GOP Presidential Hopeful Parental Trivia

Virginia Sen. George Allen and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney are the sons of famous men (a great NFL coach and the governor of Michigan, respectively), but there is more to their parentage than that. According to Wikipedia, Sen. Allen's

mother, Henrietta Lumbroso, was a Jewish immigrant of Tunisian/Italian/French background... Allen's mother immigrated from French Tunisia, and was "Italian, French and a little Spanish" and according to Allen, was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. According to Allen's sister Jennifer, their mother "prided herself for being un-American. ... She was ashamed that she had given up her French citizenship to become a citizen of a country she deemed infantile."

Also, according to the ever reliable Wikipedia, Gov. Mitt Romney's father, a frontrunner in the early-going for the GOP Presidential nomination in 1968 and former head of American Motors, had an interesting family background:

Romney, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was born in an expatriate colony in the Mexican state of Chihuahua comprised of exiles from Utah who rejected the Mormon Church's decrees against polygamy. His family was forced to flee to the United States in 1912 because of the Mexican Revolution, lived for a time in Oakley, Idaho and finally ending up in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Time reported in 1959:

From his birth, Romney had little choice but to become a missionary of one kind or another. The grandson of a Mormon who sired 30 children by four wives, he was born into a monogamous family in Colonia Dublan, Mexico, where Mormons from the Southwest had settled 20 years earlier. When George was five, Pancho Villa drove the U.S.-born Mormons out of Mexico, and the family went to Los Angeles.

His Mexican birth has raised some questions about Romney’s constitutional qualifications for the presidency. Article Two of the Constitution specifies that only a “natural-born citizen” is eligible. Some legal authorities say that this means only those born on U.S. soil. But a law enacted by the first Congress in 1790 stipulated that children born of U.S. citizens beyond the boundaries of the country “shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the U.S.”

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is Doug Feith consulting for Israel these days?

With the shooting apparently over in Lebanon, it looks safe to say that the Israeli government's decision to turn Hezbollah's latest border provocation stunt into a small to medium sized war was, in Talleyrand's words, "worse than a crime -- a mistake!"

With the exception of the 1973 war, Israel has typically chosen the time and place when endemic threats and skirmishes turn into full-scale war, rather than let its opponents choose the beginning of the war at their own convenience. Up until now, Israel has generally chosen intelligently when to start its wars, so intelligently in fact that in the wake of its many triumphs, many American pundits have come to believe that Israel has never been the one to first escalate to full-scale war, but was instead always the victim of Pearl Harbor-style sneak attacks -- a popular romantic delusion among Americans. When you win, you don't get asked hard questions because, as Gen. Patton said, "Americans love a winner."

This time, however, Israel has mostly succeeded in pounding heck out of a hornet's nest, an outcome that should have been predictable from the similar problems the American military, despite enjoying similar air supremacy, has had in putting down a more poorly organized guerilla insurgency in Iraq, but which the Israelis were too arrogant to learn from.

I've sometimes joked that we would be better off simply outsourcing our foreign policy to Israel rather than to hand it over to pseudo-Sabra wannabe neocons who lack the seriousness and competence of the actual Israelis. Yet, the conduct of this latest war suggests that the Israelis are succumbing to the same lack of realism as the neocons. Israel's key strategic psychological assumption -- that bombing non-Hezbollah targets in Lebanon would make the non-Hezbollah Lebanese unite against Hezbollah, rather than unite behind Hezbollah against Israel -- was particularly far-fetched, more worthy of Doug let's-bomb-Paraguay-to-catch-the-terrorists-off-guard Feith.

A more sensible Israeli long-term strategy for dealing with Hezbollah would have been carrot and stick-based. Israel could have used its vastly wealthy friends in New York and Moscow to build up the strength and amiability of the government of Lebanon and its army by quietly cutting in on profitable business deals the various ruling clans of Lebanon, including non-homicidal Shi'ite power brokers, all on the requirement of continuing good behavior.

The annual Iranian subsidy to Hezbollah is typically estimated at around $100 million per year, which is a pittance compared to what Israel's friends just on the Forbes 400 alone could muster. The net worth of the Forbes 400 is about one trillion, and somewhere around one-fifth to one-quarter of that is in the hands of Jewish billionaires. So, one-tenth of one percent of their net worth annually would be equal to twice the Iranian subsidy to Hezbollah.

Israel has typically preferred instead for America to bribe its neighbors, such as Egypt and Jordan, for it, while dunning Diaspora Jews for the direct benefit of Israel. Yet, as libertarian theory suggests, I suspect motivated private money would do a more effective job than the largesse of the American taxpayer.

But all this is just academic theorizing today because Israel has blown its chance for a decade or so to build up constructive relationships with the more responsible Lebanese elements.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Great Moments in Paraguayan History

From the NYT:

Paraguay was an underpopulated backwater the size of California, with a penchant for wars that would swallow its male population in battles of dubious, if operatic, purpose. Among the worst was a disastrous war Paraguay waged simultaneously against Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil from 1865 to 1870, which shrank its population from 525,000 to 221,000 and left the nation with only 28,000 men.

But, looking on the bright side, as Jan and Dean would have sung if they were 19th Century Paraguayans (and weren't dead):

193,000 girls for every 28,000 boys

The obituary continues:

The 1930’s and 40’s were a period of turmoil for Paraguay, which suffered 100,000 dead between 1932 and 1935 in a war with Bolivia over the desolate Chaco region, a swampland that ultimately had none of the mineral resources the two sides imagined were there.

Perhaps the last time Paraguay was in the news was when it was revealed that Doug Feith's initial response to 9/11 was proposing that instead of bombing Afghanistan, we should bomb Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil instead to catch the terrorists off guard. MSNBC reported;

Days after 9/11, a senior Pentagon official lamented the lack of good targets in Afghanistan and proposed instead U.S. military attacks in South America or Southeast Asia as "a surprise to the terrorists," according to a footnote in the recent 9/11 Commission Report. The unsigned top-secret memo, which the panel's report said appears to have been written by Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, is one of several Pentagon documents uncovered by the commission which advance unorthodox ideas for the war on terror. The memo suggested "hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive" or a "non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq," the panel's report states. U.S. attacks in Latin America and Southeast Asia were portrayed as a way to catch the terrorists off guard when they were expecting an assault on Afghanistan.

