the past generation. By promoting free market policies around the world, poverty has been reduced to a tiny fraction of what it was only 40 years ago. People nearly everywhere are healthier, wealthier, and better educated than their parents and grandparents were.

Why only "nearly everywhere"? Because some countries have refused to liberalize their economies, thus perpetuating and deepening the poverty experienced by all but the political elites and their cronies in the limited business sector. Compare, for instance, Botswana and Zimbabwe -- neighboring countries but one is politically free and economically prosperous while the other is both politically oppressed and economically depressed.  The conditions on both sides of the Botswana-Zimbabwe border are inextricably intertwined.

Check out anything posted to HumanProgress.org if you are skeptical of my claims.

By the way, I clicked on the article;s link because I agree with the headline: Economic rights are, indeed, human rights.  In fact, I addressed that issue from a somewhat different angle way back in 1991, just as the economic freedom revolution began to advance around the globe.

From the Archives: Not all terrible acts are perpetrated by terrorists (1996)

This article originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on July 31, 1996.

Not all terrible acts are perpetrated by terrorists

Richard E. Sincere Jr.

Without a doubt, the bomb that exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta early Saturday was the work of an evil person with malicious intentions. A businesswoman was killed, and 111 others injured. Law enforcement officials are justified in using all legal means at their disposal to find and prosecute the murderer.

It is, however, troubling that both law- enforcement agencies and the news media are treating this crime as as a terrorist event. Not all mass murders are acts of terrorism. Not all bombs are planted by terrorists.

Terrorism is fundamentally a political act, to advance a cause. Terrorists mean to create tyranny, either directly or indirectly, so that the political order that they prefer can take the place of the current one. Terrorists can be rebels seeking to overthrow a state; states seeking to overthrow the international order; or states seeking to maintain privilege for rulers and stifle dissent among the people. In every case, the motivation for terrorism is explicitly political.

Whoever planted the bomb in Atlanta was most likely a "lone wolf" who was seeking some sort of personal affirmation by seeing his morbid act reported on television and in the newspapers. He was no more a terrorist than Jeffrey Dahmer, whose murderous and cannibalistic behavior was disgusting and uncivilized, but had no political content.

The danger of elevating the tragedy at the Olympics to terrorist status is that it will give the U.S. government more excuses to erode our constitutional liberties. Already this year a new terrorism law took effect which limits the rights of foreign nationals to appeal deportation proceedings; which grants the FBI and other government agencies broad new authority to listen to our telephone calls; and which limits the right of habeas corpus for those accused of capital crimes. In short, it shrinks the Bill of Rights to a skeleton of what it should be. Another new law, "justified" by the Atlanta bombing, might rip the guts out of our freedoms of association, dissent, and privacy.

Real terrorism is when the Irish Republican Army takes a sledgehammer to the kneecaps of a suspected informer in order to enforce its will in a Catholic neighborhood. Real terrorism is when the Libyan government plants a bomb in a Pan Am jetliner that explodes over Lockerbie, Scotland. Real terrorism is when the U.S. government uses tanks to knock down the homestead of religious dissenters in Waco, resulting in the deaths of dozens. Real terrorism is when Palestinian gunmen kidnap and murder Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

It ill-serves us to redefine simple crimes as terrorism when the result is expanded government power and shrunken human liberty. Such redefinition also, in a perverse sense, glorifies the criminal when our goal should be shame and punishment.

Let's not over-react to the Atlanta bombing. If we do, far more than 112 people will be harmed.

Sincere is the author of "The Politics of Sentiment" and other works.

From the Archives: Colin Dueck explains libertarian influences in conservative foreign policy

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on October 28, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Colin Dueck explains libertarian influences in conservative foreign policy

Colin Dueck teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he is associate professor of public and international affairs. He is also the author of a new book, Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy Since World War II.

On October 28, on the eve of an election widely expected to bring in a new Republican majority to the House of Representatives, if not the U.S. Senate as well, Dueck addressed an audience at the Heritage Foundation about his book. In his lecture, he argued that the Republican approach to foreign policy has been remarkably consistent over the past six decades.

Dueck says in his book that “despite apparent oscillations between internationalism and isolationism, there has in fact been one overarching constant in conservative and Republican foreign policies for several decades now, namely, a hawkish and intense American nationalism.”

After his lecture, Dueck spoke briefly with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his book, about libertarian influences in conservative foreign policy making, and prospects for free trade after the election.


McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft

Dueck said he was motivated to write Hard Line as he “was reflecting on some of the changes that had taken place in U.S. and, specifically, Republican foreign policy after 9/11 -- the arguments for war in Iraq, the Bush doctrine, and so on.”

His original manuscript, he said, was 600 pages long and “started with McKinley," he said. “Then I talked to my editor,” who told him, “’This is totally out of control.’”

The first version of the book had chapters on McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge, but, Dueck said, he “decided the story would hold together a little better with a start in World War II.”

He explained that the “main storyline is the decline of that anti-interventionist trend represented by Robert Taft. That’s the big story in the Forties and Fifties.”

Anti-interventionist and Libertarian Strains

Taft represented what Dueck calls an “anti-interventionist” strain in foreign policy, with origins in libertarian thought.

Colin Dueck

Libertarian thinking, Dueck explained, “was prominent in the sense that for Taft and, actually, for most conservatives and most Republicans, the belief was that if the U.S. intervened, for example, in World War II, that you would get an expanded national security state -- big government, in a way. So for Taft, the priority was ‘let’s avoid that at all costs.’ Therefore, that’s the argument for staying out of war.”

History, however, intervened. As Dueck put it, “Obviously, Pearl Harbor settled the issue.”

That anti-interventionist tendency, he continued, “still persisted after the war and for somebody like William F. Buckley [it was a] major theme, but what trumped it eventually in the Fifties was a concern over Communism.”

What happened was, said Dueck, “in practical terms a lot of libertarians or libertarian-leaning conservatives [and] Republicans embraced this new consensus over the course of the Fifties, which was a more hawkish, anti-communist, cold war policy.”

Dueck did note that there were “important exceptions” to this trend, such as economist Murray Rothbard, “who was strictly libertarian.”

Rothbard, he said, “stuck to this anti-interventionist position throughout the Cold War and in that way, almost ended up having more in common with the New Left, beginning in the Sixties and Seventies.”

While Rothbard and his circle represented “an interesting strain,” Dueck said, “it was clearly not, politically [or] in practical terms in Congress, a major force in the Republican Party,” either in the Sixties and Seventies or “in the later Cold War period.”

Free Trade Policy

One foreign policy issue that generally divides Republicans and Democrats is free trade.

Asked whether a new Republican majority in Congress will affect the pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, Dueck replied:

“Well, that will really be up to President Obama. There’s been no sign that he’s going to make that a priority.”

If Obama wanted to make free trade a priority, Dueck noted, “he might get more support from the next Congress than from the last one.”

The reason, he said, is that “at the end of the day, new Republican Members are going to be friendlier to these trade agreements than most Democrats have been.”

From the Archives: LP presidential hopeful Gary Johnson calls two-party debates a 'waste of time'

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on October 21, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

LP presidential hopeful Gary Johnson calls two-party debates a 'waste of time'

With the third and final Democrat-Republican presidential debate approaching, Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee, said in an interview that such debates are “a waste of time,” also offering his thoughts about U.S. policy in the Middle East and North Africa. He also indicated that he may win a large percentage of votes in his native New Mexico.

Johnson, author of the new book, Seven Principles of Good Government, spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner during a recent campaign stop in Washington, D.C.

Although a social gathering at The Board Room on Connecticut Avenue was meant for Johnson to engage with his supporters and campaign volunteers, he spent the greater part of the evening answering journalists' questions on a wide range of policy issues.

Asked about the value to voters of the debates between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Johnson said they are “just a big waste of time” and that the two participants are like the Lewis Carroll characters “Tweedledee, Tweedledum.”

'State of war'

The former New Mexico governor offered this prediction: If “either one of them get elected, we're going to have a heightened police state. We're going to find ourselves in a continued state of war. Military interventions are not going to stop, and spending and debt [are] going to continue to be unsustainable. At some point,” he concluded, if Obama or Romney is elected, the economy “will collapse.”

In response to a question about radio and television advertising for his campaign, Johnson said he will soon be airing TV commercials “in areas we might actually win, or potentially taking second place” although “probably not” in Washington, D.C., despite that city's small number of Republican voters.

Johnson also predicted his vote totals will be relatively high in some Western states and one Midwestern swing state.

“I think there's opportunity in Nevada,” he said, noting that “something that really has gone unpublicized is in Ohio last week, I was polling at 11 percent.”

That is “probably an aberration,” Johnson conceded, “but nonetheless, all these polling numbers are going up. They're not going down.”

The first-time presidential candidate said he believes it is possible he could win more than 10 percent of the vote in New Mexico, where he served two terms as a Republican governor in a majority-Democrat state.

