# The Libertarian Editorials (Jan. 1980) **URL:** **Published:** January 1, 1980 --- “It is too early to say how the crisis in Iran will end.” ## The crisis in Iran It is too early to tell whether we are indeed on the road to war in the Middle East. Even if we are not, we must surely be regarded as taking another step along the road which will sooner or later take us to war. The tensions and instabilities are increasing in country after country. Militant Islam has awakened, and its confrontation with the consequences of decades of Western intervention in the Middle East will have results no one can foretell. As we go to press, the situation is darkening, words on both sides more brooding and harsh, threats escalating, and there are echoes in the air of the earlier crises which catapulted the world into war twice before in this century. “May use force, U.S. warns,” read the banner headline in the _Los Angeles Times_ of Wednesday, November 21. The _New York Times_ headlined: “U.S. WARNS IT HAS ‘OTHER REMEDIES’ IF DIPLOMACY FAILS ON HOSTAGES; CARRIER FORCE HEADS TOWARD IRAN.” Demonstrations erupted both in America and the Middle East; angry Americans carried signs urging “Nuke Iran”; Iranian flags were burned, and Iranian students beaten and threatened with deportation. Demonstrations larger than any since the fall of the Shah rocked Iran; mobs sacked the U.S. embassy in Pakistan, and the Ayatollah Khomeini called it “a great joy.” “The White House, reacting to the likelihood that American hostages still in Iran will be tried as spies, warned for the first time Tuesday \[November 20\] that the United States may resort to military force if all else fails,” reported the _L.A. Times_. “Reinforcing the warning, the Pentagon ordered the 81,000-ton carrier Kitty Hawk, which carries 85 jet fighters and attack aircraft, along with a substantial naval escort, to sail to the Indian Ocean from its base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. The Kitty Hawk will join a U.S. task force headed by the 64,000-ton carrier Midway, which is already in the Arabian Sea, about 600 miles from Iran’s southern coast.” (11/21/79) But Khomeini did not budge. “This is not a struggle between the United States and Iran,” he thundered. “It is a struggle between Islam and blasphemy. Now that we claim our rights, they threaten us with their warships and planes. Why should we be afraid? We consider martyrdom a great honor.” Claiming that the remaining Americans being held in the U.S. embassy in Teheran (occupied since November 4) would be tried as spies if the Shah were not shipped back to Iran to answer for his crimes, Khomeini mocked the President, and while Iranian mobs shouted “Death to Carter!” the Moslem leader claimed that the beleaguered President “lacked the guts to engage in a military operation.” Provocations escalated on both sides. While a trickle of hostages was slowly released—blacks and women—the Moslem students who seized the American embassy showed no signs of giving in to the threats, threats which were backed up with action: the storming into the area of American warships, the cutoff of all imports of Iranian oil ordered by Carter, the suspended sale of military spare parts to Iran, the jailing and initiated deportation proceedings against Iranians with illegal papers, and, most chilling of all, if only because it has only happened in the past as a prelude to war, the freezing of Iran’s assets in this country and, in strict violation of international law, in American banks abroad as well. It was a freeze on Japanese assets in the United States which finally provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, the final step in Roosevelt’s “back door to war” in 1941. The assault on the U.S. Embassy in Teheran did not come about unprovoked. The November 4 seizure of the Embassy and of more than sixty hostages was a direct response to Carter’s decision to admit the deposed Shah of Iran to the United States in late October. On November 1, the Ayatollah Khomeini went on Iranian radio to remind students that November 4 was the first anniversary of a violent street demonstration of the year before, urging the students to “expand with all their might their attacks on the United States and Israel, so they may force the United States to return the deposed and cruel Shah.” When they grabbed the Embassy, he was at first taken aback, but then supported their action. The background of the Iranian crisis is so complicated, so steeped in the history of U.S.–Iranian relations for the past quarter century and of the whole growing Middle East conflict, that it would take more than an editorial to disentangle the events and policies which have now nearly exploded into open warfare—and we will devote an article to the subject in our next issue. In the meantime, let us remember a few crucially important facts, and assess what the American response to the holding of the hostages in Iran should be. And above all, let us not fuel the fires of war by indulging in blind, jingoistic and uninformed response. That the events which have so shaken the world did _not_ come as a surprise to the Carter administration is perhaps the best starting point. The Carter administration had been debating whether or not to give the Shah asylum in the U.S. for at least nine months, facing a good deal of pressure from such key figures as our Secretary of State-in-exile, Henry Kissinger, and David Rockefeller, longtime friend of the Shah and Chairman of the Chase Manhattan bank. At least as early as July, as documents released by the Iranian students in the U.S. embassy show, the Carter administration began to consider the consequences for that embassy and its personnel when—when, not if—the Shah was admitted to the U.S. The documents show a concern that the embassy could not be protected from a likely assault, and that the personnel were indeed vulnerable. The decision to admit the Shah was made despite the fact, as the _New York Times_ has shown, that “Mr. Carter and his senior policy advisers had known for months that to admit the Shah might endanger Americans at the Embassy in Teheran. An aide reported that at one staff meeting, Mr. Carter had asked, ‘When the Iranians take our people in Teheran hostage, what will you advise me then?’ ” The important word here is “when”—there was no question in Carter’s mind as to what would be the Iranian response. Carter chose to risk the lives of Americans anyway, buckling under pressure from Kissinger, Rockefeller, and a host of others who have played a key role in shaping American foreign policy toward Iran over the last few decades. Admitting the Shah was a red flag waved before the Iranians; whether the provocation was deliberately intended to produce the response we saw is a question to which we will return next month. But no one can question the fact that the consequences of admitting the Shah were known well in advance. Needless to add, this does not justify the seizure of the American embassy and the taking of hostages; there are good reasons to have diplomatic immunity and to violate it is an offensive, immoral action which not only contravened international law and violated the precepts of the prophet Mohammed, but was technically an act of war. Let us also remember the cause of the Iranian anger toward the American government: in 1953, it was the U.S. government, through the CIA, which installed the Shah in power, and which continued to back him for more than twenty-five years. That government, and its bankrupt foreign policy, should be held partially responsible for the Shah’s crimes against his own people. The fact is that the Shah is a disgusting monster, a man given to torture, murder, and theft. He killed an estimated 60,000 Iranians during his reign (in addition to thousands of Kurds, in which respect Khomeini has bloodily followed in his footsteps), and when he left the country last January, he and his corrupt family took billions of dollars—perhaps as much as $20-billion—with them. The Shah is indeed, as the Iranian students have been shouting, a murderer and a thief, and they are justified in wanting him back. We should no more offer him asylum than we should Pol Pot or Idi Amin. There is nothing “humanitarian” in giving such a man asylum, and the additional political point being currently pushed by figures like Rockefeller and Kissinger—that if we cannot provide a safe haven for the Shah, other dictators might have second thoughts about our support—is no excuse, either. That ought to cause us to stop supporting dictators everywhere, not to give deposed tyrants a “safe haven,” so that they will feel more secure in exercising their tyranny. Moreover, Zalmay Khalizad, writing in the _Wall Street Journal_, has told us that “Khomeini has been obsessed with fear of an American sponsored military coup, as the conditions deteriorate in the country.” (11/14/79) We should realize that in light of our record, that is no idle fear on Khomeini’s part. Khomeini is convinced that the U.S. admission to the Shah on medical grounds is a pretext and a sham, and that in fact what is going on is a plot to return him or someone else to power in Iran. In view of the prominence of Kissinger and David Rockefeller in bringing the Shah into the U.S., that is no idle fear, either. Nevertheless, we must not give in to blackmail. What we should do instead is to tell Khomeini just that, tell the Shah to leave, and understand that the crisis in which we currently find ourselves is the inevitable result of an interventionist foreign policy carried out in an increasingly unstable world. We should therefore couple the exit of the Shah with an assurance to Khomeini that we do not intend to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. As the crisis eases, as we hope it will, and the hostages are released, we should take the additional steps of closing the American embassy in Teheran, removing our diplomatic mission—assurances from the Iranian government now mean absolutely nothing—and warn other Americans in Iran that they remain there at their own risk. Beyond that, we ought to systematically examine the events which led up to the Iranian crisis, understand that continuation of an interventionist foreign policy will lead to greater crises in the future, culminating in war—if, indeed, we manage to avoid it this time—and agitate for a peaceful, noninterventionist foreign policy. The examination of the crisis’ roots, we shall take up next month; the agitation for nonintervention and peace should begin today. —RAC ## Chad Green, R.I.P. The long saga of Chad Green has ended. The three-year-old has died in Tijuana, Mexico, where his parents had fled with him rather than acquiesce to the will of Massachusetts authorities. The boy’s parents, Diana and Gerald Green, favored the use of Laetrile as a weapon against cancer, opposed the use of chemotherapy and other now-standard drugs, and determined that they would sooner take their chances, and Chad’s, elsewhere, in exile. This, even though the accepted wisdom instructs us that three out of four children suffering from acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) are cured nowadays by state-of-the-art therapy. Evidently the child had been taken off Laetrile too, some two months ago, as well as off the “standard” drugs. Chad’s grandfather, Hollis Green, said that Chad “closed his eyes, just like going to sleep, and he was gone . . . no pain . . . no screaming . . . no crying.” Chad is dead but his parents’ battle with Authority continues. As of this writing, the officialdom of Massachusetts has yet to decide whether to continue its efforts to prosecute them. On the surface the case would appear to be one pitting an untried, quite possibly quixotic approach to the treatment of cancer against the best opinions of medical science. Most of the media coverage of the Green case over the many months prior to the boy’s death focused on that aspect, with both supporters of Laetrile and opponents of the peach-and apricot-pit derivative reiterating their beliefs endlessly. But the real issue is something else entirely: it is nothing less than the locus of authority in the lives of minors, and, by extension, the locus of authority in the lives of everyone in this country. We no longer believe in the divine right of kings, and few Americans believe, these days, in the divine right (or even the unquestionable wisdom) of clergymen. But we _do_ tend very strongly to believe in the unsurpassed wisdom of the medical establishment, from the high priests (the psychiatrists) down to the altar boys (those practicing the more mundane specialties). If the great men say chemotherapy, and only the presumed crack-pots say Laetrile, then