IS Wants A Western Crusade

Oliver Miles, a former head of the Near East and North African department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, writes:

If we are embarking on yet another Middle East war, we should start by reflecting that it is likely to be long – the Syrian war is only in its fourth year, but the Lebanon civil war lasted 15 years, and we have been in Afghanistan for 13 years – and that the end is likely to be different from what we now foresee.

The blitzkrieg of the so-called Islamic State (Isis) across Syria and Iraq required a military response and has had one. But the war will end with a political and not a military solution.

Isis is above all a threat to Syria and Iraq, and after them to the other near neighbours: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran and Kuwait.

Barack Obama has done a good job mobilising support from some of them, but the political pressure on him to be leader risks allowing them to make token contributions only.

That is exactly why Isis staged the monstrous beheadings that have mesmerised us all.

If they can provoke the west into what they will call a crusade they can count on growing support from marginalised Muslims both in the Middle East and in countries such as Britain and France.

It is depressing that the government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – has been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.

The prime minister has quite rightly referred to a duty to confront the threat on the streets of Britain; but not by actions that will make it worse.

Our first aim should be to look for ways to place the responsibility where it belongs – with the people of the region.

Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Jordan have made a military contribution, but what is needed is a political contribution from the heavyweights – Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and Egypt.

The Conservative MP Rory Stewart made an eloquent plea in the Commons two weeks ago for adequate resources to be given to the Foreign Office and the other agencies responsible for analysing the Middle East and developing our policy there.

If, for instance, we are looking for Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province who may be able to stand up to Isis as they stood up to al-Qaida, it can’t be done by searching on the internet or by a couple of special advisors in No 10.

Syria is a dilemma.

It is not simply the next step for parliament to authorise war measures, once operations in Iraq confirm what is already obvious – that a military solution for Iraq without Syria is impossible.

The legal situation is very different. Intervention in Iraq at the request of the legitimate government has a sound legal basis, but finding any legal basis for action in Syria is problematic.

We are probably going to have to accept the fact that we backed the wrong horse, misled by the honourable hope that the opposition of the Syrian people would put an end to a very unpleasant regime. Compromise and negotiation will be needed.

It is precisely in these political questions that Britain may still have something unique to offer. Certainly many people in the region believe that we do.

We are told that the US is very keen to have Britain onside. That is good, and gives us an opportunity to use our influence with America. What should we do?

First, we should reinforce and insist on respect for international law.

As a medium-sized power and a major trading nation, we have more at stake in that than the US. Obama will not be against; he is no George W Bush.

Next we must always hold the door open to negotiation. It may be unthinkable now, but eventually talking will be needed with whatever develops from Isis in its present form, or from its fragments.

The experience of Northern Ireland is relevant; “no talking to terrorists” may be a good slogan, but it delivers deadlock.

Third, we can help through our diplomacy to mobilise support in the region. Iran, for example, is almost as tricky a problem as Syria.

It shares our objective of bringing Isis under control; it has military assets that are probably the most effective and, other than those of Iraq and Syria themselves, the most available in the region; but it has only just begun to climb out of a generation-long feud with the US. Each finds it difficult to see the other as anything other than a bloodstained monster.

We have helped and can help more to bring Iran back into the fold.

Last and most important, we should cash in some of our hard-earned American goodwill and take a step for which we have waited too long: we should recognise Palestine, preferably bringing with us the few remaining EU refuseniks and aligning them and us with most of the rest of the world.

Sir Vincent Fean, former British consul general in Jerusalem, made the case eloquently in an article in a newspaper last week.

The way is prepared.

Fean points out that Britain noted at the UN three years ago that “the Palestinian Authority has developed successfully the capacity to run a democratic and peaceful state, founded on the rule of law and living in peace and security with Israel … Palestine largely fulfils the legal and technical criteria for UN membership, including statehood, inasfar as the occupation allows.”

This step would be a reaffirmation of our policy, which is based on the two-state solution. What is a two-state solution without acceptance of two states?

The effect on our standing in the Middle East and our ability to influence events would be extremely positive. It would do us no harm in Europe.

As for America, it would be idle to look for public agreement, since the administration’s hands are tied by Congress (although Obama himself has been treated with contempt by the Israeli prime minister and would probably see the point).

Such an initiative would be similar to the Venice declaration of 1980, when Britain and a group of other leading European countries defined a negotiating framework for Israel and the Arabs based on land for peace (which turned into the idea of a two-state solution).