“I really believe that, I really do,” he said, “and we're not focusing anything on New Mexico. The notion is that we're trying to treat everything equally and see how that pans out but I would have to think that, [given] my experience in New Mexico, I'm really looked at favorably. I really am.”

Libya question

In the foreign policy debate at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, on October 22, the question of U.S. policy in Libya and reactions to the September 11 murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans will be in the forefront of the discussion, just as it was in the town hall debate at Hofstra University on October 16. Johnson has some strong views on what U.S. policy in that region should be.

“I would pull all of our diplomats out of our embassies” there, he said. “I would not set us up as being targets.”

In the “long term,” the United States and other countries should “take part in what I would hope would be mutual benefit but when I hear that” American diplomats in the region are supposed to be “protecting vital American interests, I just ask rhetorically, out loud, What are vital American interests? Are they propping up the new dictatorship that we deem better than the old dictatorship?”

In response to a question about whether American influence is better projected using soft power than military power, Johnson explained, “that's right. It's walk softly and carry a big stick. That's what [George W.] Bush said but none of that none of that was reality. None of it.”

Suggested Links

Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson assesses Romney, Stein, and Goode
Presidential hopeful Gary Johnson on health care, marriage, and Colbert
Libertarian author Brian Doherty compares Ron Paul and Gary Johnson
Constitution Party presidential nominee Virgil Goode talks politics on Labor Day
Libertarian VP nominee Jim Gray reflects on electing judges, Gary Johnson

From the Archives: Virginia Senator Mark Warner assesses situation in Iraq and the Middle East

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on June 20, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Virginia Senator Mark Warner assesses situation in Iraq and the Middle East

On Friday evening, June 20, the University of Virginia Center for Politics hosted a screening of its Emmy award-winning documentary short film, “Out of Order,” followed by a panel discussion featuring former U.S. Senator John Warner (R-Va.) and his successor, incumbent Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.). Both Warners appear in the film along with Bob Schieffer of CBS News and other current and former Members of Congress.

After the two-hour, formal program, the current Senator Warner answered questions from the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his re-election campaign and also about foreign policy issues.

The day before the interview, President Barack Obama had spoken to the White House press corps about the administration's plans to send military advisors to Iraq in an effort to defend that country against the army of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Learning lessons in Iraq
Senator Warner said that he supported the president's deliberate approach with regard to Iraq, saying that it is important to gather all the facts on the ground before taking action.

“Of all places in the world,” he explained, “Iraq is a place [where] we should have learned the lessons that we've got to get all the facts first.”

Noting that he is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, 'Warner said he believes “very strongly that we need to slow the rush of these terrorists into Iraq.”

At the same time, however, “I also believe that we need to support any Iraqi government that's going to be inclusive” rather than narrowly sectarian.

“Particularly since part of the Iraqi army melted away rather than try to defend their own country,” Warner said, the United States needs to gather and assess intelligence about who the “bad guys” are.

“Before we take action,” he explained, the U.S. government must find out whether the ISIS forces might be “in uniforms that used to be Iraqi army uniforms.”

He asked, “How do we get that intelligence?,” stating that “on this issue, I think the president is moving with the right deliberate speed in terms of getting information first before we take action.”

Corrupt regimes
Warner also commented on the nature of regimes in the region and the sacrifices made on behalf of the people there.

“If there are only corrupt, sectarian regimes in all of those countries' future, then the region and the world's future is going to have a real challenge,” the senator said.

Suggesting that the American people are disheartened by the situation, Warner asserted that “the challenge is going to be: will these countries step up” in their own defense?

He said that it “was sickening” to see Iraqi soldiers “drop and run” rather than fight, especially after “thousands of Americans lives were lost” and “trillions of dollars were spent” on behalf of Iraq by the United States, which spent “billions of dollars” on training and equipping Iraqi troops.

Senator Mark Warner's dialogue with former Senator John Warner, moderated by political scientist Larry Sabato, can be seen in its entirety on YouTube.

SUGGESTED LINKS

GOP Senate candidate Ed Gillespie sees 'energized, excited' party activists
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GOP can regain control of Senate in 2014, says strategist Grover Norquist

Original URL:  http://www.examiner.com/article/virginia-senator-mark-warner-assesses-situation-iraq-and-the-middle-east

From the Archives: 'They won and we blinked' says former Sen. George Allen on Iran deal

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 13, 2015. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site is scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

'They won and we blinked' says former Sen. George Allen on Iran deal

Former Virginia Governor and U.S. Senator George Allen spoke in Charlottesville on Saturday, September 12, at the monthly breakfast of the Albemarle County Republican Committee. His message to the gathered activists was one of inclusion, saying that political parties win elections by addition, not subtraction.

