Franklin Lamb always has informative reports from on the ground in the Middle East. His latest is about such topics as growing accommodations between groups at war with one another, electric power, and the opening of schools for Syrian children.

As I read this, I wonder whether any of these unexpected social relations amid warfare are appreciated by the higher-ups in the U.S. government. I think not. I always have an image of a U.S. bull in a china shop wherever the U.S. government goes in the world on any mission whatsoever, military or humanitarian, because every insider account of how American government personnel operate shows that these missions fail, lead to worse consequences and are usually accompanied by tremendous waste and graft. Read any account of American interventions in Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, for example. Libya, of course, is another example. This is one reason among many for strongly distrusting the U.S. government’s missions in Africa under AFRICOM. Of course, we need not go overseas to build such condemnation of U.S. missions. We need only examine the record of the U.S. government domestically.

I take it as fact that the U.S. government persists in policies that harm Americans and foreigners, no matter what party is in power. There is, for example, a continuous record of wars from Grenada onwards, and every one is a failure. This is matched by domestic failures everywhere one looks. It is as if the government is too stupid to learn or crazy, but the reality is, I believe, that there are sub-surface perverse incentives and forces at work and that the government itself is structured so that positive outcomes are continually thwarted. How else does one explain the persistence of negative outcomes that are so obvious? These outcomes are regularly noted in books, frequently by non-libertarians.

The Best of Michael S. Rozeff