21st Century Schizoid Boy

Ron Paul is a physician, former U.S. Air Force flight surgeon, and eleven-term congressman from Texas.

The entire system of fiat money and fractional-reserve banking is like a super Ponzi scheme (if we can’t pay it back, let’s just create more!) and is the source of our problems.

End the Fed, Ron Paul, September 2009, Page 187, http://www.amazon.com/End-Fed-Ron-Paul/dp/0446549193.

It’s not a question of being an ideologue; it’s a question of which ideology one adheres to. It’s virtually impossible to be a supporter of no ideology. The ideologue label is used to make the morally principled ideology look confrontational and uncaring. This then makes it seem like the immoral philosophy, based on government force, is morally superior. It’s always couched in terms of caring for the underdog and not as a bailout of those who have unfairly been benefiting from an economic system artificially stimulated by an inflated currency that benefited certain industries’ CEO salaries and workers’ wages and benefits.

Very simply, there can’t be a more immoral system of money than one based on a banking monopoly that can counterfeit money in secret with no oversight and protection of the people. The moral argument against the Fed should be enough for decently well-informed people to dispense with it posthaste.

Page 156

It amazes me how society has advanced technologically since the industrial revolution and through the benefits of great brilliance in physics, chemistry, computers, medicine, electronics, and aerospace. Nations, even with a partial understanding of how free markets work, have benefited tremendously from the abundance created. Yet with all this knowledge, few understand some of the simplest economic truths regarding money. For generations, we have been brainwashed about the necessity of having a central bank to give us a currency that is elastic. We accept a rather bizarre idea with little question. Think about this seriously: if you need money, stretch it; that is, just print more of it.

It’s as if we still believe that money can be grown on trees, and we don’t stop to realize that if it did grow on trees, it would take on the value of leaves in the fall, to be either mulched or bagged and put in a landfill. That is to say, it would be worthless.

Why bright people in an advanced society can conclude that wealth can be increased by merely expanding the money supply is bewildering. I suspect that those who are the real promoters of central banking and fiat money are more motivated by power and greed than they are by sound economic theory. Many others are complacent and trusting and have probably not thought the issue through.

I am convinced that I can get a twelve-year-old to understand the issue of money a lot easier than someone much older. Young people are more open to new ideas; older people are too often fixed in their ways. The total failure of the system we inherited in 1971– confirming the theories of those who believed in sound money and who predicted this outcome– has awakened a whole generation of young people to the issue of money.

They realize that the mess they are inheriting is huge and easily understand how it is related to fiat money and the Federal Reserve.

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Ludwig von Mises had it right many years ago when he predicted the downfall of all socialist economies, including the Soviet system, for a precise reason. Without a free market pricing system, there’s no way to make proper economic decisions regarding supply and demand of products and services. Free market choices under socialism aren’t permitted; the government sets the price and plans production. Government bureaucrats can’t know what only markets can determine. Vital in the decision process is the profit-loss mechanism that rewards success and punishes failure. Government ownership of the means of production eliminates the benefits of bad decisions by business managers being punished. Under the socialism and interventionism that we have today, the successful are punished by being forced to bail out the unsuccessful.

We don’t have socialism of our markets yet… Where we do have socialism is in money and credit and setting interest rates…

By manipulating the supply of money and setting interest rates, the Fed has practiced backdoor economic planning. The Fed essentially keeps interest rates lower than they otherwise would be. In a free market, low rates would indicate adequate savings and signal the businessperson that it’s an opportune time to invest in capital projects. But the system the Fed operates discourages savings, and the credit created out of thin air serves as the signal for investors to spend, invest, and borrow excessively, compared to a system where interest rates are set by the market.

This causes a major problem. A boom results, and overinvestment and excesses are built into the system, creating a bubble. A recession or depression doesn’t come for some extraneous reason; it is a predictable result of the excessive credit and artificially low interest rates orchestrated by the Federal Reserve.

The longer the good times last, the greater the correction will be. Our current boom, except for a few minor interruptions, has been going on since 1971. It’s my opinion that it stopped in 2000. The Fed was able to create the housing bubble subsequently, but that has turned out to be the last hurrah. Today, we’re witnessing the consequences of this very foolish policy.