Before he delivered his remarks, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner asked him about some foreign policy matters that are in the news. Allen said that, if he were still in the Senate, he would vote against the proposed deal with Iran on nuclear technology. He also said that the best solution to the refugee crisis in the Middle East is to build a “safe haven” in Syria rather than encourage migrants to come to Europe or the United States.

'Sanctions worked'
One aspect of the agreement with Iran that bothers Allen is the unfreezing of assets.

“One of the things I worked on when I was in the Senate,” he explained, was the issue of people who had been held hostage, injured, and killed by Iran over the years.

Going back to the Carter administration, he said, there were court judgments in favor of those injured parties that could be paid out of frozen Iranian assets in the United States and elsewhere.

“We have all these assets,” Allen said, “and they ought to be able to get their judgments paid out of those assets. Those assets are being released back to [Iran], going back to a regime that's going to use that money to support Hamas and Hezbollah and all sorts of terrorist organizations around the Middle East.”

On the nuclear aspect of the agreement, he said, “People will argue over the verification and so forth of that, and you can argue endlessly. But here's the other point: they are a state sponsor of terror and in five years the arms embargo is off. Then in seven or eight years the ballistic missile sanctions are removed.”

Iran, he said, is “a dangerous force and they can be even more dangerous after this when they can get more arms and they can get more missile technology.”

Acknowledging that the agreement will go forward, Allen said “I hope that I'm wrong but I see no evidence to evince any sort of confidence that this theocracy will change its ways and will only be stronger. In fact,” he added, from Iran's perspective, “they won and we blinked.”

Stated flatly, he concluded: “Sanctions worked. What we ought to do is keep the sanctions on but these other countries” that are party to the agreement “are all capitulating because they want to go [into Iran] to make a little money.”

'Safe haven'
On the matter of the refugee crisis in the Middle East – over four million refugees from Syria are now in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan but the United States has promised to take in just 10,000 – Allen was reluctant to suggest that the United States should commit to receiving more asylum seekers.

“I think the best solution to all of this is to create an area, a safe area, in Syria, maybe along the Jordanian border,” he said, “and just create a safe-haven city so that the folks from Syria don't have to leave their country on risky boats going to Greece.”

That solution, he said, “would be a whole lot less expensive to our government, to the governments of Europe and the world, to create that sort of a situation rather than having them so desperate to live and get food they have to make these risky trips. To me, that's the solution to it rather than creating this diaspora from” Syria in the United States and Europe.

Noting that he understands asylum laws and how they affect refugees from conflict zones, Allen concluded that “to me the solution would have been, and should be, and in fact, can still be, to create a safe haven for them in Syria.”

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Virginia Congressman Robert Hurt speaks out for free trade in Charlottesville

Original URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/they-won-and-we-blinked-says-former-sen-george-allen-on-iran-deal

From the Archives: 'The Poverty of Development Economics in Africa'

(This article appeared originally in the New York City Tribune on March 16, 1990, under the headline, "The Poverty of 'Development Economics' in Africa."  It has not previously appeared on the World Wide Web.)

African development specialists complain that Poland and Hungary will get over $500 million in economic aid in 1990 while the entire continent of Africa gets only about two-thirds that amount. There are substantial arguments to justify this imbalance, the most persuasive being that the Poles and Hungarians are eager to transform their deteriorating economic systems into free enterprise zones.

At the same time, it is clear that billions of dollars poured into persistently socialist and increasingly corrupt African governments over the past two or three decades has been money down a rathole. Congress and the President seem to think that American aid should be sent where it will be used most wisely and most profitably.

Certainly, poverty in Africa is one of the most serious problems facing the world today. Pervasive hunger and heavy national debts on that huge continent drain the international economy of resources that could be put to better use elsewhere, creating wealth rather than depleting it. To understand the current sad state of economic development in sub-Saharan Africa, one must go back to the early independence period.


Unfortunately, for both political and economic reasons, African governments adopted statist economic policies whose effect was to stifle growth, not enhance it. As Indian economist Deepak Lal put it in his aptly-titled book, The Poverty of 'Development Economics', “The most serious current distortions in many developing countries are not those flowing from the inevitable imperfections of a market economy but the policy-induced, and thus far from inevitable, distortions created by irrational dirigisme.”

