Liberty and eternal vigilance against despotism go hand-in-hand, after all.

I think this is an unconventional war requiring unconventional warfare, including ongoing disruption of terrorist finance, weapons, and communications networks.

Clearly, "regime change" is not enough.

They eat American foods, wear American jeans, and watch American TV shows. I don't see how a U.S. occupation in any part of the region will nourish this kind of revolt. If anything, the United States may be perceived as a new colonial administrator. Such a perception may only give impetus to the theocrats who may seek to preserve their rule by deflecting the dissatisfaction in their midst toward the "infidel occupiers." I can think of no better ad campaign for the recruitment of future Islamic terrorists.

Even though I support relentless surgical strikes against terrorists posing an imminent threat to the United States, I have argued that America's only practical long-term course of action is strategic disengagement from the region.

In the long-run, I stand with those American Founding Fathers who advocated free trade with all, entangling political alliances with none. If that advice was good for a simpler world, it is even more appropriate for a world of immense complexity, in which no one power can control for all the myriad unintended consequences of human action. The central planners of socialism learned this lesson some time ago; the central planners of a projected U.S. colonialism have yet to learn it.

The twentieth-century history of U.S. foreign policy, according to Rand, was a history of "suicidal" failure and hypocrisy ("'Extremism,' Or the Art of Smearing"). Failure-because the U.S. had abdicated the moral high ground, destroying economic and civil liberties from within, and losing any rational sense of the country's moral significance. Hypocrisy-because the U.S. often fought evil with evil. Rand maintained that Wilson had led the charge "to make the world safe for democracy," but World War I gave birth to fascism, Nazism, and communism. FDR had led the charge for the "Four Freedoms," but he only empowered the Soviets in the process ("The Roots of War").

"There is no proper solution for the war in Vietnam," Rand counseled at the time; "it is a war we should never have entered. We are caught in a trap: it is senseless to continue, and it is now impossible to withdraw" ("From My 'Future File'"). Rand had opposed U.S. involvement in both Korea and Vietnam, and wondered why the U.S. had "sacrificed thousands of American lives, and billions of dollars, to protect a primitive people who never had freedom, do not seek it, and, apparently, do not want it" ("The Shanghai Gesture, Part III"). It is advice well worth keeping in mind-anytime the U.S. wages war with the expressed aim to free an oppressed people.

In the context of the Cold War, for example, she opposed the appeasement of the Soviets, and recognized the strategic importance of Taiwan and Israel-despite her antipathy toward the latter's socialist, religious, and tribalist nature.

This policy was partially responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as an anti-American political force in Iran; the Iranians threw off the U.S.-backed Shah, and elevated Khomeini to a position of leadership. A hostage crisis followed. Supporting the Iraqis in their war with Iran, opposing the Soviets by aiding Afghan "freedom fighters"-the theocratically inclined mujahideen who became Al Qaeda and Taliban warriors-"put the U.S. wholesale into the business of creating terrorists," as Leonard Peikoff observes. "Most of them," says Peikoff, "regarded fighting the Soviets as only the beginning; our turn soon came"

"Foreign policy is merely a consequence of domestic policy"

The New Fascism therefore "accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future's future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it" beyond its national borders.

profiteers of this system were those peculiar "products . . . of the mixed economy," those statist businessmen who "seek to grow rich not by means of productive ability, but by means of political pull and of special political privileges."

Some writers (e.g., Adam Reed, 26 March 2003, SOLO Yahoo Forum) have argued, however, that Rand's critique was limited to-and grounded in-the historically specific period of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (see, for example, "The Fascist New Frontier," in which Rand cites approvingly the similarly constituted critique of New Leftist Charles A. Reich).

To "cement the transformation" is Ron Pisaturo's goal as well. Except that he offers a much more robust strategy. Writing in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster, Pisaturo is an unabashed Objectivist advocate of a new U.S. colonialism.

Pisaturo declares that if the Western oil companies "agree to pay the cost of waging this war," then the U.S. government could continue "occupying and defending these oil-rich territories."

Once the U.S. has seized the Middle East-I suppose after several years of waiting for the nuclear fallout to settle-it will allow American pioneers to enter the region as international homesteaders. "Over time, pioneers, with the paid support of our military, can go into these isolated territories, subdue the remaining savages, install a civilized, colonial government protecting the rights of both the pioneers and the savages, and settle the land-as American pioneers subdued the savage, murderous American Indian tribes and settled America." Of course, the "savages" will eventually realize that they will be the "most fortunate beneficiaries" of such colonialism.