Matt Manweller, an associate professor of political science at Central Washington University, recently wrote an editorial in the Seattle Times. There are some interesting insights and some conclusions I agree with, but overall, I think he sees a lot of evidence for what he’s saying that doesn’t really exist. His overall point is that as we stumble about trying to modernize the third world, we’re not understanding that capitalism is the root of liberty, rather than democracy. He posits that if we just help people recognize the benefits of limited government, de-regulation, and free market principles, they will more quickly attain liberty. I agree with that to a point, but I think Manweller is avoiding a much more basic reason why true liberty has been so elusive to much of the third world, especially the Middle East.

He starts off with an interesting observation:

I want to start with a relatively controversial premise. Despite the continual barrage of attacks from the blogging left, the neoconservatives got one core argument correct: Killing Osama bin Laden will do nothing to stop terrorism. If we want to stop terrorism, they correctly argue, we need to bring hope, social and economic mobility, and the rule of law to the places that foster terrorism. The mistake the neocons made was assuming that democracy would foster such an environment in the Middle East.

I agree that just simply killing Osama bin Laden from on high would do little on its own to stop terrorism, but bringing the rule of law to a place like Afghanistan would have certainly benefitted by apprehending bin Laden and putting him on trial. He’s also right that democracy alone can’t transform the Middle East, but I think he ignores how much the Bush Administration agrees with his notions of capitalism and thought that it would be a transformative force in the region. It just failed as well.

Where I think Manweller is really getting it wrong is right here:

The neocons were correct to start with their initial premise: Liberty will nurture an environment hostile to radical Islam. From there, however, they should have done a better job finding the variable that actually creates liberty. If they had looked harder, they would have found capitalism, not democracy.

Although there are always exceptions to the rule, history has shown that capitalism (more so than democracy) does an excellent job of fostering property rights, independent courts, the rule of law, and dispersing power to multiple stakeholders — particularly in countries that have few cultural predispositions toward civil society.

Applying this conclusion to Iraq and the greater Middle East relies on a number of bad assumptions. For one, it assumes that those involved in the invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t try hard enough to introduce capitalism. That’s crazy. The CPA tried very hard to emulate the kinds of anti-regulatory small government principles that Republicans cherish back home. It just didn’t work. The reason is because Manweller’s underlying assumption is completely wrong. Capitalism, like democracy, is not the root of what eventually leads to liberty. The element that has been missing in Iraq (and other parts of the third world) is a sense of trust in the overall system of justice. Manweller dances around this point here:

Democracy does not cultivate liberty because democracy trades tyranny of the one for tyranny of the 51 percent. It does nothing to limit the power of government, protect the rights of minorities, or establish the rule of law. Democracy ends up looking just as ruthless as a dictatorship because it transfers ultimate and unchecked power from one to anyone who can create a coalition of 51 percent. In such a democracy, the other 49 percent usually pick up a gun.

But how is capitalism the cure for this? Just like democracy, capitalism also doesn’t work if there isn’t a certain level of faith in the system. For many of the poorest nations of the world, the problem isn’t one of too much government regulation over commerce, it’s a matter of too little. People in other countries often fear capitalism because they don’t have faith that their government can provide economic justice within the system. They see capitalism as a way for the rich nations of the world to get richer and they reject it and fend for themselves. Even when this is a misperception (and a lot of times it is), it’s what happens in the real world. The more basic element that leads to liberty is a sense that a government can provide justice for the weak against the powerful. This is difficult, especially when the authorities take power by force and certain subsets of a society feel like outsiders. In Iraq, we believed that it was more important to get the stock exchange running than the court system in order. That was a mistake. The most important tasks were to convince the Iraqis that we could keep them safe and prove that the government represented everyone. Capitalism alone couldn’t accomplish either thing.