The memo's content, NEWSWEEK has learned, was in part the product of ideas from a two-man secret Pentagon intelligence unit appointed by Feith after 9/11: veteran defense analyst Michael Maloof and Mideast expert David Wurmser, now a top foreign-policy aide to Dick Cheney. Maloof and Wurmser saw links between international terror groups that the CIA and other intelligence agencies dismissed. They argued that an attack on terrorists in South America—for example, a remote region on the border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where intelligence reports said Iranian-backed Hizbullah had a presence—would have ripple effects on other terrorist operations. The proposals were floated to top foreign-policy advisers. But White House officials stress they were regarded warily and never adopted.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Management Techniques of the Generalissimos

From the NYT's obituary for Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay from 1954 to 1989, who just died at 93:

One former American ambassador to Paraguay, Robert E. White, remembered General Stroessner as darkly brilliant at profiting from others’ mistakes. Once, Mr. White recalled, the Paraguayan ambassador to Argentina had gambled away the embassy’s entire budget. The ambassador was immediately summoned to Asunción and was handed a confession to sign. General Stroessner then promoted him to foreign minister. “He could never have an independent thought or deed after that,” Mr. White explained.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why the American government wants to elect a new people

One of the more extraordinary documents relating to immigration is an essay for the Center for Immigration Studies by the unusual figure Fredo Arias-King, a Harvard MBA, a Sovietologist, and an advisor to Vicente Fox during his 2000 Presidential campaign. He was the first to point out to me that the mother of Fox's first Foreign Secretary, Jorge G. Castaneda, and wife to a previous Mexican Foreign Secretary, was a Soviet woman working a the UN and might have been a Soviet spy.

Working for Fox, Arias-King met with 80 members of the U.S. Congress , and discussed immigration in detail with 50. Of those, 90% were enthusiastic about boosting immigration from Mexico.

Immigration and Usurpation: Elites, Power, and the People’s Will

Fredo Arias-King

The familiar reasons usually discussed by the critics were there: Democrats wanted increased immigration because Latin American immigrants tend to vote Democrat once naturalized (we did not meet a single Democrat that was openly against mass immigration); and Republicans like immigration because their sponsors (businesses and churches) do. But there were other, more nuanced reasons that we came upon, usually not discussed by the critics, and probably more difficult to detect without the type of access that we, as a Mexican delegation, had.

Their "Natural Progress" Of a handful of motivations, one of the main ones (even if unconscious) of many of these legislators can be found in what the U.S. Founding Fathers called "usurpation." Madison, Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and others devised a system and embedded the Constitution with mechanisms to thwart the "natural" tendency of the political class to usurp power—to become a permanent elite lording over pauperized subjects, as was the norm in Europe at the time. However, the Founding Fathers seem to have based the logic of their entire model on the independent character of the American folk. After reviewing the different mechanisms and how they would work in theory, they wrote in the Federalist Papers that in the end, "If it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America …"4 With all his emphasis on reason and civic virtue as the basis of a functioning and decentralized democratic polity, Jefferson speculated whether Latin American societies could be governed thus.5

While Democratic legislators we spoke with welcomed the Latino vote, they seemed more interested in those immigrants and their offspring as a tool to increase the role of the government in society and the economy. Several of them tended to see Latin American immigrants and even Latino constituents as both more dependent on and accepting of active government programs and the political class guaranteeing those programs, a point they emphasized more than the voting per se. Moreover, they saw Latinos as more loyal and "dependable" in supporting a patron-client system and in building reliable patronage networks to circumvent the exigencies of political life as devised by the Founding Fathers and expected daily by the average American.

Republican lawmakers we spoke with knew that naturalized Latin American immigrants and their offspring vote mostly for the Democratic Party, but still most of them (all except five) were unambiguously in favor of amnesty and of continued mass immigration (at least from Mexico). This seemed paradoxical, and explaining their motivations was more challenging. However, while acknowledging that they may not now receive their votes, they believed that these immigrants are more malleable than the existing American: That with enough care, convincing, and "teaching," they could be converted, be grateful, and become dependent on them. Republicans seemed to idealize the patron-client relation with Hispanics as much as their Democratic competitors did. Curiously, three out of the five lawmakers that declared their opposition to amnesty and increased immigration (all Republicans), were from border states.

Also curiously, the Republican enthusiasm for increased immigration also was not so much about voting in the end, even with "converted" Latinos. Instead, these legislators seemingly believed that they could weaken the restraining and frustrating straightjacket devised by the Founding Fathers and abetted by American norms. In that idealized "new" United States, political uncertainty, demanding constituents, difficult elections, and accountability in general would "go away" after tinkering with the People, who have given lawmakers their privileges but who, like a Sword of Damocles, can also "unfairly" take them away. Hispanics would acquiesce and assist in the "natural progress" of these legislators to remain in power and increase the scope of that power. In this sense, Republicans and Democrats were similar.

While I can recall many accolades for the Mexican immigrants and for Mexican-Americans (one white congressman even gave me a "high five" when recalling that Californian Hispanics were headed for majority status), I remember few instances when a legislator spoke well of his or her white constituents. One even called them "rednecks," and apologized to us on their behalf for their incorrect attitude on immigration. Most of them seemed to advocate changing the ethnic composition of the United States as an end in itself. Jefferson and Madison would have perhaps understood why this is so—enthusiasm for mass immigration seems to be correlated with examples of undermining the "just and constitutional laws" they devised.

