Search Query: Peace

Search Results

You searched for "Peace" and here's what we found ...

Yes to Recriminations against Iraq Policymakers

by
If, as President Bush claims, Iraq is a sovereign country and its government represents the people, then why are American officials ordering the parliament to cancel its August vacation and insisting that the al-Maliki government meet certain “benchmarks”? Is it sovereign or not? By what authority does the U.S. government dictate to it? Something just doesn’t add up here. The Bush administration is also building a dozen military bases in that country and a new embassy larger than the Vatican. These look like the acts of an empire. Just as ominous is the fact that some critics of the war, particularly Democrats in Congress, say the reason we ought to exit Iraq is that the government and people aren’t worthy of U.S. intervention. We should get out, but that’s the wrong reason. This is a bad sign because it is ...

The Good and Bad News about the Bush Wars

by
There’s good and bad news about the two American-initiated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The good news is the American people are largely disengaged from them. The bad news is the American people are largely disengaged from them. How can the same piece of news be both good and bad? Let’s see. New York Times foreign-affairs columnist Thomas Friedman laments that most Americans are detached from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During a recent radio appearance on the Don Imus Show, Friedman cited comedian Bill Maher’s complaint that “the enemy” has had to fight only 140,000 Americans rather than all 300 million of us. You hear this a lot. Commentators seem to long for World War II, when “the whole country was at war.” They criticize President Bush for letting most Americans shirk their responsibility. When he’s queried about what sacrifices he’s asked of the American people, Bush says they have forgone peace of mind and paid higher gasoline prices. Naturally, this does ...

An Imperial Presidency, Part 2

by
Part 1 | Part 2 Republicans and Democrats have, at times, criticized the imperial presidency. Both are, to a certain extent, correct. Both are also hypocritical. It isn’t only politics that has driven these royal presidents. It is a lust for American power in the world — the desire to be “great” or to lead a crusade for democracy — that inevitably results in tragic wars. These presidential powers, we saw in part one, go back at least a century. Theodore Roosevelt, who was president from 1901 to 1909, is the typical imperial president. One of his friends, William Howard Taft, would write that Roosevelt was “obsessed with the love of war and the glory of it.” Mark Twain complained that Roosevelt was “insane” for war. These militarist forces, with the imperial presidency as its apotheosis, transformed America. Our nation went from one that embraced classical-liberal principles — principles that included limited government, noninterven-tionism, and anti-imperialism — to one with very different ideas. America, with the ...

Bully of the Playground: How Washington Makes Enemies Abroad and Undermines Freedom at Home

by
This speech was given at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s June 2007 conference, “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy & Civil Liberties” held in Reston, Virginia. Transcript (PDF) Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of seven books and the editor of ten books on international affairs. ...

The Importance of the Marketplace of Ideas‚ In Both War and Peace

by
This speech was given at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s June 2007 conference, “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy & Civil Liberties” held in Reston, Virginia. Transcript (PDF) Richard M. Ebeling, former Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College in Michigan, was named the President of the Foundation for Economic Education in May 2003. Richard discovered the freedom philosophy as ...

War, Peace, and the Struggle for Liberty

by
This speech was given at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s June 2007 conference, “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy & Civil Liberties” held in Reston, Virginia. Transcript (PDF) Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, in Atherton, California. His popular online column, “Behind the Headlines,” deals with foreign policy from a ...