America didn’t like it, but in the end picked it up and ran with it. Any decent poodle owner likes a dog that barks once in a while.

Meanwhile, in Iraq and Syria, we should leverage our readiness to use force to get the new Iraqi government to develop its inclusive approach, in contrast with the ruthless imposition of Shia hegemony by its predecessor.

Only the Iraqi government can win back the loyalty of the Sunnis, whose despair has driven them into the hands of the men in black. Only through Iraqi boots on the ground can our force and American force prevail. 

Then, after the next shake of the kaleidoscope, we must find a way to do the same in Syria.

Europe’s Last Conviction Politician?

Given the double-page spread that he so richly deserves in The Spectator, Neil Clark writes:

Václav Klaus has made a habit of saying things others shy away from saying, but it doesn’t seem to have done him much harm in the popularity stakes.

Quite the opposite: the 73-year-old ardently Eurosceptic free-marketeer has legitimate claims to be regarded as the most successful ‘true blue’ conservative politician in Europe over the past 25 years.

He was, after all, prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1998 and then his country’s president for a further ten years, from 2003 to 2013.

So when we meet after a typically hearty Serbian lunch — at the International Science and Public Conference in Belgrade — I am keen to ask if he has any advice for David Cameron and the British Conservative party.

‘I was invited to a conference last year in Windsor which was called the Conservative Renewal Conference,’ he says.

‘I made a speech in which I asked the question: “Do you really need a renewal — or don’t you think it would be sufficient to have a return?” My speech stressed the need to return to standard conservative ideas and approaches. I am afraid the current leadership of the Conservative party are not exactly doing that.’

Klaus’s message clearly resonates more with activists than with the serial ‘modernisers’ at the top of the party.

‘After I had finished my speech, two or three older ladies came up to me and said, “It was like Maggie’s speech!” So I find the Conservative party now rather confused in its ideas. The party is playing with the green ideas in a way I can’t accept.’

Klaus is not too keen — to say the least — about another element of the ‘modernising’ agenda.

‘The same-sex marriages and all that stuff about family, to put it broadly, is for me another tragic misunderstanding by the current leaders of the party and I am very sorry about that.’

We move on, inevitably, to Europe.

What effect does Klaus think a British referendum on EU membership — and the prospect of a UK withdrawal — might have for the Continent?

‘It would send a strong signal. I was very angry, even in the communist era, looking at Britain from the outside, from behind the Iron Curtain, that Britain decided to leave EFTA to join the EEC in the early 1970s.’

It was a Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, who took that momentous step. What, I wonder, does Klaus think of the present Conservative leader’s line on Europe?

‘I have met Mr Cameron several times and I am not so sure about his credentials on the EU. I understand he must somehow reflect the division in the whole country and in his party, but nevertheless I don’t think that in a secret ballot in a referendum that he would vote yes [for Britain to remain in the EU] — but this is only my guesstimate.’

Listen to Klaus in full flow on the absurdities of the EU and it’s hard to think why any sane individual — on left or right — would want their country to stay in it.

‘A few days ago I studied the names of the EU commissioners under Mr Juncker, and their portfolios. We in my country say that 16 is already too high for having meaningful portfolios. But the EU now has 28, more than in any country in our part of the world.

‘If you look at the names of those portfolios, I really don’t believe my eyes. The former Estonian prime minister is a commissioner for digital markets. As an economist I really don’t know what the term “digital markets” means.

‘Plus there is another, a German politician, Günther Oettinger, who is the commissioner for “digital economy and society”.

‘We would laugh in the communist era to have such names for the members of our cabinet. I can’t imagine what these commissioners are doing.’

I put it to Klaus that in the bloated and bureaucratic EU economic model, we have the worst of all worlds — one which pleases neither genuine socialists, nor Thatcherite free-marketers, and he readily agrees.

‘What we have in Europe now is not the German Soziale Marktwirtschaft — the social market economy — but the German model deteriorated by another adjective, “ecological”.’

‘I started my political career after the fall of communism with a well-known slogan: “I want to introduce markets without adjectives.” There was a big fight in the country about this phrase.

‘They said, “Klaus wants to introduce markets without social policy.” “No,” I said. “There can be a social policy, but the slogan means a market economy with an additional social policy and not a social market.”

‘The sequence of the words is all important. At present we are going deeper and deeper and deeper into the ecological and social market economy.’

Whatever we decide to call the current system, he adds, it clearly isn’t working for Europe.