What could be motivating U.S. legislators to do the opposite, that is, to see their constituents—already politically mature and proven as responsible and civic-minded—as an obstacle needing replacement? In other words, why would they want to replace a nation that works remarkably well (that Sarmiento was hoping to emulate), with another that has trouble forming stable, normal countries? Mexicans are kind and hardworking, with a legendary hospitality, and unlike some European nations, harbor little popular ambitions to impose models or ideologies on others. However, Mexicans are seemingly unable to produce anything but corrupt and tyrannical rulers, oftentimes even accepting them as the norm, unaffected by allegations of graft or abuse.8 Mexico, and Latin American societies in general, seem to suffer from what an observer called "moral relativism," accepting the "natural progress" of the political class rather than challenging it, and also appearing more susceptible to "miracle solutions" and demagogic political appeals. Mexican intellectuals speak of the corrosive effects of Mexican culture on the institutions needed to make democracy work, and surveys reveal that most of the population accepts and expects corruption from the political class.9

A sociological study conducted throughout the region found that Latin Americans are indeed highly susceptible to clientelismo, or partaking in patron-client relations, and that Mexico was high even by regional standards.10 In a Latin environment, there are fewer costs to behaving "like a knave," which explains the relative failure of most Spanish-speaking countries in the Hemisphere: Pauperized populations with rich and entrenched knaves. Montesquieu’s separation-of-powers model breaks down in Latin America (though essentially all constitutions are based on it) since elites do not take their responsibilities seriously and easily reach extra-legal "understandings" with their colleagues across the branches of government, oftentimes willingly making the judicial and legislative powers subservient to a generous executive, and giving the population little recourse and little choice but to challenge the system in its entirety....

During the 18 months when I aided Fox’s foreign relations, in those meetings with what became the new Mexican elite I do not recall so many discussions about "what can we do to make tough decisions to reform Mexico," but rather more "how can we get more concessions from the United States." Indeed, Fox largely continued governing the country as his predecessors did, even appointing as head of the federal police agency an Echeverría loyalist who was allegedly involved in a deadly extortion attempt against a museum owner in 1972. According to several leading world rankings on corruption, quality of government, development, and competitiveness, Mexico actually worsened during Fox’s presidency.14 Lacking internal or external pressure, the Mexican elites have taken the path of least resistance, which is not the best outcome for the country. Paradoxically, as happens in co-dependent relations, a firm but polite defense of American interests by Washington would force the Mexican elites to act and in the end (surely after a brief period of acrimonious recriminations) would be beneficial for Mexico, much as the European Union’s tough accession laws force elites in lesser-developed aspiring members (Spain in the 1980s and Central European countries in the 1990s) to adopt painful and otherwise politically unfeasible reforms that affect special interests but that benefit average citizens. After all, the gap between elite and popular aspirations in these countries is wider than in the United States, and on a broader range of issues.

...This co-dependence is perhaps nowhere more evident than the personal relations of the political classes of Mexico and the United States. When speaking to these congressmen, we noticed an affinity toward the corrupt party we were attempting to overthrow in Mexico. Several had visited Mexico and apparently enjoyed lavish treatment from their hosts, even mentioning how some of the things they enjoyed in Mexico would not be possible at home.

Even though the Mexican political class is notoriously corrupt, they can often count on stronger support in Washington than can several more worthy world leaders who are genuinely attempting to reform and improve their countries. The history of the Bush family is symptomatic.

While snubbing pro-American reformers in the newly liberated Eastern Europe, George H.W. Bush did go out of his way to accommodate Mexico and its leader Carlos Salinas. Then-vice president and presidential candidate Bush openly endorsed Salinas after the latter’s fraudulent election in 1988, a favor that Salinas returned four years later when he met only with Bush and snubbed his Democratic rival, Bill Clinton.

In April 2000, candidate George W. Bush followed in his father’s footsteps when he tacitly but unambiguously endorsed the candidate of Salinas’s ruling party against a then little-known opposition figure named Vicente Fox, perhaps believing that the official-party candidate, the former secret-police chief Francisco Labastida, would engage in a quid pro quo as president. Labastida himself could not receive the honor in person on April 7, 2000, since he had been fingered by the U.S. press as a possible target of the Drug Enforcement Administration because of his record as governor. Instead, he sent his wife to meet with Bush. Florida governor Jeb Bush knew for many years and apparently also received lavish treatment from Salinas’s brother Raúl, before Raúl was arrested on corruption and murder charges and spent the next decade in a Mexican high-security prison. Bush Sr. had a long friendship and business relations with Jorge Díaz Serrano, then director of the Mexican oil monopoly pemex, before he was also arrested in a power struggle and accused of embezzling over $50 million. The long-time politicos of the Hank Rhon family, who were suspected of laundering drug money and who continue to win elections in Mexico, were also reported to have contributed money to the gubernatorial campaigns of George W. Bush from a Texas bank they own.15 To their credit, no overtly illegal practice has been proven against the Bush family in their dealings with Mexico, but the appearance of admiration toward its ruling classes cannot be easily discounted. [See my 2001 UPI article on the Bush family's ties to the Mexican ruling class.]

Though similar stories involving lesser politicians do not make headlines, several lawmakers we met also had a special, giddy mystique of Mexico as a place where moneyed leaders coexist with tame, grateful citizens. It would seem that the American political class has a special affinity for their colleagues south of the border. The appeal of their lavishness and impunity seems to strike a positive chord in the American politicians, who perhaps resent being held accountable by their citizens, who cannot become wealthy from politics, and who may be removed from power "unfairly" and without warning.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The black-white IQ gap -- has it narrowed?

Over at GNXP, Darth Quixote has a good graph responding to the claim in the Flynn - Dickens paper arguing for a recent 4 to 7 point closure of the notorious 15 point white-black IQ gap. His graph shows that all the closure has been in tests of children rather than of adults, as I suggested earlier on iSteve. This leaves unanswered the question of whether adult black IQ can be expected to rise as these children go up, or does black IQ tend to fall during adulthood?

I asked them to create another plot with average birth year of the sample along the horizontal axis. The blue line tracks average scores of black children, which are now up around 89. The red line for teens, now at 87, the green line for young adults, now at 85, down a few points from earlier, and the pink adult line flat at 85.

The black-white IQ gap -- has it narrowed? Over at GNXP, Darth Quixote has a good graph responding to the claim in the Flynn - Dickens paper arguing for a recent 4 to 7 point closure of the notorious 15 point white-black IQ gap. His graph shows that all the closure has been in tests of children rather than of adults, as I suggested earlier on iSteve. This leaves unanswered the question of whether adult black IQ can be expected to rise as these children go up, or does black IQ tend to fall during adulthood?

I asked them to create another plot with average birth year of the sample along the horizontal axis. The blue line tracks average scores of black children, which are now up around 89. The red line for teens, now at 87, the green line for young adults, now at 85, down a few points from earlier, and the pink adult line flat at 85.