Even in the greater Middle East, the idea that small-government capitalism is the missing element from having them achieve liberty is misguided. The Middle East has a long history of engaging in trade and many Arab countries have lax regulations on industry. But they are also very authoritarian when it comes to issues of personal liberty. Saudi Arabia is one of the worst. It’s hard to argue that radical Islamism would disappear in Saudi Arabia if they just stopped regulating industry so much. In fact, an argument can easily be made that the country in the Middle East that we consider to be the most free, Israel, is also the most socialist.

I agree with the concept that Tom Friedman discusses in his latest book – that as the world economy becomes more intertwined that we’ll find it harder and harder to sever those bonds for the sake of war. In that sense, capitalism does play a very big part in promoting liberty and generating opportunity. But those bonds aren’t forged until people both here and elsewhere feel that their economic interests can be protected by those who govern them. Capitalism is not some magical powder that we need to bring to the Middle East and spread over the land to sprout freedom. It is no more the magic elixir than was having the Iraqis dip their fingers in purple ink and vote for a civil war. The Middle East doesn’t need our economic system as much as they need our justice system, so that they can more easily count on their governments to protect their rights. Unfortunately, the current occupants of the White House don’t have a lot of respect for our own justice system, so it was kind of useless to expect that they’d be able to export it over there.

Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns is making some very interesting claims:

NATO has intercepted Iranian weapons shipments to Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, providing evidence Iran is violating international law to aid a group it once considered a bitter enemy, a senior U.S. diplomat said Wednesday.

“There’s irrefutable evidence the Iranians are now doing this,” Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said on CNN. “It’s certainly coming from the government of Iran. It’s coming from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps command, which is a basic unit of the Iranian government.”

I’ve written a lot about Afghanistan at Reload, and I just want to quickly explain why we should be very skeptical of what Burns is saying. This post will be short on links because I’m on my lunch break, and I don’t have time to look up everything I’ve cited in the past on this.

Long story short, Afghanistan, as we all know, is the major opium producing country in the world – by far. The heroin that’s produced in hidden labs throughout Afghanistan is smuggled out in several different directions, most of which ends up in Europe, but a growing percentage stays in the countries along the smuggling routes (India, Pakistan, Russia, and Iran). Iran actually has one of the worst heroin problems in the world, and this is very clearly something that the theocratic Iranian leadership is not happy about.

The attempts by NATO forces and the Karzai government to destroy the opium production from within Afghanistan is beyond futile. The industry is roughly one half of the entire country’s GDP. You can’t just wipe that out militarily. Even with the unanimous support from outside the country to eliminate the trade, drug smugglers still dominate large areas of Afghanistan – especially in the south. But because the trade is still illegal, and coalition forces still have a mandate to assist the Karzai government in destroying the opium fields, the Taliban have been able to set up a protection racket, where they can collect ‘fees’ from the drug smugglers in exchange for making sure that their fields are spared when the eradication teams come through.

The Taliban doesn’t get paid in stacks of bills, though. Instead, they get paid in something that’s more valuable to them – weapons that they can use to fight the coalition forces. That’s where the Iranians come in. Seeing the massive increase in drug smuggling coming across the Iran-Afghanistan border, the Iranian government began to more heavily patrol the area. The intention was never to arm the Taliban, but that was the inevitable result. The Iranian government is notoriously unable to enforce its own strict laws, and high-ranking Iranian officials were bound to find ways to get in on the massive profits to be made by helping all that heroin make its way to London. This is why Iranian arms have ended up in the arms of the Taliban.

Obviously, these accusations aren’t coming out of nowhere. We’ve got a fleet of warships off the southern Iranian coast and we continue to have dimwitted Congressmen making severe threats against the regime. There’s a strong movement among a small subset of Americans to start a war with Iran, a move that would end in disaster. Those of us who still have our common sense intact need to keep dealing with the facts.