obviously it is the duty of all right-minded people to come down hard on the likes Diana and Gerald Green and just as energetically support the proclamations of the great men. Not so? Not necessarily. Dr. Thomas Szasz, who still toils with few allies in the vineyards of rational antipathy to the Religion of Medicine, made a significant point to me way last winter, in an earlier stage of the Chad Green story. Dr. Szasz observed that the State had not withdrawn Chad from his parents’ control, had not taken him out of their home, had not branded them “unfit,” or “abusing,” or in any other way questioned their devotion to their son and their general fitness as parents. The State had said, however, that in one particular, the matter of the treatment to be given Chad, the parents must succumb to the will of others. In short, Massachusetts declared that Diana and Gerald Green were remiss only in the medical opinions they held, and by extension, in the consequences of those opinions: the treatment they had to be forced to permit the doctors to give Chad. Now, said Szasz, if the state had a case against the Greens, that they were unfit parents, the State, by its own logic, would have taken the child from his parents and undertaken the obligation to raise the child. Not just for a few minutes each week, when he was, by legal order, forced to submit to standard treatment, but continuously. And since the State never presented such a case against the Greens, it created, in effect, a special category for his situation: suitably placed throughout the vast bulk of the week, but improperly placed in his parents’ home during those hours when, left to their own devices, they would have treated him to a different medical procedure. When the last tears have been shed for Chad, perhaps the people who care to go beyond emotionality will sit down and ponder the implications of this sort of authority. The problem does not die with Chad Green; it only becomes general. —DB ## Guest Editorial ## A Monetary Three Mile Island? In our issue of last March, we featured an article about how exactly the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, expands the money supply, and causes inflation. The prime reason, we pointed out, that it does inflate is to adhere to the weary, decades-old Keynesian concept of “fine-tuning.” Under this illusion the economy—which is really the sum total of the billions of choices, both deliberate and inadvertent, of 200-million Americans—is viewed like a living engine which is supposed to run in a predictable way and when it doesn’t, can be stimulated or depressed until it is once again running smoothly. The “medicine” used by the State economic physicians is the manipulation of the money supply: creating more paper money to stimulate the economy or withdrawing it to slow down the boom caused by previous money creation. For decades the government has deluded itself that it actually can control and and direct the diverse actions and choices of millions of people engaging in billions of transactions. But 40 years of inflation has begun to catch up with these “doctors,” their Keynesian medical bags have proved useless in keeping the economy running smoothly. In everyone’s eyes, the incompetence of the government money managers is becoming clearer by the day. In that _LR_ article we spoke of the ineptitude of the Fed in directing monetary growth: “In one case Fed experts tell of a computer error at a single bank that changed the money supply statistics for that week by $500-million.” Barely nine months later, an example of Fed incompetence many times greater than that jumped into the general news, focusing public attention as never before on Fed foolishness. What happened, briefly, was that the Fed announced in mid-October that M1 (the narrowly defined money supply comprising currency in circulation and saving accounts) had risen by several billion dollars during the first week after the Fed’s new restrictive monetary policy was enacted. The financial community took this to mean that the new policy of sharply higher interest rates had not led to a diminution of the inflation rate, that in fact inflation was soaring as measured by the explosive growth in the monetary supply, and that hence even tighter monetary policies were in the works, policies that would make borrowed money more expensive and depress the stock and bond markets. Not surprisingly, the stock market plummeted. Imagine everyone’s surprise, then, when two weeks later on October 25, the Fed shamefacedly announced that it had erred, overstating M1 by $3.7-billion for the week ending October 10. Then, the very next week, the Fed reported that M1 for the week ending October 17 was again in error, this time by $800-million, for a total miscalculation of $4.5-billion in an M1 which rarely rises or falls that much in many months. Millions of investors lost billions of dollars as a result. This gigantic central bank foul-up reveals two interesting things. First, people are paying much more attention to the money supply than was the case even a few years ago. The overwhelming majority of financial observers now realize that money supply expansion _is_ the cause of inflation. Compare this situation to that existing a decade ago, when the money supply was ignored and one only heard the term in monetarist or Austrian academic circles. The other lesson in this is that we’ve been offered further proof of the bankruptcy of fine-tuning. How can the mandarins who seek to regulate economic activity by means of controlling the supply of money hope to become anything more than laughingstocks if they can’t even keep count—within a few billions a week—of the amount of money with which they attempt to control the American economy? In the wake of what he called the Fed’s “monumental goof,” the powerful chairman of the House Banking Committee, Representative Henry Reuss (D.-Wis.) advised the Federal Reserve to set up “a fail-safe system so as to avoid future monetary Three Mile Islands.” It was Frank Chodorov who, in the height of the McCarthy era, exclaimed that “the only way to get rid of communists in government jobs is to eliminate the jobs.” Similarly, the only way to eradicate “future monetary Three Mile Islands” is to eliminate the monetary “power plant” that immorally—and incompetently—spews out unbacked paper money. —Christopher Weber