This seems to show that blacks born in the years roughly 1955 to 1975 saw rising IQ scores. That's not too surprising. Those were prosperous years with black life improving in many ways. I would guess that a shortage of calories for pregnant black women stopped being a problem for them. I wouldn't be surprised if average height grew quickly during those years too. Since then, the results are more ambiguous.

This seems to show that blacks born in the years roughly 1955 to 1975 saw rising IQ scores. That's not too surprising. Those were prosperous years with black life improving in many ways. I would guess that a shortage of calories for pregnant black women stopped being a problem for them. I wouldn't be surprised if average height grew quickly during those years too. Since then, the results are more ambiguous.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Our (very, very high-pitched) vibrant culture

I don't like linking to videos because it always seems as if you're required to first download the new Release 17 or whatever of the player to see them, but this short segment from an Oakland news station starring Mr. Bubb Rubb and Ms. Roxanne Bruns is worth it. Lots of iSteve.com themes are on display, along with bad driving.

The good news is that this is a few years old and the "whistle tip" fad has apparently been stomped out.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Five years after 9/11, a hint of sanity in Britain

From the Times of London on Tuesday:

Muslims face extra checks in new travel crackdown
By Ben Webster, Transport Correspondent

THE Government is discussing with airport operators plans to introduce a screening system that allows security staff to focus on those passengers who pose the greatest risk.

The passenger-profiling technique involves selecting people who are behaving suspiciously, have an unusual travel pattern or, most controversially, have a certain ethnic or religious background.

The system would be much more sophisticated than simply picking out young men of Asian appearance. But it would cause outrage in the Muslim community because its members would be far more likely to be selected for extra checks.

Officials at the Department for Transport (DfT) have discussed the practicalities of introducing such a system with airport operators, including BAA. They believe that it would be more effective at identifying potential terrorists than the existing random searches.

They also say that it would greatly reduce queues at secur-ity gates, which caused lengthy delays at London airports yesterday for the fifth day running. Heathrow and Gatwick were worst affected, cancelling 69 and 27 flights respectively. BAA gave warning yesterday that the disruption would continue for the rest of the week.

Passengers are now allowed to take one small piece of hand luggage on board but security staff are still having to search 50 per cent of travellers. Airports have also been ordered to search twice as many hand luggage items as a week ago...

The new measures, which include a ban on taking any liquids through checkpoints, are expected to remain in place for months. A DfT source said it was difficult to see how the restrictions could be relaxed if terrorists now had the capabil-ity to make liquid bombs.

The DfT has been considering passenger profiling for a year but, until last week, the disadvantages were thought to outweigh the advantages. A senior aviation industry source said: “The DfT is ultra-sensitive about this and won’t say anything publicly because of political concerns about being accused of racial stereotyping.”

Three days before last week’s arrests, the highest-ranking Muslim police officer in Britain gave warning that profiling techniques based on physical appearance were already causing anger and mistrust among young Muslims. Tarique Ghaffur, an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said: “We must think long and hard about the causal factors of anger and resentment.

“There is a very real danger that the counter-terrorism label is also being used by other law-enforcement agencies to the effect that there is a real risk of criminalising minority communities.”

Sir Rod Eddington, former chief executive of British Airways, criticised the random nature of security searches. He said that it was irrational to subject a 75-year-old grandmother to the same checks as a 25-year-old man who had just paid for his ticket with cash.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Quinceañera:"

From my review in the upcoming edition of The American Conservative:

The massive May Day marches by illegal immigrants appear to have made film critics finally notice that the American entertainment industry has largely ignored the 28 million people of Mexican origin in this country. In compensation, reviewers are now praising extravagantly "Quinceañera," a modest but lively and fairly likeable $400,000 drama about an American-born Mexican girl's bumpy ride to her traditionally lavish 15th birthday party, or quinceañera....

Young Magdalena lives in Los Angeles's Echo Park, which the press gingerly describes as "vibrant." That euphemism means shopkeepers, fearful of local gangs, lower the metal bars over their store windows at 6pm, leaving the commercial streets desolate after dark.

Still, Echo Park is superbly located in hills overlooking the skyscrapers of downtown LA. So, an influx from trendy Silver Lake of white homosexual men, the standard shock troops of gentrification because they are less vulnerable to crime than male-female couples, has begun slowly economically cleansing Chicanos from Echo Park's quaint but dilapidated clapboard cottages.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Camp of the Sinners"

Jean Raspail and Neal Stephenson didn't anticipate this.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The logic of nuclear genocide

UPDATED: The logic of nuclear genocide: As I've described below, there is a (thankfully) not-fully-articulated logic to much of the more excited rhetoric we've been hearing since the beginning of the latest war in Lebanon, which points in the direction of calling for nuclear genocide of Muslims.

Most war fever commentators have, to their credit, shied away from totally explaining where their thinking is logically headed. To see this chain of thought more completely explicated, you have to look to the fever swamps of the Rapture Reverends. A reader points me to the conservative column site WorldNet Daily, from whence comes a call for killing "45 million-plus Islamic fundamentalists" by a Christian minister named Michael D. Evans, who is described thusly:

"Michael D. Evans is the author of "The American Prophecies," an Amazon and Barnes and Noble No.1 best seller, and a New York Times best seller. He is also the founder of America’s largest Christian coalition, the Jerusalem Prayer Team."

He is the author of Beyond Iraq: The Next Moves, which WND helpfully explains is:

THE BOOK THAT KNOCKED HILLARY OFF THE #2 AMAZON SPOT!

In his smash best-seller "Beyond Iraq: The next move," Michael D. Evans clearly defines the roles that America, Iraq and Israel play in the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Breaking through the cluttered, and often confusing, information overload on this topic, Dr. Evans presents the Scriptures and current events side-by-side. As he does this, he leads readers to some startling but inescapable conclusions...

"Mike Evans is a true ambassador to Jerusalem. His efforts at peace conferences and the UN have earned him great respect and admiration." -- EHUD OLMERT, prime minister of Israel

"You have consistently demonstrated the moral clarity that is necessary to defend Israel from the lies and distortions of its enemies." --BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, former prime minister of Israel

(By the way, you've got to sympathize with poor Olmert and Netanyahu for having to put up with influential Americans like the Rev. Evans. Wouldn't you like to be a fly-on-the-wall to hear what Netanyahu, who has never given the impression that he suffers fools gladly, mutters to his aides in private after he finally escorts the Rev. from his office with the warmest promises to carefully study the Rev.'s annotated updating of the Book of the Apocalypse?)