‘I am really shocked to see leading EU and European politicians pretending that everything is OK, which is ridiculous and funny,’ Klaus says.

‘I recently read an article by a well-known German economist, Professor Sinn, who has studied the situation in Italy. He presented statistical data which showed that GDP in Italy has declined by 9 per cent since 2000.

‘It’s unimaginable! I don’t think communist Czechoslovakia would have survived such a long-term decline. At the same time, industrial output declined in the same period by 25 per cent! One quarter of the economy simply disappeared.’

Klaus believes the EU is beyond reform and has called for it to be replaced with an ‘Organisation of European States’ — a simple free trade association which would not pursue political integration.

He recalls his own experience at the forefront of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution in 1989.

‘When we started to change my country we quite deliberately did not use the term “reform” — we used the word “transformation”, because we wanted a systemic change. Such a systemic change is needed in Europe today.’

It’s not just on the economy that Europe has got it wrong, says Klaus.

He doesn’t agree with the western elite’s current hostility towards Russia, which he believes is based on a false and outdated view of the country.

‘I remember one person in our country who at one moment was minister of foreign affairs, telling me that he hated communism so much that he was not even able to read Dostoevsky.

‘I have remembered that statement for decades and I am afraid that the current propaganda against Russia is based on a similar argument and way of thinking.

‘I spent most of my life in a communist Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination. But I differentiate between the Soviet Union and Russia. Those who are not able to understand the difference are simply not looking with open eyes.

‘I always argue with my American and British friends that although the political system in Russia is different from the system in our countries and we wouldn’t be happy to live in such a system, to compare the current Russia with Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union is stupid.’

He says, with finality: ‘The US/EU propaganda against Russia is really ridiculous and I can’t accept it.’

Klaus wants to transfer other democratic decision-making powers back to the nation states.

‘I’m not just criticising the EU arrangements — at the same time I’m very critical of global governance and the shift to transnationalism.

‘A week ago I was in Hong Kong and I criticised the naive opening up of countries without keeping or maintaining the anchoring of the nation state. Doing this leads either to anarchy, or to global governance.

‘My vision for Europe is a Europe of sovereign nation states, definitely. But we have already gone well beyond simply economic integration. The EU is a post-democratic and post-political system.’

Klaus has spent his political career standing up for sovereignty and rejecting the dominant orthodoxies of the day.

Unlike other leaders in the former Soviet bloc countries, he did not feel inhibited about criticising western policies when the Berlin Wall came down.

He was one of the few to oppose the Clinton/Blair ‘humanitarian’ bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999 (he was also strongly critical of the Iraq war).

Yet he feels the freedom to hold — and express — ‘unfashionable’ views in the West is now under increasing threat.

‘If you ask me whether I think liberty is under huge attack in Europe now, I would say yes. I feel repressed by not being allowed to express my views. I have permanent troubles with this.

‘Suddenly I have discovered, for the first time in 20 years, having been invited to be a keynote speaker at a conference, that the organisers find out I have reservations about the EU, about same-sex marriages, about the Ukraine crisis, and they say, “We are very sorry, we have already found a different keynote speaker, thank you very much.”

‘This is something I had experienced in the communist era but not in so-called free Europe. Only a very narrow range of opinions is now considered politically correct.’

It’s to fight this worrying trend that Klaus has decided to launch a new project.

‘I am planning, if we can get the money and people together, to start a new quarterly journal in 2015 called Europe and Liberty.’

It’s hard not to wish him well.

In the not too distant past, Europe did have leaders who had clear and distinct visions: on the left, the likes of Sweden’s Olof Palme and Austria’s Bruno Kreisky; on the right, de Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher.

You could agree or disagree but you could never say you didn’t know what they believed in, or that the views they held were not sincere.

But they’ve been replaced by a generation of bland, uninspiring, consistently ‘on-message’ politicians.

Václav Klaus is different, a throwback to the days when our leaders did stand for something and weren’t afraid to speak their minds.

Let’s hope he does not turn out to be Europe’s last conviction politician.

Reckless?

I'm sorry. I couldn't resist it. I realise that my readers expect a higher standard.

Mark Reckless is a grandson of Henry McDevitt, de Valera's man in East Donegal. Has he misinterpreted UKIP's name as a call for independence from the United Kingdom?

Has another UKIP candidate in place now been removed to make way for the "LibLabCon" incumbent?

