Privateers and mercenaries

Some say that I'm out of line in denigrating the Bushies' handling of the so-called "War on Terror" without proposing what actually should be done. Fair enough.

Of course, the term "War on Terror" itself makes no logical sense in the first place. "Terror" isn't an enemy – it's a method of fighting. Fighting a war against terror is as nonsensical as fighting a war against cavalry charges, or artillery barrages, or carpet bombing, or flanking movements – they're all just methods. The simple fact that the Bushies can't even seem to define what they're fighting against almost foredooms the "War on Terror" to defeat.

Let me help them. What they're really doing is trying to fight a war, not against a nation-state, but against a religious ideology called fundamentalist Islam, or Islamism. There's a long history of conflict between Islam and the West, with both sides having attacked each other. In recent decades, Muslims have been very much on the defensive, with generally backward economies. Muslim countries have been – almost without exception – colonized by European settlers and occupied by Western troops, and they resent it just as much as we would have if the shoe was on the other foot. The Islamists are a military/political/religious reaction to this state of affairs.

It's quite true that Islamists are threatened by, and dislike, Western culture, but that has little to do with why this has turned into a shooting war. And they're absolutely not striking out because "they hate freedom," as Bush and the neocons have – idiotically, but without challenge from Boobus Americanus – said so many times. They're striking out because of the U.S. constantly meddling in their part of the world – everything from installing and propping up the hated shah for decades, to sending Marines to Lebanon, to stationing troops in Arabia, the Prophet's homeland, to shooting down an innocent Iranian airliner, to bombing an aspirin factory in the Sudan.

They're using terror tactics against the West (mainly America) for two reasons:

On a fundamental level, they want the Americans to stop meddling in their affairs; and
On a practical level, terror provides by far the most cost-effective method of fighting the Americans, in order to make them go away and stop meddling.

Although it's possible, I suppose, for the United States, at some indeterminate cost, to extirpate the Islamists worldwide, creating a Pax Americanus for a few years, my bet is the U.S. government is in over its head and is doing no more than counterproductively sowing dragons' teeth. There are well over a billion Muslims in the world, and the vast majority of them see the "War on Terror" as a war on Islam. The situation is immensely aggravated by the U.S. government's completely one-sided support of the state of Israel.

Further, in addition to misidentifying the enemy, the Americans are using the wrong weapons to fight. High-tech weapons were in order to fight the old Soviet empire, but they're completely inappropriate for a guerrilla war, where the fighters are immersed into the population. Using high-tech weapons to fight this war is like using battleships in World War II, or cavalry in World War 1. I'm not sure there has ever been a modern war the generals didn't think they'd win by using the best weapons from the last conflict.

The most likely consequence of using these immensely expensive weapons is to accelerate the inevitable bankruptcy of the U.S. government. But then, I always look at the bright side. Recognizing that the Forever War will go on more or less ... um, forever ... barring a change in U.S. strategy, my solution is to radically change U.S. strategy.

That means, first, completely withdrawing U.S. troops from all foreign countries. They're not defending America, but acting as provocations and making enemies. And second, abolish all foreign aid and military aid, and disengage from all military alliances – prominently including NATO and the United Nations.

NATO served a purpose while the USSR existed, but it's completely outlived its purpose, and now serves only as a provocation to countries that aren't members. The United Nations is nothing but a corrupt club for bureaucrats who try to do to the world at large what they've typically done at home.

These things are actually doable, even in today's context. If this had been done in years past, there would likely never have been a 9-11 event. My personal druthers, of course, would be to abolish most of the U.S. government, including in this context, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. These groups are increasingly loyal mainly to themselves and have the potential to act as the Praetorians did in ancient Rome. But even I, an eternal optimist, believe getting rid of these thoroughly entrenched bureaucracies to be politically impossible at this point.

Fine. But what would I have done if I had been in Bush's position, in today's world after 9-11?

Certainly not invade Afghanistan. As long as the United States still has something that passes for a Constitution – notwithstanding the fact that it's mostly a dead letter – I would prefer to do something constitutional. The rarely read document contains, almost unknown to Boobus Americanus, a provision (Article I, Section 8) allowing for "Letters of Marque and Reprisal," which is to say, privateers units licensed by their own governments to fight a war.

Privateering, which has been around (in a modern context) since at least the 16th century, originated as a way for merchants and shippers to recover value if their property was stolen by a foreign government. Ships flying that nation's colors would be captured, taken to a neutral port, and have the action adjudicated. The incentive for the privateer was a fat commission on the auctioned vessel and its contents.

Eight hundred privateers were licensed in the Revolution. In the War of 1812, the 500-odd licensed American privateers took about 1,750 British ships. It was very successful, and cost taxpayers nothing. But why, if privateering was so successful, has it disappeared?

Governments of the time considered privateers to be the terrorists of their day, and they were abolished by international agreement in the mid-19th century. The increasingly large standing armies and navies of the time, like the Post Office, or any other government agency, didn't like to be compared with entrepreneurs. But entrepreneurial privateers, mercenaries, private detectives and bounty hunters were then, and are now, by far the best way to rid the world of undesirable elements.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, a group of American businessmen, headed by one Edward Lozzi of Beverly Hills, Calif., was apparently intending to offer a $1 billion bounty to any private citizens who brought in the perpetrators, dead or alive. Ross Perot used private forces to free his employees trapped in Iran in 1979. The only really successful military force in Sierra Leone was Executive Outcomes. If the mercenaries had been left alone and the United Nations had been kept out, Katanga would have split off from the Congo in the '60s, and things could only have been better than they turned out.

Are mercenaries effective as soldiers? Extremely. The best fighting force in the world, man for man, has always been the French Foreign Legion. Although the examples from history are many, it's possible to get an even better idea of how things might be from literature.

I submit Ragnar Danesjold from "Atlas Shrugged," and Captain Nemo from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" as two examples. Television offers Paladin from "Have Gun, Will Travel." An excellent (and very funny) movie illustrating what would likely happen if soldiers are on commission is Clint Eastwood's movie "Kelly's Heroes." Those who think war can be fun will be especially entertained.

I'm quite anti-war in general, of course – war is the health of the State. That's not to say, however, that there aren't many individuals and groups who need to kill – although reasonable men can differ about who they might be. That being the case, I believe that if someone (like Bush, say) wants to go out and do some killing, he ought to do it on his own account. I certainly don't want to be forced to pay for his notions, or be considered guilty of them simply because I'm an American.

For those of you interested in achieving a real understanding of the war against the Islamists (vs. the imbecilic version spewed out on the evening news) and its implications for oil, investment markets, international relations, the U.S. dollar, gold, individual rights, and the odds of your city going radioactive, I would strongly suggest checking out geopolitical/investment analyst Richard Maybury's mind-expanding new report "Why Islam Will Win."

And, while you are at it, check out his excellent newsletter, the Early Warning Report. For you who don't know Rick, he's the guy who, among many other events missed by traditional intelligence agencies, forecasted 9-11, the fall of the Soviet Union five years before it happened, predicted the Iraq-Kuwait war a full year before it started, and warned readers a month before the 1987 stock market crash.