Most economists and politicians insist on defining inflation as a rising price level. Rising prices are a consequence of monetary inflation and are harmful. Mises claimed that this confusion over defining inflation was deliberate and mischievous. If it’s only a price problem, then blame can be placed on profiteers, speculators, labor unions, oil companies, and price gougers. This deflects attention from the real source of the problem, the Federal Reserve and its money machine. It’s because so many are convinced that consumer and producer price increases are caused by these extraneous reasons that wage and price controls are resorted to, while the Fed’s role in the inflation is ignored.

The silliness of this understanding is that once prices rise at an unwelcome rate, the blame is placed on a robust economy. In a free market, a robust economy causes prices to go down. A healthy cell phone or computer market, even in an age of inflation, will lower prices. Yet the Fed’s solution will be to purposely slow down the economy and decrease demand to lower prices, which works with a lot of pain. This attitude reflects the shortcomings of a fiat monetary system managed by the Fed.

The Federal Reserve is responsible for the boom-bust cycles. It’s responsible for price inflation, depression, and excessive debt. Although the central bank can get away with mismanagement of the economy for long periods of time, its policies are always destructive. Unchecked, the policies of a central bank lead to financial chaos, an example of which we are now experiencing.

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Higher prices represent a depreciation of the value of the dollar and are a tax on the people. The tax is borne by the middle class and the poor. The early users of the money are the beneficiaries; the government, the banks, and the large corporations.

This is a deceitful, unfair, and corrupt system. Not only does it transfer wealth from the middle class to the rich, it can postpone payments to the next generation just as borrowing does.

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Easy credit by the Fed sets the stage for excesses, both honest and dishonest.

Pages 179-186

Those who (possibly unconsciously) seek socialism, fascism, interventionism, or corporatism always support central banking. Some sincerely seek a central bank as a tool in economic planning to make up for the perceived shortcomings of the free market. Although many who support a central bank will claim that growth of government is not their goal, the result is otherwise. It’s the nature of the beast.

Remember that the people who run the Fed are just regular people, as flawed as anyone else. The only difference is that they have massive power to break civilization. Any institution that can do this is by nature tyrannical and is specifically what the Constitution was trying to prevent. Authority to create money gives credibility to legalized counterfeiting. Some supporters of this power believe that the money managers should and will be restrained in creating money for any reason other than for humanitarian purposes. This expectation of self-restraint never works out in the end.

Pages 192-193

Founded in 1741, Wegelin & Co. is Switzerland’s oldest [surviving] bank (http://www.wegelin.ch/home/aktuell.asp).

Our bank is in the process of recommending our clients to exit from all direct investments in US securities.

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And as we assume that we are not the only ones who will be pursuing a policy of exit from the American capital market, we expect that the range of non-US securities with American exposure will expand significantly.

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If this picture of a tautologous construct round the US Treasury is correct, then we must at the very least be extremely cautious about nominal values. For Treasury bonds and bills would then be seriously overvalued, as would the US dollar itself, which would naturally argue against all other US bonds. In our view, not even an engagement in US stocks is really worthwhile.

We live at a time of shifting power and influence in the world. Asia is on the rise, and Brazil too, probably. Australia will catch on to their coattails, and Europe may once more be able to position itself within these countries’ recoveries. The USA will remain the unquestioned military power and also an enormous repository of debt and other problems. Because they are painful, and there is always an inclination to shift the blame for them onto third parties, redimensioning processes always harbour the potential for aggression. Switzerland is currently experiencing just this. But it won’t end there. Potential aggression and economic progress are mutually exclusive. Which is why we are well advised to take a general farewell of America. This will be painful, for the USA was once the most vital market economy in the world. But for now, it’s time to say goodbye.

Wegelin & Co, Investment Commentary No. 265, August 24, 2009, Pages 7-8, http://www.wegelin.ch/download/medien/presse/kom_265en.pdf.

Warren E. Buffett is the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway. He is the World’s second richest man.

The United States economy is now out of the emergency room and appears to be on a slow path to recovery. But enormous dosages of monetary medicine continue to be administered and, before long, we will need to deal with their side effects. For now, most of those effects are invisible and could indeed remain latent for a long time. Still, their threat may be as ominous as that posed by the financial crisis itself.