In his July 28, 2006 column, the Rev. Evans, of all people, announced that Pat Buchanan was a "nutcase:"

Buchanan Comes Out of the Closet

Pat Buchanan's anti-Semitism finally came out of the closet for all the world to see. Buchanan has been accused of anti-Semitism for years, but has played the artful dodger and managed to remain, albeit on the sidelines, in the public arena while hiding an obvious disdain for Israel and the Jewish people.

But no longer.

His outrageous remarks last week [i.e., Buchanan's column "No, this is not 'our war'"] have permanently marked Buchanan as a nutcase. This in the face of growing world opinion that it is finally time to stop talking to terror organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas and instead eliminate their ability to wage war against civilization.

What Buchanan, and most of the left-leaning world press seem ignorant of is the fact that Israeli blood is paying for American and Western freedom, right now, on the ground, in the real world.

You see, Pat, in the real world, you cannot negotiate with terrorists.

In the real world, 45 million-plus Islamic fundamentalists want to annihilate Israel and America.

In the real world, they will not stop killing us until we kill them. This is not about some short-term geographical or political agenda; this is about a world religion gone mad in the minds of 10 percent of its adherents and their apocalyptic vision for the overthrow of all governments, religions and peoples to usher in a new world of Islamic conquest.

They do not want land, freedom, political power, money or rights. What they want is simple: Your soul … or your blood.

How do you negotiate with an Islamic radical who has only one goal:

Total world domination resulting in the conversion, or destruction, of every human being on earth.

Do you offer to convert or murder half the world if they will delay their attacks?

Do you suggest that they should be happy with Eastern World domination instead of total world domination?

Do you ask them to give the Western nations a little respite from their homemade bombs while we consider the claims of Islam and see if there are reasons to consider converting?

Do you give them the opportunity to build madrasas in Western nations to preach Islamic violence and conquest, if they will just allow us to continue our present way of life for a little while longer?

Just how do you negotiate with a terrorist who wants to kill himself, and you, rather than to let you live as a non-Muslim?

How about it, Pat? I'm listening …

Since I don't hear anything but a tired anti-Semitic diatribe coming from you, let me tell you how:

You allow the most courageous nation on earth, the one that was born out of the fires of the Holocaust, the one that has survived every attack against it, everyday, since its birth in the fires of war in May of 1948 to do what lazy, fat, over-comfortable and over-prosperous, opinionated but spineless Americans like you no longer have the gumption, spiritual will or moral clarity to do.

You allow them to fight, destroy, annihilate and eliminate the threat of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria – and Iran, if necessary. You shut up while they gear up to take on the greatest threat to American and Western freedom that we have experienced since World War II.

You cheer while they mount their tanks, you cry when you see the photographs of their missing and killed, you get angry when you hear the enemies of freedom speaking evil of them, and you use your platform, whatever it may be, to promote their cause and to defend their character.

You do this because you know that modern-day Israel is doing what we in the West – for fear of disapproval (what would Barbra Streisand think?) – are too frightened to do:

Wage war against an intractable enemy until they either lay down their weapons and surrender unconditionally, or are laid down by the righteous retribution of honorable men who will not allow their criminal acts to continue.

A reader writes:

Off on a business trip, but I want to offer that I appreciate your blogging about the "War on Terror." I'm a little appalled and disturbed at what I see happening on the American Right, they are simply as emotionally overwrought and uncontrolled abroad as the Left is at home. It seems there is no "reality based choice" out there. There are many people out there who do believe this is as bad as "Nazi Germany," but the scary thing is that so many smart people refuse to disabuse them of this notion.

Anyway, keep up the good work.

The current frenzy has an insidious underlying logic to it that ultimately points in a direction so horrible that I've been hesitant to point it out for fear that making this chain of thought explicit will help it become popular in its full extent.

The good news is that the current shooting war in Lebanon won't last forever. (The Security Council just unanimously voted on a plan to bring it to a halt, although I have no idea if it will work.) War fever drives people nuts -- for example, in early 1942, when my grandfather was driving through Pismo Beach, California, he became convinced that a Japanese farmer on a slope overlooking the coast had grown his crops in a coded pattern to transmit (very very slowly) secret messages to the Japanese invasion fleet lurking offshore. This was not considered nutty in the post-Pearl Harbor mental climate. Indeed, rather than my grandfather being hauled off for a long stress-free rest amidst flowers and nice men in white coats, the poor farmer and all the other Japanese in California were rounded up and sent away to camps.

Here is the full foreign policy logic that is bubbling under the hysteria:

1. All Muslims everywhere are Them.

Arabs who are shooting rockets at Israel, Iranians who supply the rockets, Pakistanis who try to blow up planes, Shi'ites like Ahmadinejad, Sunnis like bin Laden, all Muslims are "Them." (Christians who live in Arab countries like Lebanon are probably Them too, but it's best not to think too hard about this.)

2. America and Israel are Us.

3.They want to kill Us.

4. Our merciful strategy of trying to democratize Them by conquering Them just makes Them perversely want to kill Us more.

5. Trying to blow up Their weapons from the air doesn't seem to work, as We have seen in Our war in Lebanon, and just makes Them want to kill Us even more.

6. Even if We did destroy all Their rockets and cyclotrons, They will still try to kill Us with Their sports drink bottles, which will only become more deadly as technology progresses.

7. Unlike sane people like Stalin and Mao, They cannot be deterred by threats of military retribution because They are religious maniacs who want to die.

8. It is either Us or Them.

9. We must run any risk to be safe.

Therefore:

They must die.

All of Them.

We have 10,000 nuclear warheads.

That should suffice.

And here is the domestic policy sub-logic:

A. Us doesn't include wild-eyed Us-haters like Connecticut businessman Ned Lamont or potential Hitlers who harbor secret evil thoughts against Us that only spill out after a dozen drinks like Mel Gibson.

B. These dangerous weak sisters who are not Them but neither are they Us will never accept this irrefutable logic, so these people must be dealt with so that their hatred of Us will not stand in the way of Us securing Our safety.