In other words, current poverty in Third World countries and especially in Africa is the result of conscious policy decisions by ruling elites, often aided by development economists trained in the West who quite readily discarded the classical and orthodox economics in the tradition of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and even John Maynard Keynes in favor of dicier theories and practices.

Perhaps the most trenchant and unconventional critique of orthodox development economics is found in Jane Jacobs' widely-discussed 1984 book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. In it, Jacobs tackles head-on the field of macroeconomics and the development policies that flow from it, calling the whole field “a shambles.”

Like others who have analyzed the history of development aid, Jacobs notes that the impulse to send aid to underdeveloped countries was electrified by the success of the Marshall Plan in post-war Western Europe. The problem, of course, is that Marshall Plan aid was intended to repair fully developed but war-damaged economies, not transform embryonic economies ex nihilo.

“The healing of organisms,” she says, “including the organisms known as economies – is not at all the same as the metamorphosis of organisms, the conversion of them into something different.” Since the growing development industry of the 1950s and 1960s insisted on calling its projects “mini-Marshall Plans” and the like, disappointment was inevitable. This disappointment came at a high prices, as well.

One estimate is that in the 30 years ending in 1986, the West transferred about $1.6 trillion to the Third World, an amount equal to the total worth of all industrial stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and double the value of the entire U.S. agricultural sector.

The failure of the development economists was in their definition of development. They saw poverty as an obstacle to be overcome. They used military rhetoric to define development as a single-minded goal that can be reached by strategies, long-term planning, and setting targets. The unstated assumption was that “economic life can be conquered, mobilized, bullied, as indeed it can be when it is directed toward warfare, but not when it directs itself to development and expansion.”

Moreover, as Michael Novak has often pointed out, development economists are forever seeking the “causes of poverty.” Poverty, across all cultures and for most of human history, is mankind's normal state. What needs to be explored are the causes of wealth. Fortunately, that project was set off on a good start by Adam Smith in 1776.

The key, argues Jacobs, is that by its very nature, “successful economic development has to be open-ended rather than goal-oriented, and has to make itself up expediently and empirically as it goes along.” Jacobs defines economic development “as a process of continually improvising in a context that makes injecting improvisations into everyday life feasible,” amplifying this definition with the concept of “drift”: development entails “unprecedented kinds of work that carry unprecedented problems, [which drift into] improvised solutions, which carry further unprecedented work carrying unprecedented problems ...”

Small-scale economic actors in the Third World can be remarkable flexible in this fashion. Precisely because of the precariousness of their situation (most often in the unprotected, informal sector that exists apart from the officially sanctioned economy), peasants and micro-entrepreneurs respond well to the price mechanism. Deepak Lal argues that “unlike in richer countries, economic agents in poor ones will have few 'reserves' to fall back upon and will thus have to adjust speedily to a change in their economic environment by swiftly altering the terms on which they are willing to exchange economic commodities.” In developed economies, protected by large savings or the safety net of the welfare state, economic actors “can postpone the required price adjustments in a changing economic environment.”

It seems clear from this analysis that the informal sector – which, after all, existed and grew in the pre-modern era in Western countries even during the age of mercantilism – is the most effective engine of economic growth. It alone, unencumbered by the conservatism of bureaucracies and political elites, ready to adjust to changing conditions, willing to risk arrest and prosecution in order to achieve economic success, can create the conditions for growth even in the poorest of countries. Western development aid should thus be focused on assisting the informal, small-business sector and avoid government-to-government transfers that entrench unproductive, statist policies.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa, published in 1990 by the International Freedom Foundation.

No News Is New News: Revisiting the Somali Crisis of 1992-93

With the release on October 11 of the new Tom Hanks' movie, Captain Phillips, which is about the capture of an American cargo ship by Somali pirates; with the attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi by Somali terrorists affiliated with al-Shabaab; and with this week's anniversary of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu (later chronicled in the book by Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, and the 2002 Ridley Scott film of the same name), it seemed timely to revisit the Somali crisis of 1992-93 by looking at old video.

The video, in this case, is an episode of “On the Line,” which was produced by the Voice of America (VOA) for its Worldnet television network. The date was October 8, 1992. The occasion was the George H.W. Bush administration's lame-duck decision to send American troops to Somalia to protect the deliveries of humanitarian assistance, which had been obstructed by thugs and warlords.

On the Line: Crigler, Sincere, Untermeyer, Natsios

This troop deployment came to an insidious end just a year later, when the Clinton administration decided, after the debacle later portrayed in Black Hawk Down, that U.S. forces should be withdrawn from Somalia.