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Washington’s printing presses will need to work overtime. Slowing them down will require extraordinary political will. With government expenditures now running 185 percent of receipts, truly major changes in both taxes and outlays will be required. A revived economy can’t come close to bridging that sort of gap.

Legislators will correctly perceive that either raising taxes or cutting expenditures will threaten their re-election. To avoid this fate, they can opt for high rates of inflation, which never require a recorded vote and cannot be attributed to a specific action that any elected official takes. In fact, John Maynard Keynes long ago laid out a road map for political survival amid an economic disaster of just this sort: “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens…. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

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Our immediate problem is to get our country back on its feet and flourishing — “whatever it takes” still makes sense. Once recovery is gained, however, Congress must end the rise in the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio and keep our growth in obligations in line with our growth in resources.

Unchecked carbon emissions will likely cause icebergs to melt. Unchecked greenback emissions will certainly cause the purchasing power of currency to melt. The dollar’s destiny lies with Congress.

The Greenback Effect, Warren E. Buffett, August 18, 2009 , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/opinion/19buffett.html.

William (Bill) Gross is co-founder of Pacific Investment Management (PIMCO) — the world’s largest bond fund.

Of one thing you can be sure however: over the next several decades, the ability to make a fortune by using other people’s money will be a lot harder. Deleveraging, reregulation, increased taxation, and compensation limits will allow only the most skillful – or the shadiest – into the Balzac or Forbes 400.

Readers who are interested in such things as the Forbes annual list of hoity-toities will have noticed that more and more of them are global, not U.S. citizens. The U.S., in other words, is not producing as much wealth in proportion to the rest of the world. Its fortune-producing capabilities seem to be declining, which might suggest that its relative standard of living is doing so as well. If so, the implications are serious, not just for Donald Trump but for wage earners and ordinary citizens, as reflected in their income levels and unemployment rates.

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On the night of May 20, Standard & Poor’s announced a downgrade watch for the United Kingdom and since the U.S. and U.K. are Siamese-connected, financially-levered twins, the implications were obvious: the U.S. might be next. In the space of 48 hours, the dollar declined 2%, and U.S. stocks and long-term bonds were down by similar amounts. Such a trifecta rarely occurs but in retrospect it all made sense: a downgrade would cast a negative light on the world’s reserve currency, and since stocks and bonds are only present values of a forward stream of dollar-denominated receipts, they went down as well.

The potential downgrade, while still far off in the future in PIMCO’s opinion, seemed dubious at first blush. While country ratings factor in numerous subjective qualifications such as contract rights, military might, and advanced secondary education, the primary focus has always been on the objective measurement of debt levels, in this case sovereign debt, as a percentage of GDP.

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While policymakers, including the President and Treasury Secretary Geithner, assure voters and financial markets alike that such a path is unsustainable and that a return to fiscal conservatism is just around the recovery’s corner, it is hard to comprehend exactly how that more balanced rabbit can be pulled out of Washington’s hat.

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Five more years of those 10% of GDP deficits will quickly raise America’s debt to GDP level to over 100%, a level that the rating services – and more importantly the markets – recognize as a point of no return. At 100% debt to GDP, the interest on the debt might amount to 5% or 6% of annual output alone, and it quickly compounds as the interest upon interest becomes as heavy as those “sixteen tons” in Tennessee Ernie Ford’s famous song of a West Virginia coal miner.

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The immediate question is who is going to buy all of this debt? Estimates suggest gross Treasury issuance of up to $3 trillion this calendar year and net offerings close to $2 trillion – almost four times last year’s supply.

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The concern is that this can be accomplished in only two ways – both of which have serious consequences for U.S. and global financial markets. The first and most recent development is the steepening of the U.S. Treasury yield curve and the rise of intermediate and long-term bond yields. While the Treasury can easily afford the higher interest expense in the short term, the pressure it puts on mortgage and corporate rates represents a serious threat to the fragile “greenshoots” recovery now underway. Secondly, the buyer of last resort in recent months has become the Federal Reserve, with its publically announced and near daily purchases of Treasuries and Agencies at a $400 billion annual rate. That in combination with a buy ticket for over $1 trillion of Agency mortgages has been the primary reason why capital markets – both corporate bonds and stocks – are behaving so well. But the Fed must tread carefully here. These purchases result in an expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet, which ultimately could have inflationary implications. In turn, nervous holders of dollar obligations are beginning to look for diversification in other currencies, selling Treasury bonds in the process.