Douglas Carswell's views bear no resemblance to, for example, the Labour Conference trade union fringe meeting speech on health policy that was rapturously received by UKIP when Louise Bours delivered it yesterday. There was even a favourable namecheck of Len McCluskey and a promise to work with him.

Are Reckless's opinions any closer to the party line than Carswell's are?

Barrow Boy

Based on his performance on Newsnight, the greying John Woodcock, who chairs Progress of which I am a member, needs to grow up and get out of the student union.

The mighty Patrick Cockburn pointed out that we were not actually allied to those who were already fighting IS on the ground, including Assad, and that we were in fact pretending that Assad was somehow not the President of Syria while classifying everyone else in the field against IS as a range of terrorist organisations.

Woodcock spluttered that there could never be an alliance with "this murderous dictator". Quite what he would have done in either World War, heaven alone can begin to speculate.

Clare Short was also on hand to point out that, as is set out at great length his Cockburn's latest book, it is our paper tiger associates, the Gulf monarchies, who are both the ideological and the financial originators and backers of that against which we are now affecting that they are joining us in battle.

Beyond a single stylised photograph of a female Emirati "fighter pilot", no evidence has been produced that "the Five Arab States" are doing anything at all, even by the standards of our own meagre deployment due this Government's having sacked, scrapped and cancelled everyone and everything else.

But where is the Sixth Arab State? Where is Kuwait, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar up to her eyeballs in both preaching and financing the Caliphate? The country for which we fought the first of the three Gulf Wars to date is very conspicuous by her absence. Very, very, very conspicuous, indeed.

As is NATO Turkey, with an enormous Army to match Saudi Arabia's enormous Air Force. And with a likewise matching Islamist Government heavily implicated in the Islamist insurrection in, and invasion of, Syria. 

You know, the insurrection and invasion that David Cameron wanted to back last year. The insurrection and invasion that the cheerleaders for this war wanted to aid by means of an International Brigade. They got what they wanted there.

As Cockburn very importantly mentioned, there is no Third Force. There never has been. There never will be. Anyone who thinks that elderly émigrés sipping coffee in Paris amount to a row of beans, coffee or otherwise, in Syria needs to get out of not even the student union, but the primary school playground.

Tanks On The Lawn?

The phrase itself was coined by Harold Wilson.

But nothing about UKIP has any appeal to traditional Labour voters, and that is why it is not attracting them.

It is attracting the Tory minority, or a large section of it, in Labour areas.

That is a Tory minority for a reason.

Those are Labour areas for a reason.

Labour's Vision

Bryan Gould writes:

Labour leaders have often been eloquent in articulating a vision of the kind of society they want; it is explaining how that vision is to be realised that seems to be the problem.

We have seen a further demonstration of this sad truth at this year’s Labour conference.

Ed Miliband had good things to say about Labour’s goals, but Ed Balls made it clear that those goals would have to be achieved within the constraints of the current neo-classical orthodoxy.

The subordination of lofty aspirations to the harsh and supposedly inexorable dictates of “free-market” economics has a long and sad history in Labour politics.

Harold Wilson, for example, destroyed the chances of his 1960s government with his long and ultimately fruitless battle against devaluing the pound.

Jim Callaghan signalled his acceptance that Keynesian economics had run their course when he told the 1976 Labour conference that “you can’t spend your way out of recession”.

The New Labour governments at the turn of the century, of course, had no need to undergo a Damascene conversion.

They readily embraced the “free-market” orthodoxy and set about trying to produce a better society on the basis that the filthier the rich, the bigger the crumbs from their table would be.

Ed Balls has placed himself firmly in that tradition by asserting that a new Labour government would allow no let-up in austerity and no resiling from the restraint of public spending.

Any progress, it seems, would have to come from re-shuffling the pack, not from cutting a new one.

The commitment to continued austerity is inevitably and correctly seen as validating, of course, the main plank in the Tory platform, and therefore immediately gives rise to the question - why should the voters trust Labour to carry it out when the Tories are available to do it with considerably more conviction?

If the voters did accept Labour’s commitment to maintain austerity, how - they might ask - could Labour promise with any credibility, in an unchanged macro-economic context, to produce different and better economic outcomes?

And if Labour were to win power on that basis, why would they want to enter government in a straitjacket of their opponents’ making?

The acceptance by Labour leaders that reducing the government deficit must be the top priority seems explicable only on the basis of either a complete loss of political nerve or a total failure to understand how more successful economies operate.

