 Do-gooders gone bad
Bill Bonner
The
Daily Reckoning
19
January, 2004
The Daily
Reckoning PRESENTS: Floundering
amid the shifting sands of political intrigue, "good intentions"
go all too easily awry...
Regular sufferers of the Daily
Reckoning will recall that we've been digging down - into this
bedrock of money-grubbing capitalism - for so long, we are developing
a bad back.
But today, to the relief of
readers and ourselves... we move on... and sink into the Sahara
of contemporary politics... where our spade sinks in more easily.
Some will say that this is
the problem with politics. The sands shift so easily and readily
that you can make no headway. As soon as you have dug yourself
a nice little position, along comes a wind change that collapses
the sides and fills it up. But that is also what makes it entertaining
- at least to onlookers with an appreciation for the absurd or
the sordid.
Some people are irritated by
the grit of politics. Others seem to take it in and, like an
earnest oyster, roll it into a gaudy pearl. Before you know it,
they are so thrilled with their little jewel, they want everyone
to wear it.
You will recall, no doubt,
our brief mention of the Cannibal of Rotenberg. The poor man
thought his anthropophagism might catch on and become the Next
Big Thing... a great pearl of a program... which would solve
the problems of overpopulation and undernourishment in a single
slice. "The Third World is ripe for the eating," he
pointed out. And if his recipe for planetary improvement had
not been interrupted by the polizei, who knows what might have
happened?
But now the fellow is in the
hoosegow making do with hamburger. And so is another of the world's
do-gooders gone bad: Saddam Hussein. We don't know much about
the Butcher of Baghdad, but we imagine that his defense will
be little different from that of all ex-dictators; surely he
thought he was building a better world. Iraq is a wild and wacky
place... with different tribes and religious groups ready to
slit each others' throats. At least, that is Saddam's story;
without his firm leadership, the country would have been a mess.
Riccardo Orizio makes a habit
of interviewing dictators. He goes after those who have retired,
been deposed... or sent to jail. His book, Talk of the Devil:
Encounters with Seven Dictators, is a like a travelogue of different
highways to Hell... each one of them paved with good intentions.
It is a shame that do-gooders
don't set off some signal before they go bad... like a fire alarm
that is running out of juice. Maybe some adjustment could be
made.
But the most successful of
them - such as Mussolini and Hitler - actually gain market share
as they go bad. Their delusions are self-reinforcing, like the
delusions of a debt bubble; the higher prices go, the more people
come to believe they make sense.
We think of Il Duce. The clown
thrashed around in typical leftist claptrap, looking for a program.
When he finally got into office, he simply threw out the whole
thing... and got a new program better suited to his ambitions:
Put on silly uniforms. Strut around, telling the masses that
you're recreating the glory of ancient Rome. Spend a lot of money.
So many people came to admire
the man that he came to admire himself... and began to believe
that his program might do as advertised. Then, he invaded Abyssinia...
and the bull market in Benito Mussolini was over.
We wonder, too, at America's
latest breed of do-gooder, the neo-conservatives. Is their stock
rising... or falling?
"These Cold Warriors were
mostly liberals of a special, ideologically zealous variety,"
explains an article in The American Conservative. "Many
of them had come for the extreme Left. They had opposed communism
because they had universalistic objectives of their own and did
not want any competition. These proponents of a single model
for all societies were able to form an alliance with putative
conservatives, who had come to believe during the Cold War that
to be conservative was always to be hawkish and assertive in
foreign policy. Used to "standing up for America,"
these nationalistic and saber-rattling conservatives found in
the cause of a better world, a new outlet for their desire to
"exercise American power."
The neo-cons preach a rousing
sermon of "global democratic revolution," to quote
George W. Bush. There's nothing conservative about revolution,
but that doesn't seem to bother anyone. The sands shift, who
cares?
Of course, President Bush is
probably not a neo-con himself. But he seems ready to go along
with just about anything. According to former Treasury secretary
Paul O'Neill, the leader of the free world even had a little
trouble following the foreign policy discussions in the White
House. But he's a shrewd politician who knows a good slogan when
someone gives it to him and who saw immediately the advantages
of attacking Abyssinia or Mesopotamia. It gave him cover to spend
more than any president had ever spent... with hardly a peep
of protest. Traditional conservatives were struck dumb by the
audacity of it.
No do-gooder program we have
ever heard of has been more ambitious than the neo-con scheme.
Afghanistan, Iraq... next up are Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia
- all countries in need of "regime change," according
to the neo-cons. But the program goes far beyond occupying a
few hapless third world countries. These fellows think they have
a panacea for everything bad; they believe they are delivering
us from Evil.
The pompous absurdity of it
is hardly noticed. Reagan dared to tag the Soviets as the "Evil
Empire." A few years later, the empire was history.
That is why it is sometimes
better to lose a war than to win one. Victory seems to bring
out the worst in many people. After the Soviet threat was removed,
the neo-cons found new a new source of evil... militant Islam.
"This poses a much more
serious threat than the Soviet Red Army," explained Thomas
L. Friedman, a cheerleader for the neo-con team, "because
these human bombs attack the most essential element of a society:
trust."
Thus do they "have the
potential to erode our lifestyle," he continues.
You and I, dear reader, might
see less danger in a handful of fanatics with plastic explosives
in their pockets than in a whole arsenal of thermo-nuclear warheads
aimed at us by a determined enemy. But we lack the vision of
the neo-con messiahs. What they see is an almost inevitable 'clash
of civilizations' between the Arab world and the Western world.
And if one is not inevitable...
it will at least be likely, after they get finished throwing
their weight around.
 Bill Bonner
Jan 16, 2004
Bill Bonner
is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison
Wiggin, of the Wall Street Journal best-seller: "Financial
Reckoning Day: Surviving The Soft Depression of The 21st Century"
(John Wiley & Sons), available at Amazon.
A version of
this essay was first published in the Daily
Reckoning.
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