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The obvious solution to both dollar weakness and higher yields is to move quickly towards a more balanced budget once a sustained recovery is assured, but don’t count on the former or the latter. It is probable that trillion-dollar deficits are here to stay because any recovery is likely to reflect “new normal” GDP growth rates of 1%-2% not 3%+ as we used to have.

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Holders of dollars should diversify their own baskets before central banks and sovereign wealth funds ultimately do the same.

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Staying rich in the “new normal” may not require investors to resemble Balzac as much as Will Rogers, who opined in the early 30s that he wasn’t as much concerned about the return on his money as the return of his money.

PIMCO Investment Outlook 2009: Staying Rich in the New Normal, Bill Gross, June 2009, http://www.pimco.com/LeftNav/Featured+Market+Commentary/IO/2009/IO+June+2009+Staying+Rich+in+the+New+Normal+Gross.htm.

“Gross’ fund has returned 12 percent in the past year, outperforming 96 percent of its peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg” (Bloomberg, August 19, 2009).

When the Constitution was written, the nation’s founders expected that there would be a 50% turnover in the House of Representatives every election cycle. That was the experience they witnessed in state legislatures at the time (and most of the state legislatures offered just one-year terms). For well over 100 years after the Constitution was adopted, the turnover averaged in the 50% range as expected.

In the 20th century, turnover began to decline. As power and prestige flowed to Washington during the New Deal era, fewer and fewer members of Congress wanted to leave. In 1968, congressional turnover fell to single digits for the first time ever, and it has remained very low ever since.

57% Would Like to Replace Entire Congress, Rasmussen Reports, August 30, 2009, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/august_2009/57_would_like_to_replace_entire_congress.

Sorry to the people I know in LA and SF that I couldn’t contact. I was only in both cities on the weekdays and was working crazy long hours to solve the customer problems. I had a little bit of time in the day or on the way to/fro the airport and thus the pix…

Rosemead, CA

(The Hollywood Sign)

San Francisco, CA

President Lyndon Baines Johnson talks to Senator Richard Russell, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in a secretly taped phone conversation (released by the LBJ Library), May 27, 1964, http://www.hpol.org/lbj/vietnam/russell/russell.ram (http://www.hpol.org/lbj/vietnam/).

Russell: Pretty good, how are you Mr. President?

Johnson: Oh, I’ve gots lots of trouble… what do you think about this Vietnam thing? I’d like to hear you talk a little bit.

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Russell: It’s the damn worst mess I ever saw. I don’t like to brag– I never have been right many times in my life, but I knew we was gonna get in this sort of mess when we went in there, and I don’t see how we’re ever gonna get out without fighting a major war with Chinese and all of them down there in those rice patties. I just don’t see it. I just don’t know what to do.

Johnson: That’s the way I’ve been feelin for 6 months.

Russell: Our position is deteriorating, and it looks like the more we try to do for them, the less they’re willing to do for themselves. It’s just a sad situation.

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It’s a hell of a situation. It’s a mess. And it’s gonna get worse and I don’t know what to do. I don’t think the American people really are quite ready to send our troops in there to do the fightin’. If it came down to an option of just sendin’ Americans in there to do the fightin’ which will of course eventuate into a ground war…If it got down to that I’d just pull them out. I’d get out. But then I don’t know.

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Johnson: How important to us is it?

Russell: It isn’t important to us a damn bit… from a psychological standpoint, but..

Johnson: I mean yes, and from the standpoint that we are party to a treaty and if we don’t pay to attention to this treaty well then why pay attention to any of ‘em.

Russell: Yeah, but we’re the only one paying any attention to it… I think there’s some 12 or 14 other countries as party to this treaty.

Johnson: Yeah, there are 14.

Russell: Other than the question of our worry and saving face.. that’s the reason I said I don’t think that anybody would expect us to stay in there.

