It’s a rather weird feeling to write this in a Starbucks in Del Mar, California, after Baghdad. I very much want to go back. I hardly know Baghdad and my experience of Iraq was a bit like looking at an elephant from two feet away through the wrong end of a telescope, but I got a great feeling about the prospects for freedom there. The opportunities for advancing liberty in that country (and the region) are great and the feeling I got was as exhilarating as those I got back when I worked in the USSR and the communist states of central and eastern Europe. I hope that I can get a number of projects off the ground in the next few weeks. And I hope to be back soon. I have difficulty making up my mind between the motto ‘Where liberty is, there is my country’ and Thomas Paine’s response: ‘Where liberty is not, there is my country.’
Iraq is certainly a volatile place these days, but “volatile” means that “a good hard shove in the right direction” might actually do something — as opposed to the U.S., whose bureaucracy seems pretty well impervious to CATO & co.
On the other hand, making progress in Iraq means defeating Brenner & Co.’s attempt to use the world’s largest unaccountable bureaucracy to “fix” Iraq using Central Planning. It’s worked so well before!
Another good place to help out would be East Timor. The guys running the place now are well-meaning liberty-minded types, but they probably don’t know enough. They might install socialism by accident! It’s small enough that an org like CATO might be able to get someone to listen. It’s also poor and wretched enough that things can’t get much worse if things go bad. (The US sponsored the murder of 1/3 of the population already. How much worse can it get?)