As Month Two gets underway, we hope our readers and listeners around the world are staying safe, from the Donbass to Dubai. Yesterday we discussed Victor Davis Hanson's observations of the United States' failure to achieve strategic victory in its many wars. As a reminder of that, consider this foot-of-page-37 news item from overnight:
"Everything must be done to prevent Iraq from being dragged into this turmoil," French President Emmanuel Macron said following a call with Barzani.
Mr Barzani is the President of Iraq's Kurdish region. So, just to be clear here, twenty-three years after France famously declined to join America in "Operation Iraqi Freedom", M Macron is now trying to talk Free Iraq out of joining Iran in waging war on America - with an army created, trained, funded and armed largely by Washington.
At the same time, Americans are expected to endure six-hour lines at the airport in order to take a domestic flight to visit gran'ma. This is also a reminder - of the grim trajectory of the last quarter-century, of the state's increasingly punitive attitude to its own citizenry. In a functioning, civilised society, no freeborn citizen should be obligated to stand in line for six hours save for Taylor Swift tickets. This malign trend is the theme of this week's episode in my ongoing audio adaptation of the bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
The silliest thing Dick Cheney ever said was a couple of weeks after 9/11: 'One of the things that's changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government — big shift — and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do.'
Really? I'd say 9/11 vindicated perfectly a decentralized, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government — the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped — big time, as the Vice President would say — was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms. Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the US border at Derby Line, Vermont and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he'd been refused entry just half-an-hour earlier. No compatible computers.
Yet, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, amazon.com would know that he'd bought The A-Z of Infidel Slaying two years earlier and their 'We have some suggestions for you!' box would be proffering a thirty per cent discount on Suicide Bombing for Dummies. Amazon is a more efficient data miner than US immigration.
Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon's system is very cheap, but it's in the nature of government to do things worse, and slower. Here's another example of Dick Cheney's government – the one we 'trust and value and have high expectations for' – from the morning of September 11th:
FAA Command Center: Do we want to think about scrambling aircraft?
FAA Headquarters: God, I don't know.
FAA Command Center: That's a decision somebody's going to have to make, probably in the next ten minutes.
FAA Headquarters: You know, everybody just left the room.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Thirty of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, there are spy thrillers, comedy classics, tales of horror and historical romance and much more, all over at our Tales for Our Time home page. If you've a friend who might be partial to almost eighty cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio adventures, also includes video poetry, live music and more. And I'll be doing a live-performance Tale for Our Time at sea on the next Mark Steyn Cruise - sailing aboard the Queen Mary 2.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to nearly eighty gripping yarns in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Thirty-One of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