Before I start into this post, I wanted to introduce myself and thank Goldy again for letting me post up here. I normally post as ‘thehim’ at Blog Reload, Effin Unsound and (every once in a long while) at Washblog. I started blogging three years ago after the advent of the Iraq War made me realize how far away this country has gotten from the principles that have made it so great. But for the past 2 years, I’ve focused more on issues of personal liberty, specifically the drug war.

The reason I’ve made this my focus is because after following a number of foreign policy and domestic issues, I saw that the drug war and its inherently counterproductive nature is wreaking havoc in a number of difficult issues that we face today – from illegal immigration, to crime, to our relations with Latin America, to the war in Afghanistan, to the way our nation’s infirmed and elderly are taken care of, to our overcrowded prisons, and worst of all, to our race relations. The drug war costs us billions of dollars every year and accomplishes absolutely nothing. It’s based on an assumption that the government has a duty to protect adult citizens from their own decisions. This false belief has been recognized as a mistake by people as politically diverse as Milton Friedman, George Soros, William F. Buckley, and Ralph Nader. Yet it still continues, because the willingness of politicians from both parties to resort to fearmongering has never been effectively countered with basic reason and common sense.

As this blog deals with Washington State politics, let’s look at some recent local news. Over the past school year, undercover police officers had been attending classes and pretending to be students at three Federal Way high schools. In the end, they were able to charge 3 adults and 11 juveniles with drug offenses. Two of the adults are facing gun charges for illegally selling firearms to the officers. Most of the transactions happened off school grounds once students agreed to help these officers purchase drugs.

I don’t doubt that the high schools in Federal Way have a problem with drug use. Illegal drug markets tend to gravitate towards the path of least resistance. In other words, the decision to make a living by selling illegal drugs is made more often in places where people have less opportunity. But all high schools today have some level of drug use going on. The last undercover operation like this one was at Redmond High in 2003 (you can see what one person had to say about that here).

What was done in Federal Way has been presented nearly unanimously by the local media as a positive thing. It is portrayed as a reasonable response to underage drug use. But the reality is not so neat. In any school where drug use is fairly common, these operations aren’t like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s more like shooting fish in a barrel. Undercover cops, especially female ones, can make just about any student into a drug dealer by making them feel that it would worth their while to break the law for them.

The main question to be asked is how did the cops decide who to target? In my suburban high school 15 years ago, an undercover cop could have arrested about half of the students in my senior class this way. Was it different here? Did these two officers make an effort to find out who certain main dealers were, or were they just content to arrest anyone who had the knowledge of where to find drugs? Did they only focus on a certain ethnic community? Did they only focus on kids who fit a specific stereotype (as what happened in Redmond)?

Probably the most pernicious aspect of stings like this is the belief that it helps those who get caught. I’ve seen this expressed several times, by teachers and school officials, even by one of the arrested teen’s grandfather. This is a greatly mistaken belief. No drug on this planet does more damage to a child’s prospects to succeed in life more than what a trip through the criminal justice system will do. Not to mention that all of the charged students have now been expelled. Depending on how these cases are handled, some of the arrested may find it impossible to receive financial aid for higher education or to be qualified for a number of jobs. All because they were the middleman between a drug supplier and an adult pretending to be a teenage drug user.

Despite these criticisms, I understand the train of thought for Federal Way school officials. They obviously know that drug use is widespread among their high school students. They felt like they had to do something. It’s very difficult to look at a problem like that and accept the fact that, at the local level, there’s nothing that can be done to fix it. This is a problem that needs to be fixed at the state level, by having the Governor and the Legislature finally take a stand against the federal government and start being smart about how we deal with drug use.

The reason that drugs are so readily available in our high schools stems from the fact that they’re illegal for adults as well. As a result, the supply chains exist underground and are controlled by criminals. Compare that to alcohol, where the supply chain is aboveground and heavily regulated by the government. Certainly, kids still get their hands on alcohol, but are there networks of alcohol sellers in high schools, who have large quantities of alcohol that they can sell to other students? Of course not. But this happens with drugs like marijuana, ecstasy, and cocaine, because at the higher levels of the criminal organizations that control those drugs, they could care less if a 16-year-old wants to be part of the network of low-level dealers. That’s exactly why our schools are flooded with these drugs. But if either of those two undercover cops wanted to buy alcohol from other kids, they probably would’ve been told to find someone over 21 to buy it for them.