Of course, there are large assumptions included in this logic. One obvious problem is the couple of million or so Muslims who live in America. Here the logic runs in the opposite direction:

Profiling them when they try to get on our airplanes, preventing them from immigrating, encouraging them to leave our country -- all of these steps are immoral to the point of unthinkability. Dividing people up into "Us" and "Them" for the purpose of deciding who gets the most attention at airport security screening is too awful to contemplate. The whole concept of excluding anybody in the world from moving to America is deeply, deeply dubious, indeed it's probably anti-Semitic if you examined it closely enough. Look at 1924. If you got Mel Gibson drunk enough, he'd probably be in favor of these kind of things.

Therefore:

Nothing can or should be done domestically to makes us safer. Instead, We should blow Them all up over there. The only thing that anyone should be allowed to consider is a coherent, well-integrated strategy of:

Invade the world.
Invite the world.

The good news, fortunately, is threefold. First, at present, nobody is really saying all of this -- it's still too awful to express every step of the logic. Second, when you do come out and say it like I just did, it sounds not only horrific, but laughably stupid.

Third, war fever isn't permanent. This too shall pass. Once rockets aren't killing one or two Israeli civilians per day, the mania will recede.

But, it's unlikely that any UN plan will permanently solve Israel's problems, so this logical dementia will eventually return.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Schmutzkrieg!

Hezbollah's impressive investment in digging holes in the ground in South Lebanon attests to the imminence of the threat they pose to overrunning Israel. Nothing says "offensive warfare" like tunnels. You all recall how on May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany began its infamous schmutzkrieg assault on France, burrowing 20, sometimes even 30 meters per day through French dirt, which eventuated in their capture of Paris on June 14, 1967.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Pakistaini-Brit airport plot

The arrested suspects turn out to be exactly who you'd expect them to be:

British authorities arrested 24 people based partly on intelligence from Pakistan, where authorities detained up to three others several days earlier. More arrests were expected. British officials said the suspects are British-born Muslim men, at least some of Pakistani ancestry... A senior U.S. counterterrorism official said the suspects, whose ages ranged from 17 to the mid-30s, were looking to sneak at least some chemicals on the planes in sports-drink bottles.

With airport bombing plots back in the news, I'd like to remind readers of one of the great unmentioned questions about 9/11: Did the Bush Administration's long campaign against ethnic profiling of Muslims at airports prevent any of the four hijackings from being foiled?

Here's part of an article I wrote the evening of 9/11/01. (UPI didn't get around to publishing it for another week or so.)

Bush had called for laxer airport security

by Steve Sailer

UPI, September 11, 2001

LOS ANGELES, Sep. 11 -- Ironically, in an attempt to appeal to the growing number of Arab-American and Muslim voters, exactly eleven months ago George W. Bush called for weakening airport security procedures aimed at deterring hijackers.

On Oct. 11, 2000, during the second presidential debate, the Republican candidate attacked two anti-terrorist policies that had long irritated Arab citizens of the U.S.

At present [i.e., the evening of 9/11], of course, there is no definite evidence that Arabs or Muslims were involved in today's terrorist assaults. Many incorrectly assumed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that Middle Easterners were involved. Nor is there direct evidence that Bush's attack on airline safety procedures made the four simultaneous hijackings easier to pull off.

Bush said during the nationally televised debate, "Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what's called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that." Then-Governor Bush went on, "My friend, Sen. Spence Abraham [the Arab-American Republic Senator from Michigan], is pushing a law to make sure that, you know, Arab-Americans are treated with respect. So racial profiling isn't just an issue at the local police forces. It's an issue throughout our society. And as we become a diverse society, we're going to have to deal with it more and more."

Bush's plug for Senator Abraham was intended to help Abraham in close re-election battle, which he ultimately lost. (Abraham is now the Bush Administration's Secretary of Energy.) More important personally to Bush was the swing state of Michigan's 18 electoral votes, which Al Gore eventually won narrowly. Arab-Americans, centered in Dearborn and Flint, make up about four percent of the population of Michigan, the most of any state.

In the debate, Bush conflated two separate policies that Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans felt discriminate against them: the heightened suspicions faced by Middle Eastern-looking travelers at airport security checkpoints and the government's use of "secret evidence" in immigration hearings of suspected terrorists. Yet, despite Bush's confusion, Arab-Americans appreciated his gesture. Four days after the debate, the Arab-American Political Action Committee endorsed Bush.

The day after Bush's remarks, 17 American sailors died in a terrorist attack in the Arab nation of Yemen. The bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, however, did not stop Vice President Al Gore from echoing Bush's calls to end these two anti-terrorist techniques in a meeting with Arab-American leaders on October 14, 2000.

According to a spokesperson for a leading Arab-American organization, people of Arab descent are stopped and searched at airports more often than many other ethnic groups. Some refer to this as Flying While Arab or Flying While Muslim. These terms are intended as plays on the popular phrase "Driving While Black," which is widely used to criticize police departments for stopping more black than white motorists.

This year, both Bush and his Attorney General John Ashcroft have called for an end to racial profiling.

The Federal Aviation Administration provides airline and airport personnel with the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening system to help them identify suspicious travelers. It relies on a secret profile of the characteristics of typical hijackers and terrorists.

Bush's Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said that "the security procedures are not based on the race, ethnicity, religion or gender of passengers" Yet, the system is widely believed to use other information - such as whether the traveler is going to or coming from the Middle East - that tends to "disparately impact" Arab and Muslims.

None of the ethnic rights groups, however, has offered any data to dispute the widespread assumption that in the three decades since the Palestine Liberation Organization invented skyjacking, a disproportionate number of hijackers and plane bombers have had Middle Eastern ties.

Nonetheless, the Bush Administration publicly agrees with the civil rights organizations that even a nonracial airport profiling system that had merely a disparate impact on Arabs and Muslims would be objectionable. Secretary Mineta said, "We also want to assure that in practice, the system does not disproportionately select members of any particular minority group." Of course, if Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately more likely to hijack airliners, and the profiling system does not end up disproportionately targeting them, then system wouldn't work very well at preventing hijackings.

To ensure that no disparate impact is occurring, the Bush Administration carried out in June a three-week study, first planned by the Clinton Administration, of whether or not profiling at the Detroit airport disparately impacts Arabs.

The results of the study have not been released. Nor is it known whether the secret profiles have been relaxed - they are kept secret in order to keep hijackers guessing.