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Johnson: I would say that it pretty well adds up to them [McNamara, etc.] now that we’ve got to show some power and some force… We haven’t got much choice. We are treaty bound and we’re there, and this will be a domino that will kick off a whole list of others, and we’ve just got to prepare for the worst…

I don’t think the American people are for it… I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of a lot less.

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Johnson: The Republicans are gonna make a political issue out of it.

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Russell: It’s a tragic situation. It’s just one of those places where you can’t win. Everything you do is wrong.

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It frightens me because it’s my country involved over there.

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The peculiar physical configuration of Korea made extensive guerrilla fighting impossible, but that’s not true over in Laos and Cambodia, and Vietnam.

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Johnson: Now, the whole question as I see it: is it more dangerous for us to let things go as they’re going now — deteriorating every day.. than it would be for us to move in.

Russell: We either got to move in or move out.

Johnson: That’s about what it is.

Russell: You can make a tremendous case for moving out… It would be more consistent with the attitude of the American people and their general reactions than to go in.

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Johnson: Nixon and Rockefeller and Goldwater all sayin’ let’s move and let’s go in in the North.

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Russell: We never could actually interdict all their lines of communication in Korea, although we had absolute control of the seas and the air. And we never did stop ‘em. And you ain’t gonna stop these people either.

Johnson: Well they’d impeach the president if he’d run out, wouldn’t they?

Russell: Well, I don’t think they would.

Johnson: Outside of Morris, everybody I talk to says you’ve got to go in… None of them disagreed with him yesterday when he made the statement that we had to stand.

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Russell: Of course you’d look pretty good I guess goin’ in there with all the troops and sendin’ them all in there but I tell you, it’ll be the most expensive venture this country ever went in to.

Johnson: I’ve got an old Seargant that works for me… and he’s got six children. And I just put him up as the United States Army and Airforce and Navy every time I think about makin’ this decision, and think about sending that father and his six kids. And what the hell are we gonna get out of his gunnin’, and it just makes the chills run up my back… and I haven’t got the nerve to do it and I don’t see any other way out of it.

Russell: It doesn’t make much sense to do it. It’s one of these things where heads I win, tails you lose… It’s a terrific quandry that we’re in over there. We’re just in the quicksands up to our neck.

Just 10 weeks after the above conversation, The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was signed on August 7, 1964:

The joint resolution “to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia” passed on August 7, with only two Senators (Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening) dissenting, and became the subject of great political controversy in the course of the undeclared war that followed.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution stated that “Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repeal any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression.” As a result, President Johnson, and later President Nixon, relied on the resolution as the legal basis for their military policies in Vietnam.

As public resistance to the war heightened, the resolution was repealed by Congress in January 1971.

JUST one crime is solved a year by every 1,000 CCTV cameras in the [London] Metropolitan Police area, it was claimed on Monday.

A senior Scotland Yard officer admitted just 1,000 crimes were solved in 2008 using CCTV images, as officers fail to make the most of potentially vital evidence.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said there are more than a million CCTV cameras in London and the Government has spent £500 million on the crime-fighting equipment.

CCTV cameras solve just one in 1,000 crimes, TheLondonPaper, Lara Deauville, August 24, 2009, http://www.thelondonpaper.com/thelondonpaper/news/london/cctv-cameras-solve-just-one-in-1000-crimes (also http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CCTV-cameras-to-solve-just-one-crime-Met-Police-admits.html).

Rick Blaine: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.

You’re winnings, sir.

Captain Renault: Oh, thank you very much.

Any man who reads the newspapers will encounter the phrase “even women and children” a couple times a month, usually about being killed. The literal meaning of this phrase is that men’s lives have less value than other people’s lives. The idea is usually “It’s bad if people are killed, but it’s especially bad if women and children are killed.” And I think most men know that in an emergency, if there are women and children present, he will be expected to lay down his life without argument or complaint so that the others can survive. On the Titanic, the richest men had a lower survival rate (34%) than the poorest women (46%) (though that’s not how it looked in the movie). That in itself is remarkable. The rich, powerful, and successful men, the movers and shakers, supposedly the ones that the culture is all set up to favor — in a pinch, their lives were valued less than those of women with hardly any money or power or status. The too-few seats in the lifeboats went to the women who weren’t even ladies, instead of to those patriarchs.