The media occasionally raises points like these when the topic of the drugs comes up. So far, in relation to what happened in Federal Way, I’ve seen nothing to challenge the prevailing mindset that this sting is an acceptable and beneficial response to the problem of teenage drug use. If we understand that involvement with drugs is a function of having a lack of opportunity, why do we think we’re going to fix it by randomly picking off kids in a high school and giving them less opportunity to succeed in life?

As a college student in Michigan ten years ago, I went to see Dr. Jack Kevorkian speak. At the end of his talk, people were allowed to ask questions. After a handful of questions over legal issues, a wheelchair-bound man took the microphone and began accusing Dr. Kevorkian of being a murderer and encouraging people with disabilities to end their lives. The old doctor at the podium tried his best to respond to the baseless accusations, but with every attempt to set the record straight, the man in the wheelchair just became more enraged and more belligerent.

I have no idea who it was that gave this disabled individual the idea that Kevorkian had a desire to kill people in his situation, but the media-crafted persona of him as “Dr. Death” allowed for many people to misunderstand him and to avoid the very simple point that he was trying to make – that it’s not the government’s role to tell people how to deal with the reality of terminal illnesses and unmanageable pain. And the hysteria that followed his fame and his brashness sent this gaunt old man to jail soon after.

Upon his release from jail last week, media outlets seemed incredulous that Kevorkian hasn’t changed his mind about his actions. There’s no reason for him to. He’s standing up for a principle that is fundamental to our rights and to what this country is all about. Our government should not have the right to impose a particular morality upon its citizens. If a person with a terminal illness feels that they wish to control the way they leave this earth, the government should have no right to stop them. If a person dealing with pain so excruciating that they can no longer enjoy their existence decides that death is a better alternative, it’s simply unconscionable to force that person to continue to endure the pain. This man went to prison for 8 years in defense of these rights, and for that, he’s a hero.

In America today, our growing tendency to believe that government has a role in making our moral choices for us is sending more and more people to jail who clearly don’t belong there. In Spokane, a 66-year-old woman named Christine Rose Baggett is facing a felony charge. Baggett suffers from arthritis, two herniated discs in her back, and a bad ankle. Why is this clear menace to society being charged?

What the court record shows is that Baggett admitted purchasing an ounce of marijuana from a man on Aug. 23 for $180. But she gave some of it back to him “as payment for delivering the marijuana to her.”

Baggett, like many other people with similar ailments, had discovered that marijuana is very effective and inexpensive pain reliever. But despite the fact that Washington State voters overwhelmingly voted for the legal use of medical marijuana, prosecutors in Spokane still believe that they’re protecting society by hauling this poor old woman through the court system on technicalities.

Going back to Dr. Kevorkian, do people really believe that by sending someone like him to jail it was going to change his mind? This is a man who already believed that the law was wrong and was expecting to go to jail. Why would following through on the threat have any meaning at all, other than to prove to Kevorkian how dangerous the government has become in following its delusions?

The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. There are a number of reasons for this, but much of it boils down to our collective belief that prison is an effective tool for enforcing moral conformity, rather than just a way to provide justice for victims of crime. We understand that it’s fair and just to have a system where people who harm others are removed from free society and locked up. But it’s time we recognize that jail is not the place for those who aren’t harming anyone but whose personal moral choices we may disapprove of.

I don’t believe this. Forty years to the day after the beginning of the Six-Day War, and we have a massive buildup of warships off the Iranian coast along with a Category 5 hurricane approaching the Persian Gulf. I have no idea what the hell’s going to happen, but I’m sure that some people will be blaming God.