Neocons, Dershowitz, and the Value of Predictions

What most neoconservatives do not understand is their fate. After all, even communists thought they had good intentions. They thought they were building a better world. They didn't know how harshly history would judge their ideology and the names associated with it. They thought that holding the levers of power made them more virtuous than common street criminals. But the evidence came when the deaths were counted and the bills came due - they were far, far worse. One neoconservative is beginning to figure it out: Francis Fukuyama has abandoned these losers.

Of course, the neoconservatives aren't the only bad guys. For a classic case of real "anti-Americanism" look no further than Alan Dershowitz and Tony Blankley. They hate everything that is (or was?) good about our country. As William Norman Grigg reports:

As outlined in Dershowitz's forthcoming book Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways, this legal doctrine would justify “such devices as profiling, preventive detention, anticipatory mass inoculation, prior restraint of dangerous speech, targeted extrajudicial executions of terrorists and pre-emptive military action, including full-scale preventive war.”

Or, to put the matter plainly, the abolition of constitutional government, the repudiation of the Anglo-Saxon concept of liberty through the rule of law, and the adoption of garrison state policies borrowed from the European Union, Israel, and the UK.

I'm not a huge fan of "academic freedom" and tenure for professors. They should be subject to the aims and mission of the college they serve, and it seems to me that an enemy of liberty like Dershowitz has no place at Harvard Law School or any respectable law school, and should be fired right now. And Blankley should be gone from the Washington Times, too. Karmic justice suggests they both deserve the same treatment at the hands of the totalitarian state that they would wish on others. But the fact is, the rest of us don't deserve it, and therefore we must not let it happen.

Like torture, which Dershowitz has also promoted, it is jaw-dropping that totalitarianism is even discussed in polite company. It is just as disgusting and inappropriate as racist and sexist remarks, and far more dangerous. The President of Harvard got fired statements far less damaging than Dershowitz's hitlerific agenda.

What the Dershowitz's and other scaremongers refuse to deal with is that America's neoconservative foreign policy is the cause of, not the solution to, the terror threat. We most certainly do not need to live in a world of "preemption" in the future. Complying with the Constitution and following the foreign policy prescriptions of the founders of the republic are quite sufficient to keep us safe. We do not need Homeland Security or the PATRIOT Act, let alone Dershowitz's drastic solutions.

On Sunday I wrote, "I think in the next few weeks we'll mark the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one." Now, while it looks like Iraq is heading to civil war, Jeff Wells points to a Newropeans Magazine report (whose link I had a problem loading) estaimating "over 80% the probability that the week of March 20-26, 2006 will be the beginning of the most significant political crisis the world has known since the Fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, together with an economic and financial crisis of a scope comparable with that of 1929." And that without a military strike against Iran. If there is war, the probability of this crisis, the report says, approaches 100%.

Two main reasons:

a)"Iranian decision of opening the first oil bourse priced in Euros on March 20th, 2006 in Teheran," that is, instead of dollars.
b)"the decision of the American Federal Reserve to stop publishing M3 figures (the most reliable indicator on the amount of dollars circulating in the world) from March 23, 2006 onward."

If our own central bank is afraid to find out how worthless the American dollar really is, that can't be good. The one thing we can't predict is what kind of event will signal the new era. The world, and particularly this Administration, are always full of surprises.

But don't assume I'm pessimistic. Being conscious of the possibility, or probability, of disaster is the best way to prepare for it and even prevent it. All signs point to the total failure of our financial system (which wasn't supposed to happen for another three decades due to Social Security), and with that, the failure of our political system and much else. To know now that, for instance, you may lose your job in the next few months, is better than seeing it disappear without warning. That's what predictions are for - to make us conscious of events which we might otherwise not know about and which, by knowing about them, empower us to take some control of the situation.