The guests on “On the Line” that day were Andrew Natsios, at the time director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance within USAID and President Bush's special representative for humanitarian assistance in Somalia; Frank Crigler, the penultimate U.S. ambassador to Somalia (1987-90), who had retired from the Foreign Service earlier that year; and myself, then the director for African affairs at the International Freedom Foundation in Washington.

The host of the program was Chase Untermeyer, then director of the Voice of America and later U.S. Ambassador to Qatar.

Untermeyer asked me to explain the causes of the conflict in Somalia. My reply:

The causes are deep-seated, of course. The collapse of the government could have been a temporary power vacuum in which another government would come to power quickly. But in fact we see rival factions arising all over the place and the fact is that these factions are hostile to the humanitarian aid that's coming into the country and that is what is causing the technical problems in solving the disaster.

He asked Natsios, “Who is in charge in Somalia?” Natsios replied:

In terms of Somalis, no one is in charge of Somalia. In fact, I wish this were a civil war, at least we could negotiate with the two sides as we've done all over the world. In the Angolan civil war, the Mozambican civil war, the Sudan civil war, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, this is not like that. Even if the warlords agreed, they don't control half the militias. There are just bands of young thugs running around with guns who are high on the drug called khat, an amphetamine. They are uncontrollable and they don't answer to anybody.

Then Untermeyer said, “Mr. Sincere, is it correct to refer to Somalia as a country. Does it have any semblance of national order or rule at the moment?”

I answered:

I think that the best description for Somalia today was actually written by Thomas Hobbes 400 years ago, [in] Leviathan:  it's the state of nature, a war of all against all. It's something almost unprecedented in 20th century history. We're simply unused to a situation like this. And that is why it's so difficult for the United States, the other Western democracies, and the United Nations to get a handle on this and to actually help the situation.

Ambassador Crigler added to my response:

Let me comment on that, Chase, because I think this is a situation that's not going to remain unique. I don't believe it's unique even today. I think we're seeing something not unlike that in Yugoslavia, or what's left of Yugoslavia, and even, as we speak, in Georgia in the former Soviet Union – a situation in which the state of nature seems to be the only substitute for a repressive state structure.

(I find it interesting that both Georgia and the former Yugoslavia have settled into stability, with several former Yugoslav states joining NATO and the European Union. Somalia remains anarchic by comparison.)

Crigler continued:

The state structure in Somalia was really imposed from without, in any case, there was never really a nation-state as we know it in Somalia before, and that has collapsed since [President Mohammed] Siad-Barre's fall because that rigid structure is no longer there and simply crumbled of its own and there was nothing left to take the place of it. What has happened over the years under that rigid structure is that people have lost the talents for settling their ethnic differences by peaceful means. Traditionally, as Andrew [Natsios] was suggesting, the elders were able to moderate those differences. Those skills were lost during this period of repression and I'm afraid that's not a unique situation we're going to see in the world today.

Later, Andrew Natsios suggested that, if the rival Somali factions didn't resolve their own problems, the United States would withdraw its troops. (That prediction came true, if in tragic fashion.) Untermeyer asked me if I agreed that that is a good policy. I said:

I think it's the best policy. This is ultimately up to the Somali people to solve for themselves. Order cannot be imposed from outside. Humanitarian assistance cannot be provided if rival clans are actually shooting the humanitarian assisters. It's a tragic situation and it is ultimately up to the Somali people to get together and say, “We no longer want to have this war. We must live peacefully.” And it's not up to us to impose that on them. We can prod them, we can cajole them, but beyond that, there's not much we can do.

At that point, Untermeyer asked Ambassador Crigler about Somalia's strategic importance, and then posed the same question to me. My answer:

Well, certainly, from a geopolitical standpoint, Somalia always will have a strategic value to the United States and to any rivals the United States might have. But I think the point should be made that a comparison has often been made that the United States is paying more attention to Yugoslavia than to Somalia and the accusation has been leveled that this may be of racist origin but in fact the amount of aid that the United States has sent to Somalia has far outstripped what's been sent to Yugoslavia in the same period of time. I don't think the United States has fallen down on the job in this at all but the fact is that the hostility that we're facing in the region is blocking our ability to solve the problem.

Twenty-one years later, and we are still facing a region that is blocking our ability to solve the problem.

Here's the complete video of episode 24 of “On the Line,” just under 20 minutes, as recorded in the VOA studios on October 8, 1992: