War: The Systematic Erosion of Civil Liberties

Segment 1: The Center of Peace and Liberty

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iran and Israel, crises are flourishing today. On this edition of The Doug Noll show we will be talking about the world conflicts that exist today and our own country’s history with war and conflict. Our guest is Dr. Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute (www.independent.org). Ivan spent 15 years working for congress in various capacities before getting into the Think Tank world. The Center on Peace and Liberty studies war, civil liberties and freedom. Through research they have shown that much of the erosion of civil liberties and loss of freedom in the United States’ history has occurred because of war. When our country has a crisis and the government puts anti-liberties regulation in place, it’s very difficult to remove the legislation, even when we have a liberal president in office.

 

Segment 2: A Standard Pattern

The slogan “the best defense is a good offense” is fine for conventional warfare but for terrorism it’s just the opposite. A strong offense with terrorism usually just creates more terrorism. Getting Bin Laden was important because we decimated the al-Qaeda leadership, but Ivan thinks that we should’ve stopped there, instead of going into Somalia, Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula. We’re making more enemies. There is a standard pattern with terrorists: once they hit their opponent, they hope that the opponent will overreact, which enables them to gain more funding and recruits.

 

Segment 3: The Most Aggressive Country on the Planet

In regards to Syria, whenever a country is in a civil war it’s very chaotic. We don’t have good intelligence in Syria about “who’s radical and who’s not” so if we send heavier weapons to Syria we risk having terrorists get their hands on them. There’s only been one war in U.S. history (the War of 1812) that has not had dire political repercussions. Obama has been cautious to get into war. Romney has pressure to ramp up the volume of weapon sales to the rebels. For most of our history we’ve run a restrained foreign policy, but it started eroding with the Spanish-American war, then we hit WWI and WWII and after WWII we are the king nation and the super power. We became the most aggressive country on the planet. We need to retreat from our overly-interventionist policy. This does not make us isolationists. Every problem in the world does not need to be solved by the U.S. We can’t afford it, financially or otherwise.

 

Segment 4: Imperial Overextension

The policy of intervention has held up thus far because the military industrial complex is alive and well. To cut back on military spending would put a lot of people out of work. So how do we change the course of this country? We need to reconfigure our military into a more defensive profile. Our economy is stagnant but our military budget is growing fast, which brings about imperial overextension.  We could save a lot of money if the defense department did what it was supposed to do and the constitution provided for the common defense instead of the common offense. We have been the most aggressive country in the world by far, and historically war is the central cause of big government.

 

To listen to the complete interview:

 

Segment 1

Segment 2

Segment 3

Segment 4

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