Austerity policies, as the record shows, are an extremely ineffective way of bringing the deficit down.

By reducing the size of the economy, they will inevitably diminish tax revenues, which means that the deficit is therefore bigger than it would otherwise be, both absolutely and as a proportion of a slower-growing GDP.

Further, with low investment in the domestic economy, so that the borrowing and lending of the household and corporate sectors roughly balance each other out, and with no action to address our lack of competitiveness, the consequent foreign payments deficit (and the borrowing from abroad that it necessitates) has to be roughly matched - as an accounting inevitability - by a government deficit.

Cutting public spending, in other words, is beside the point and largely self-defeating as a means of reducing the deficit - even if that is treated as the primary goal of policy.

If we really want to get the deficit down, there is no option but to get the economy moving again, not on the basis of an unsustainable asset inflation and brief consumption boom, but of improved levels of investment, competitiveness, and trading performance.

How is that to be done?

A complete alternative strategy cannot set out in a couple of hundred words here, but it is certainly not to be helped by reducing government spending. In any case, why do we single out government spending as so dangerous to stability and prudent management, when we look at what happens elsewhere in the economy?

In the real economy (and not that of fevered right-wing imaginations), 97% of our money comes into existence as credit created out of nothing by the banks.

That credit is created by the stroke of a computer entry; it rests on nothing other than the banks’ willingness to lend - especially, of course, on house purchase, hence the asset inflation in the housing market.

No one seems to turn a hair at the fact that the money supply is almost totally accounted for by credit created by private companies whose sole purpose is making profits for their shareholders.

On the other hand, a government that created credit for public purposes and the good of the economy as a whole (or, as the pejorative term would have It, “printed money”) would be lambasted.

Government-created money is acceptable, it seems, only when - you’ve guessed it - irresponsible lending means that the banks have to be bailed out.

Then, the Bank of England will issue up to £350 billion of “quantitative easing” (equally the product of the “printing press” and, incidentally, having no appreciable inflationary consequences).

If vast amounts of money can be created for private purposes, why is it so outrageous that a government serving the public interest might create money for investment, say, in new productive capacity?

That, after all, is exactly what the newly dominant economies of the Pacific Rim - China, Korea, Taiwan, and others - have done and are doing, and exactly what Shinzo Abe in Japan has returned to, after two decades of stagnation while his country applied policies recommended to them by western economists - those same economists who apparently still have Ed Balls in thrall.

Isn’t it time the Labour leadership shook off the shackles of a failed orthodoxy and learnt to think for themselves?

They might then identify the means that would enable those desirable ends to be met.

It Needs To Be Established

Damon Linker writes:

Ideas have consequences — and bad ideas have bad consequences.

Just how bad the consequences turn out to be depends to a large extent on the precise character of the bad idea.

A bad idea that influences no one isn't really that bad. It's just stupid, and instantly forgettable.

But a bad idea that lodges in people's minds, fires their imaginations, inspires them to persuade others of its wisdom, and motivates them to make bad decisions in the world — that idea is truly bad.

Some bad ideas inspire world-historical acts of evil. "The Jews are subhuman parasites that deserve to be exterminated" may be the worst idea ever conceived.

Compared with such a grotesquely awful idea, other bad ideas may appear trivial. But that doesn't mean we should ignore them and their pernicious consequences.

Into this category I would place the extraordinarily influential libertarian idea of "spontaneous order."

Now, regular readers will know that I believe we're living through something of a "libertarian moment," culturally speaking, and that I don't think this is all bad.

On most of the conflicts wrapped up with the sexual revolution and its aftermath, for example, I'm on the libertarian side of the argument — though I also think libertarians too often ignore or skirt over the moral dilemmas that arise in a culture of sexual autonomy.

On economic issues, I have far less sympathy for libertarian arguments, but I'm happy that someone is making them. Libertarians can be obnoxiously fixated on one moral-political principle to the exclusion of all others.

But their single-minded focus on the liberation of the individual from all forms of coercion makes them very useful to have around.

Whether we're arguing about taxes and government regulations or the soft social coercion associated with received norms, practices, and traditions, it's a good thing overall for those in positions of political and cultural authority to have to justify themselves before the bar of individual liberty.

But that doesn't mean libertarians are always right — or even that they always avoid staking out manifestly silly and occasionally harmful positions.

The idea of spontaneous order might be the silliest and most harmful of all.