However, on June 6th Attorney General Ashcroft told Congress, "We want the right training, we want the right kind of discipline, we want the right kind of detection measures and the right kind of remediation measures, because racial profiling doesn't belong in the federal government's operational arsenal." [More]

Why hasn't anybody else ever been interested in this question of whether Bush made possible 9/11 over the last half decade?

As for what else could be done about Muslims in Europe, my suggestion from last year looks better and better: pay them to leave.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How to Get Rich the Tom Friedman Way

A number of authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman are perennials on the bestseller lists because readers believe they will tell them how to get rich via breakthrough concepts like the World Is Flat and the Tipping Point. And Tom Friedman is indeed enormously rich, much richer even than Malcolm Gladwell. Tom and Ann Friedman live in:

"a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club," according to the July 2006 issue of the Washingtonian magazine.

So, what cutting-edge business concept did Friedman use to get so ungodly rich? Sure, his bestsellers and his personal appearances would have made him wealthy, but not zillionaire rich like this. So, what was his 21st Century Globalized Flat World secret?

Well, he got rich a very old fashioned way: he married well. His wife, whom he married in 1978, is the daughter of billionaire shopping mall developer Matthew Bucksbaum. The Bucksbaum family wealth is estimated at $2.7 billion.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Middle Eastern Powder-Thimble

An obsessive neocon trope for the last five years has been that this very moment is the autumn of 1938 all over again, when it's our last possible chance to stop the New Hitler (whose precise identity seems to be hazy -- it used to be Osama bin Laden, but then we lost interest in catching him and the New Hitler became Saddam Hussein, and then that Zarqawi maniac, and now, apparently, it's that guy in Iran who looks like Yakov Smirnoff or Borat, or maybe this Nasrallah fellow in Lebanon).

Now, former Clinton Administration foreign policy honcho Richard Holbrooke explains in the Washington Post in "The Guns of August" that it's really the summer of 1914 or maybe the fall of 1962 all over again.

A reader writes:

The author (Richard Holbrooke) begins with this:

"Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay. Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terrorists based there. Syria could easily get pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hezbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of giving shelter to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; there is constant fighting on both sides of that border. NATO's own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance."

According to Holbrooke, the following are either happening or might happen: 1. Turkey is "talking" about invading northern Iraq. 2. Syria "gets pulled" (passive voice) into the war in Lebanon. 3. Egypt and Saudi Arabia "are under pressure" to support Hezbollah by disfavored domestic elements that those governments routinely ignore and/or repress. 4. "Afghanistan" (I think he means the mostly ineffective national government of that country) accuses Pakistan of something everyone knows they do - providing cover to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Etc. etc. etc.

The author then adds these seemingly typical Middle Eastern problems up and concludes that "This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation."

Wow. I find that an amazing conclusion. The ongoing border skirmishes and ethnic/religious battles in the Middle East, which we're all pretty used to (and tired of) are suddenly, seemingly through the addition of the single element of Israeli involvement, transformed into "the greatest threat to global stability since" the Soviet Union and the United States nearly blew up the world.

Really?

Clearly, the Iraq Attaq has had a destabilizing effect on the Middle East and, contrary to the neocon theory that America causing more disorder over there would be (through some magical alchemy) constructive, it's more common in that part of the world for perturbations to cause things to go from bad to worse than from bad to good. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tends to work more strongly over there than in some other regions.

Still, it's just a bunch of Middle Eastern countries we're talking about. If some of them didn't have oil, they'd rank up there with Burma in global importance. And they all have big incentives to keep pumping oil into the world market. Obviously, various people in America have emotional, family, religious, and ethnocentric ties to various countries over there, but, in the final analysis of American national interest, so what?

So, please, keep in mind that if the Great Powers had paused in the summer of 1914 and said, "Jeez, it's just somebody shooting somebody in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for heaven's sake," the next 75 years of unpleasantness up through 1989 could have been avoided.

Especially because today there aren't any Great Powers around for each other to worry about. There's just the Hyperpower -- us -- with 47% of the whole world's military spending. And there's a motley cast of a supporting actors: a future Great Power in China, a staggering ex-Superpower in Russia, a few Medium Powers like Britain and France, two potential Medium Powers in Japan and Germany, a far future potential Great Power in Indian, a Regional Micro-Superpower in Israel, and so forth. According to the CIA World Factbook, Iran comes in 25th in military spending (as of 2003), wedged among such imposing military colossi as Singapore, Argentina, Norway, and Belgium.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Lamont vs. Lieberman: the other subtext

I've been pointing out that much of the Establishment dismay over Sen. Lieberman's loss in the Connecticut primary is worry that they too might someday lose their jobs due to screwing up royally over Iraq.

The other subtext among the chattering class is fear and loathing of the supposed emergence of an American Left that is not very Jewish, which you can see in all the Jewish pundits who have ranted about how dare Connecticut voters throw out Lieberman after only 18 years. (Harold Meyerson has been an honorable exception.) This is basically an elite obsession. Among the public, Lamont won 39% of the Jewish vote (compared to 58% of the Protestant vote), so actual Jewish voters weren't as ethnocentric as the Jewish pundits. Still, it's odd for the more leftwing candidate to do much better among Protestants than among Jews, so some voters were thinking like the pundits.

This trend toward a less-Jewish left has been slowly growing for a long time, and was visible in the Arab-American Ralph Nader's fairly good showing in 2000, when he took 2.7% nationally but supposedly only 2 percent of the Jewish vote according to the exit poll. Compare that to 1948 when Henry Wallace, with Communist backing for his Progressive ticket, got skunked most places except his native northern Plains and New York, where he took 9%, much of it, I presume, Jewish. Henry Wallace's share of the Jewish vote is estimated at 15%.

I think this new new left is not particularly anti-Semitic. I'm sure Lamont supporters would have liked their man to get 58% of the Jewish vote as well. But a not-unimportant fraction of Jews have turned much more militaristic in recent years, which has led to growing alienation between Jews and the left.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Global Force Projection

As I mentioned yesterday, the U.S. has over 80% of the world's aircraft carrier capacity, as measured in naval warplanes.