Most cultures have had the same attitude. Why? There are pragmatic reasons. When a cultural group competes against other groups, in general, the larger group tends to win out in the long run. Hence most cultures have promoted population growth. And that depends on women. To maximize reproduction, a culture needs all the wombs it can get, but a few penises can do the job. There is usually a penile surplus. If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed. Hence most cultures keep their women out of harm’s way while using men for risky jobs.

These risky jobs extend beyond the battlefield. Many lines of endeavor require some lives to be wasted. Exploration, for example: a culture may send out dozens of parties, and some will get lost or be killed, while others bring back riches and opportunities. Research is somewhat the same way: There may be a dozen possible theories about some problem, only one of which is correct, so the people testing the eleven wrong theories will end up wasting their time and ruining their careers, in contrast to the lucky one who gets the Nobel prize. And of course the dangerous jobs. When the scandals broke about the dangers of the mining industry in Britain, Parliament passed the mining laws that prohibited children under the age of 10 and women of all ages from being sent into the mines. Women and children were too precious to be exposed to death in the mines: so only men. As I said earlier, the gender gap in dangerous work persists today, with men accounting for the vast majority of deaths on the job.

Another basis of male expendability is built into the different ways of being social. Expendability comes with the large groups that male sociality creates. In an intimate, one-to-one relationship, neither person can really be replaced. You can remarry if your spouse dies, but it isn’t really the same marriage or relationship. And of course nobody can ever really replace a child’s mother or father.

In contrast, large groups can and do replace just about everybody. Take any large organization — the Ford Motor Company, the U.S. Army, the Green Bay Packers — and you’ll find that the organization goes on despite having replaced every single person in it. Moreover, every member off those groups knows he or she can be replaced and probably will be replaced some day.

Thus, men create the kind of social networks where individuals are replaceable and expendable. Women favor the kind of relationships in which each person is precious and cannot truly be replaced.

Is There Anything Good About Men?, Roy F. Baumeister, American Psychological Association, Invited Address, 2007, http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm.

When pressed on whether he viewed the invasion of Iraq as illegal, he said: “Yes, if you wish. I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal.”

The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Iraq war illegal, BBC News, September 16, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3661134.stm.

Two most senior law officials state that Britain’s decision to go to war in Iraq was illegal.

The war in Iraq had “no basis in international law”, a Dutch inquiry found today, in the first ever independent legal assessment of the decision to invade.

In a series of damning findings, a seven-member panel in the Netherlands concluded that the war, which was supported by the Dutch government following intelligence from Britain and the US, had not been justified in law.

“The Dutch government lent its political support to a war whose purpose was not consistent with Dutch government policy,” the inquiry in the Hague concluded. “The military action had no sound mandate in international law.”

Iraq war was illegal, Dutch panel rules, The Guardian, January 12, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/12/iraq-war-illegal-dutch-tribunal.

The Real News Network, The Downing Street memo Pt.1, http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4099

The charges in the Indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

The Judgment : The Nazi Regime in Germany, International Military Tribunal, Major War Criminals — USA, France, UK, and USSR v. Hermann Goering et al. 1945-46, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judnazi.asp (Indictment: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/count.asp)

The central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars.

Summation for the Prosecution by Justice Robert Jackson, Nuremburg Trials, July 26, 1946, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/Jacksonclose.htm.

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

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The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

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The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The secret Downing Street memo, Times Online, May 1, 2005, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article387374.ece.

As of January 16, 2010, a documented ~100,000 “violent civilian deaths have resulted from the 2003 military intervention in Iraq. [IBC's] public database includes deaths caused by US-led coalition forces and paramilitary or criminal attacks by others… IBC’s documentary evidence is drawn from crosschecked media reports of violent events leading to the death of civilians, or of bodies being found, and is supplemented by the careful review and integration of hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures.”

• http://www.iraqbodycount.org/about/
• http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/

Iraq government estimates 5 million children orphaned since the start of the war: http://www.alternet.org/world/70886/?page=entire.