Simply stated, the idea holds that when groups of individuals are left alone, without government oversight or regulation, they will spontaneously form a social and economic order that is superior in organization, efficiency, and the conveyance of information than an order arranged from the top down through centralized planning.

Popularized by Friedrich Hayek and his fellow Austrian economists in the mid-20th century, the idea actually has its roots in the classical liberal writings of John Locke and Adam Smith.

Locke famously argued that government originates from a prepolitical state of nature in which groups of farmers establish a night-watchman state to protect their natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

In this archetypal statement of classical liberal mythology, civilizational order (including the formation of stable families and the institution of private property) emerges spontaneously, prior to the formation of government, which is instituted for the sole purpose of protecting and preserving it.

Adam Smith expanded on this idea, applying it to the market economy, which he famously described as working its wonders as if it were governed by an "invisible hand."

Set millions of people free to pursue their economic self-interest, Smith claimed, and they will spontaneously generate an economic order marked by wealth and growth that benefits nearly everyone lucky enough to reside within it.

Careful readers of Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government and Smith's The Wealth of Nations will find much subtler views than the positions I've presented here.

But it is the bowdlerized versions of their thought that have captured the American — and libertarian — imagination.

Populated by generations of immigrants from foreign lands who came to the New World in search of new lives with fresh starts, the United States quickly developed a civil religion predicated on the presumption that it's possible to "begin the world over again."

Raised to recite that civic catechism, Americans have found it all too easy to believe that the achievements of American civilization flow from the spontaneous efforts of scrappy individuals toiling away in a state of natural freedom, with government either doing nothing significant to help or else standing obstinately in the way of even greater accomplishments.

No wonder so many Americans in the postwar period gravitated to the writings of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who warned that central government planning was bound to put us on "the road to serfdom."

Rather than looking to the state to guide us — a goal that inevitably ends with it trying to enslave us — we would be better to recognize that the market economy and even civil society as a whole formed spontaneously, as the outcome of countless unregulated acts and decisions by millions of individuals over time.

Going forward, Hayek concluded, individual liberty and prosperity depends upon allowing the spontaneous ordering of our collective lives to continue uninterrupted and uncontrolled by the state.

From Locke to Smith to Hayek, the lesson seems clear: Leave people alone, and a coherent civil order will spontaneously emerge and perpetuate itself.

This is utter fiction. A fairy tale. A just-so story that has as much historical veracity as Locke's happy talk about a prepolitical state of nature filled with spontaneously formed families and settled plots of legitimately gotten farmland.

The fact is that aside from certain very rare cases (see below), it's impossible to find human beings acting with perfect freedom outside of an already existing political order that shapes their decisions and determines to a considerable extent their behavior and range of possible choices.

President Obama got a lot of flack during his 2012 campaign for re-election for saying that wealthy business owners "didn't build that" all by themselves, but his point was indisputable.

The president mentioned the internet, roads and bridges, firefighting, and other public works that make it possible for the market economy to function and thrive.

He could have said far more.

How about the culture of general law-abidingness that we call the rule of law? The Federal Reserve's regulation of the money supply? An independent judiciary for the settlement of civil disputes?

Law enforcement at local, state, and federal levels that fights violent crime, fraud, corruption, monopolistic business practices, and a host of other behaviors that would otherwise scuttle the working of markets?

And on and on and on.

The order we see at work in the United States and in other advanced democracies is anything but spontaneous.

But there is one situation where it's possible to see genuine spontaneity in action: when an established political order is overthrown.

Now it just so happens that within the past decade or so the United States has, in effect, run two experiments — one in Iraq, the other in Libya — to test whether the theory of spontaneous order works out as the libertarian tradition would predict.

In both cases, spontaneity brought the opposite of order. It produced anarchy and civil war, mass death and human suffering.

In response, some libertarian-minded critics have claimed that this just goes to show the damage that tyranny does to individuals, robbing them of the capacity to govern themselves once they've finally been granted their freedom.

Quite so.

But then that would seem to imply that postwar Iraq and Libya could have spontaneously produced a liberal democratic order only if its citizens had acted as if they'd already been enjoying life in a liberal democratic order.

That sounds awful unspontaneous.

Order doesn't just happen, and it isn't the product of individual freedom.

It needs to be established, and it needs to be established first (sometimes by force), before individuals can be granted civic, economic, and social freedom.

The libertarian prophets of "spontaneous order" get things exactly backward, sometimes with catastrophic real-world consequences.

Which is why it's a particularly bad idea.