So, why isn't the rest of the world terribly interested in aircraft carriers? (Various countries have plans underway to build one or two aircraft carriers, but there doesn't appear to be any intention anywhere to challenge U.S. global supremacy in aircraft carriers, and that includes China, which owns an aircraft carrier it bought from Russia, but doesn't have it out at sea.)

Some readers have cited the vulnerability of aircraft carriers to atomic weapons, but they've been vulnerable since 1949. That hasn't fazed the US Navy. The last of the Nimitz-class supercarriers, the George H. W. Bush is under construction. And, construction is scheduled to begin on the first of the new CVN-21 generation of supercarriers next year, for delivery in 2015, at a cost of $8 billion, plus $5 billion in R&D, with two more currently planned after that. And aircraft carriers require many support ships such as Aegis-equipped guided missile cruisers. So, each U.S. aircraft carrier plus its support ships costs somewhere around $20 billion.

I think the bigger reason, along with the huge U.S. lead in this colossally expensive form of warfare is this: The aircraft carrier is the penultimate weapon of global force projection, trailing only the nuclear ICBM. And intercontinental force projection is simply something that not many countries feel that much of a need for anymore.

The ancient roiling of the world that went into high gear with the outward explosion of the European race after 1492 has been slowing down. Europeans succeeded in conquering some continents permanently (unless they continue their feckless refusal to patrol their borders) and have been expelled from other continents.

It turned out that while it was enormously profitable to colonize an entire mostly empty continent like North America or Australia, it was much less profitable to imperialize an already highly-inhabited continent. Lots of the world, including most of Africa without mineral motherlodes, couldn't generate enough wealth to be worth the costs. Some areas, like India could turn a profit, but once the Indians started to develop their own sense of nationalism, they couldn't be held in thrall profitably without resorting to mass slaughter, which Western Europeans had less of a stomach for as time progressed. Today, even if we were stealing every penny of the oil being pumped out of Iraq, the $50 billion per year wouldn't pay our occupation costs -- and that's at record high oil prices. Probably Kuwait is the only country worth conquering these days.

As the most educated members of the ruled races came to historical consciousness, typically in schools provided by their European overlords, they began to find rule by another race to be an intolerable insult. Political control of the world is now much more homogenous at the continental level than a century ago, when Europeans ruled most countries on other continents. (I'm defining "continental" not in the technical geographic definition, but more in the Huntingtonian civilizational manner, where, for example, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa or East Asia and South Asia are separate continents.)

European settler enclaves on non-European continents, such as French Algeria, Rhodesia, and South Africa have been ground down, in the first two cases utterly, and South Africa is probably just a matter of time. Russia has lost control of Central Asia. (Latin America is a quasi-exception -- it has settled into an intermittent low-intensity twilight struggle among partly blended races.)

Today, almost all countries on earth are now ruled by elements relatively indigenous to their continent. Granted, there are many local divergences such as the minority Alawites running Sunni Syria, and a few medium-scale ones, such as the Chinese running Singapore, and occasionally, the descendents of Indian migratory laborers run far-flung small states like Fiji. (Madagascar, which is run by Southeast Asians who landed off the coast of Africa a couple of thousand years ago, is sui generis.)

But the most famous exception to this historical pattern of European settlers either taking over an entire continent politically and demographically, such as Australia or North America, or losing political and demographic control of every country in an entire continent is Israel.

This helps explain the inordinate excitement and loathing Israel arouses among its neighbors. It's a reminder of the European superiority that they were once personally subjected to. It also suggests the perilous uphill task America took on in Iraq.

And that helps explain why not many countries are all that interested in using aircraft carriers to project power across oceans anymore. They don't have the heart to do what it takes to rule a people on the other side of the ocean.

In the 1990s (a.k.a., the Good Old Days), they were pleased to delegate to America the task of policing the sea lanes and leading the occasional coalition to punish international rule-breakers like Saddam or the Taliban. But since we've gotten bogged down in occupying Iraq long term, our role becomes more questionable to the rest of the world.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

War: the human race just isn't trying very hard anymore

As part of my daylong obsession with providing some perspective on war in the modern world, in contrast to the fevered discussions you'll find elsewhere, I took a look at military spending as a percent of the economy.

n 1944, the U.S. spent 38% of its GDP on the military. The U.S. defense budget ran around 9% of GDP in the 1950s after the Korean War, and was fairly similar in the 1960s. In the 1980s, it approached 6%. Today, even while fighting in Iraq, we're down around 4%.

And yet, despite this decline, we spend 47% of all the money on the military in the world, by one estimate. According to the CIA World Factbook, the world only spends about 2% of the global gross product on the military today.

Lots of other countries that you might think of as big spenders, aren't. According to the Factbook:

Iran, which everybody knows intends to blow up the world, is spending all of 3.3% of its GDP on the military.

China which is widely said to be hellbent for leather to displace us is spending 4.3% of their GDP on their military - a bit more than us relative to the size of their economy, but hardly comparing to the Soviet Union's devotion to arms back in the bad old days. (I saw one estimate of 15-17% in 1988, but I bet it might have been even higher.) Taiwan, which is supposed to be so threatened by China, is spending all of 2.4%.

South Korea, which has crazy North Korea across the border, spends only 2.6%. Then there are Pakistan 3.9% and India 2.5%. Others include Australia 2.7%, Canada 1.1%, Libya 3.9%, Syria 5.9%, Egypt 3.4%, Turkey 5.3%, Kuwait 4.2%, Vietnam 2.5%, Indonesia 3.0%, Rwanda 2.9%, Cuba 1.8%, Venezuela 1.2%, Colombia 3.4%, France 2.6%, United Kingdom 2.4%, Germany 1.5%, Brazil 1.3%, Japan 1.0%, Kazakhstan 0.9%, and Mexico 0.8%. The two countries that claim zero spending on the military are Iceland and the Dominican Republic.

So, who are the big spenders? Israel 7.7% (a lot, but less than the U.S. spent in the 1960s), Angola 8.8%, Saudi Arabia 10%, Oman 10.0%, Qatar 11.4%, and Jordan 11.4%.

Nobody knows much about North Korea, but the Factbook suggests 12.5% as a guess.

So, who had the highest military share of all those I looked at?

It's the War Nerd's favorite foreign country, Eritrea at 17.7%.

In summary, the human race just isn't trying very hard anymore to blow each other up.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer