From the Easy Chair

Oct. 1990 Situation in Arabia

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: X-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BM119

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BM119, Oct. 1990 Situation in Arabia from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 227, October the first, 1990.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss the situation in Arabia, the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq and the presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia. It is possible that by the time you get this tape there will be a major conflict or there will be a back down on the part of Iraq or someone else, perhaps us. I have no way of knowing what the future holds in this respect. And our intent tonight is not to deal with the details of what may be forthcoming—although we may be touching on that—but mainly the right and wrong of this. Do we have any business there? Was this even in the best interests of the United States? Does it promote anything with regard to world order? Or is it all together a reckless adventure on the part of both Saddam Hussein and George Bush?

Thus, our perspective is going to be from a position of basic premises, a basic perspective of faith, of morals, of the welfare and interest of our country.

With that general introduction, Otto, would you like to comment generally and then we will get into the specifics of this situation?

[Scott] Yes. Thank you, Rush. This is an event, the business of sending so many troops over there so abruptly which is part of our time. In previous eras there was a longer buildup, an appeal to congress, an appeal to the people and in this instance action was taken by the executive branch very rapidly with barely any notice either to the American people or to Kuwait. And we are now in the midst of one of the most unstable and dangerous areas of the world.

The morality of the matter is not simply discussed. It is not a simple situation. Although, as usual, I think the media and impatient types try to make it very simple. I think it would be a very good thing to discuss the religious situation in the Middle East which nobody seems to be talking about.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They are all talking in terms of power politics. And I have been shocked by the blood thirstiness of some of the comments that I have heard from some of my very old associates.

[Rushdoony] Well, before we get into an analysis of the moral implications one minor aspect of the moral implications, which is still a very important one, is the matter of hostages. One of the things that we did was to rush into the situation with what was a kind of declaration of war against Iraq.

Now, normally, given the situation, Kuwait was already occupied. There was no haste that was necessary. What is normally done before a country declares war is to give its civilians who are in the enemy country or the occupied country an opportunity to leave. We did not issue a warning to the Americans in Iraq and Kuwait that they were to leave within 48 hours or 24 hours before we did anything. In other words, we handed Iraq a large number of American hostages, almost as if to say we want a provocative situation that will inflame the American people. I believe that was morally very wrong or, at the least you could say, it was a hasty, impetuous and unwise act.

[Scott] Well, certainly it was impetuous. And it is interesting to note that at about the same time we were sending naval vessels to Ethiopia to pick up a very much smaller number of American citizens because of the civil war underway there.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, now we can agree, I think, that the invasion of Kuwait was wrong. However, the situation in Kuwait was not of a country that had anything like democracy or a republican form of government any more than Saudi Arabia has or Iraq has or any of those countries. Moreover, if we are full of moral indignation, why did we do nothing about Lithuania and other areas within the Soviet Empire where there were people striving to be free and we did nothing?

Now at the same time all of this has been happening I, being on a number of mailing lists, received the August, 1990 Cashmere Report. And I will read just one item. Now none of this appears in our newspapers. The article is “Indians Adopt Rape as a Weapon to Suppress Movement. A 10 year old girl was gang raped by the Indian occupation forces on August 15 at {?} 10 miles west of {?}. There were several other incidents of gang rape where the father, brother and or the husband were forced to witness the orgy at gun point. The {?} girl jumped to her death on August 13 in an attempt to escape the Indian army rapists. The increased incidents of gang rapes indicates that the Indian colonial governor {?} has adopted it as a weapon of terror. Over 20,000 people staged a protest rally at {?} a {?} locality on August 18, again, such gang rapes.”

Well, another article in this same report, four pages, “Indians Burn Alive Cashmeres, Shoot to Kill Others. Youth gives eyewitness of Cashmere torture,” and so on and on.

Now here is a situation where a people have been oppressed for years and nothing is said in our press. This was happening at the same time as what happened in Kuwait. But did we hear anything about it? Not a word.

[Scott] Well, I think there is very slight attention being paid to the fact that India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers are on the verge of war as we speak tonight. But, of course, it is like the murder of a million Tibetans. It is a far away event which doesn’t impinge upon the American position in the direct sense. The Middle East is another story. The Middle East has got the oil.

Now apparently there has been some misinformation given by the American government both to the American people and to congress. Pardon me. Four days before Hussein invaded Kuwait he spoke to our American ambassador and, of course, our ... we sent a woman over there, which was a very smart thing to do in a country which does not believe in having women in public life or in political positions. We seem to go out of our way to do this sort of thing to other cultures, to insult them tacitly, so to speak by walking headlong with hobbled shoes over there to sensitivities. The ambassador to Kuwait, the American ambassador to Kuwait assured Saddam Hussein that the United States is not interested in boundary disputes between Arab nations. And at about the same time a representative from the state department, speaking to a committee of congressmen at a hearing of a subcommittee assured congress that we have no defense treaty with Kuwait and that, therefore, we are not obligated to come to the aid of Kuwait no matter what. And this was, of course, at a time when Saddam Hussein was already making threats about Kuwait. And when the Kuwaitis and the Iraqis were in conference, they were having a negotiation about this dispute. In the course of the negotiation the Kuwaitis representatives walked out of the room and ended the talks. And it was after that that Hussein attacked.

Now from the behavior, from the reaction of your executive branch it would seem that we had, in fact, if not on paper, a defense treaty with both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, because we immediately came to the defense of both countries without going through any other avenue of discussion, congress or anyone else. And I cannot recall even Woodrow Wilson didn’t move as precipitously as President Bush has moved.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I can’t... not even President Roosevelt. President Roosevelt did a great many things that cut corners, so to speak, but he was very careful in many political ways. Before he did anything he would call in the congressional leaders and have private talk with them. Always prepared to public and congress for what he was going to do. He had lots of allies.

In this instance everyone seems to be rushing to catch up with President Bush.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the interesting thing, too, is that Iraq had every reason to feel they had been betrayed because next to the Soviet Union, their greatest source of help has been the United States. We were helping them financially against Iran. We were arming them right along and we did not object to their use of poison gas. We soft pedaled that. As a result, Iraq had every reason to feel that we would be on their side.

[Scott] Well, we told them that we would not intervene.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] On the question of poison gas, the first person to use poison gas in the Middle East was Nasser of Egypt. The Egyptians used poison gas years ago against the rebellion in the Sudan. Poison gas was also supplied to the Cambodians by the Soviet Union and the Wall Street Journal ran a whole series of articles about it. Do you remember the yellow rain?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That was poison gas. And we were told, believe it or not, that it was not, that it was beef feces. Now you really have to have an imagination to come up with something like that. But there are photographs of the victims. There was all kinds of accumulated intelligence evidence. The Wall Street Journal struggled on and off for many months to arouse the attention of the world to that particular set of atrocities to no avail.

On... as for that matter, massacres had been an ongoing part of the Middle East ever since they succeeded in throwing off the Turkish rule and it is interesting to reflect that when Turkey ruled that whole area it ruled through the ruling families of all those countries with the exception of Saudi Arabia because the Saudi family took over Arabia after the Turks had departed in the inter regnum between World Wars I and II. But the Sabah family in Kuwait was a puppet ruler under the Turks and so, for that matter, was the King of.... King Hussein’s family. His father, his uncle, his grandfather and so forth ruled under the Turks. The people of the Middle East have been under these individuals or under these dynasties, I should call it, for many centuries. They are not popular.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Now Kuwait has a parliament which the emir shut down because it had begun to talk about reform and he immediately dispensed with it and said, “We don’t need any parliament at all.”

So we have there a rather curious thing. And I think we tend to use the word democracy too much, too loosely, too often.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is nothing sacred, by the way, about a democracy. A democracy, our founding fathers warned us...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...is the form of government most likely to lead to a dictatorship.

[Rushdoony] Well, in the fall 1990 newsletter Mission to the Persecuted by Christian Solidarity International, we are told of the persecution and torture in Egypt of Christians. Egypt is a country long occupied by Arabs. The real Egyptians or Copts are Christian and they are being brutally persecuted and tortured and even killed. But nothing is said about that at the UN or in congress. In fact, while all this is going on, and in spite of the pleas of Christians, we have made Egypt our number two source of aid and grants after Israel.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And Israel, of course, is in the West Bank and persecuting the Palestinians there. The same issue of Mission to the Persecuted has an article on brutal killings in Turkey which are aimed, as they point out in a deliberate attempt to purge Christianity.

At the same time the postal regulations for the United States issued with regard to our servicemen over there require that, well, let me read. E2. “Any matter containing religious materials contrary to Islamic faith or non authorized political materials are prohibited.” This means that a Bible cannot be sent to a serviceman. Chapel services, incidentally, is not permitted. A great deal more is banned. And yet we are supposedly defending freedom and it is in the name of freedom that we have gone there according to President Bush. But what we are actually doing is denying freedom to our own people.

[Scott] Well, the argument that the United States is not a Christian country is a technical argument based upon the fact that we didn’t make that particular statement in our constitution. I have written about that recently...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...and you will get it in a few days and I said in regard to that respect that although there... this is technically accurate, the fact is this country was not founded and put together, constructed, created and advanced by Mohmedans, or by Buddhists or by Confucianists or by the believers of any other faith except the Christian. And anyone who denies that is denying fact of history and anyone who implies that that isn’t true is denying... is lying in an oblique way.

But the government of the United States does not feel responsible to the Christian community of the country. It sees no reason at all why it should defend the rights of Christians, American Christians anywhere. It does not recognize religious rights as part of the political order. The political order is over religion.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, Joseph Storey, who was a Unitarian and one of the great justices of the US Supreme Court, probably the greatest, certainly the outstanding scholar, said that Christianity was the faith which undergirded the laws of the United States.

[Scott] Obviously true.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And attorney Shelby Sharpe has told me that we hear nothing about the trinity case in which the Supreme Court spelled out the fact in very specific language that this is a Christian nation.

[Scott] Well, that is true. The Supreme Court has made that statement. And every so often you see a reference to it. But today, of course, the reference only comes from Christian scholars.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... because the others have agreed to bury the matter under a whole weight of {?}. But going back to the ... the whole question here is that all the Mohammaden countries have very strict rules against Christians. Now there is a law passed by our congress several years back that forbids American companies to obey the Arab boycott against Israeli goods or investors or whatever. But there is no law by the American Congress to protect Christian interests in those countries.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...which is a remarkable distinction.

[Rushdoony] Well, how unpopular this war is, we are not being told. But the fact that the army admits that the AWOL reservists will be nine percent of the army reserves by the end of this year tells you something about the unpopularity of the whole war.

[Scott] Well, of course, it is not a war yet. It is a field exercise. It is a very large one. The ... it is an interesting one because it is the first time, I guess, in the history of the United States that we have had to ask other people to help pay for the expenses of the field exercise. It is also interesting because we have been in the forefront of an embargo against Iraq and yet we fought two wars, one in 1812 and one in 1917 against the idea that any belligerent could declare and maintain an embargo against a neutral ship carrying goods, food or anything else. Yet that was the argument that we went to war with Great Britain over.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it was also the argument for freedom of the seas that we went to war against Germany.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now suddenly that part of our history has been totally abandoned without a word. We have actually told other countries that they have no right to ship food into there or any other goods unless.... or else they will encounter our war vessels. We are doing what the English did to us and what the Germans did to us in which we protested against as an offense against humanity.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the most horrible steps taken in modern history was taken in World War II when Roosevelt and Churchill decided that the war had to be waged against the civilians. And so this was the main target of the bombings of Germany, to hurt the civilians.

[Scott] That was true and that was the advice of Dr. Lindeman to Churchill. Dr. Lindeman argued that if we bombed the civilian areas it would disrupt the German war machinery. It would destroy the infrastructure upon which the German military machine relied and, therefore, it would end the war.

In the event, it turned out that that was not true. German war industry, believe it or not, despite the bombing of Dresden and other areas... at the end of the war the German war industry was turning out more goods than it was when the war started.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] At no time during the course of the war did Germany even draft women into the work force. It was amazing. It was absolutely amazing.

Japan was still able to fight when we dropped the A bomb. We never had the terrible experience of going up against the full Japanese army and I am glad we didn’t, because, first of all, to go into the harbor of Yokahama was like entering the thin neck of a bottle. We would have spent a million lives. So in that event, dropping the bomb seemed worthwhile. To drop it a second time is something I question. I also question the fact that it was dropped not on a military installation, but on civilian targets again and that it was dropped on the two most Christian cities in Japan...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...which seems to me a very strange sort of decision made somewhere in Washington.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now the thing that surprised me, Rush, when I went east, recently, as you know, and talked to a lot of my old friends, was they are already talking about dropping nuclear bombs on to Iraq. And I said there is an awful lot of women and children there. And I have ... I have... the fellow said something about patriotism. I said, “Well, I have ... I have risked my life. I have been in a war. I have had a war. I am not too anxious to see a war. I don’t think anyone who has had any experience with war is ever anxious to see another. But I certainly wouldn’t go to such extremes in this instance. We are talking about a nation of 17 million people. We are a much larger power. We are much better armed and so forth. It doesn't seem to be necessary that we should engage in wholesale massacres.”

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, one of the results of centuries of effort beginning with the truce of God by the medieval church requiring that periodically they abstain from fighting, requiring that merchants, churchmen, women and children be given safe conduct through war efforts, or areas, we see the culmination of that in a poem that when you and I went to school was very popular. It was based on an incident which probably was not historical, the Barbara Fritchie poem. Do you remember that?

[Scott] Oh, yes, certainly. Of course.

[Rushdoony] We had to memorize that.

[Scott] {?} darn right.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Spare this... shoot not a hair... I forget.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] If I had time I could remember snatches of it.

[Rushdoony] Well, the whole episode had to do with ostensibly Stonewall Jackson’s cavalry going through this town and this one woman, Barbara Fritchie waving and flaunting the American flag from an upper window.

[Scott] Shoot not a hair of this gray head.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And ostensibly, according to the poem, which was written by a northerner, Stonewall Jackson did not permit any of his men to do anything and saluted the woman and rode on.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] Now that represented a standard that has since disappeared.

[Scott] Well, John Grigg writing in Encounter magazine several months ago drew that same comparison between World Wars I and World Wars II.

He said World War I has retroactively been described as an immoral war launched and carried on by imperial powers for territorial expansion and, therefore, an immoral war. And World War II has been described as a moral war because it was against a monstrous regime of Nazi Germany. But, he said, in World War I there was no bombing of civilians...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The men of World War I would have been horrified at the suggestion. And, he said, in World War II there were no bounds.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... to what was done. There were many atrocities, as you and I both know that have never been reported.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...by the Allies. Although there has been lots reported by the Germans and very little reported about the Russians.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, the point of ... that John Grigg made in Encounter is a very valid point. What horrifies me is that we are beginning where World War II left off.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I can’t imagine ... well, I can imagine, of course. I do think that one of the problems we have is because younger people than us have been totally calloused by the Sadism of the movies...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... and the television and the literature and the theater of the day.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it has hardened their heart and they now don’t think anything about the human element.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The casualness of killing in the streets of our big cities...

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ... is evidence of that. Human life means nothing.

[Scott] Less than ever.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Since the days of the pagans the western world has never been this way before.

[Rushdoony] No, no. Well, I was interested in the September 21 Browning Newsletter put out by Ivan ... Dr. Ivan Browning and his daughter Evelyn Browning Garris. And the first five pages deal with the violence around the world in the Americas, including the Caribbean, sub Saharan Africa.... Africa, Europe and the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceana and so on describing a wide spread of rioting, of violence, terrorism, the number of deaths taking place, none of which gets into our daily newspapers. It is so common place.

[Scott] Well, it isn’t that it is commonplace. It is that the editors really are only interested in the few spots in the world.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now it is interesting to note. This is October the first that we are talking, that suddenly Gorbachev is no longer on the front pages of even the first 10 pages. He is somewhere back in the pages. Today I read Wall Street Journal and way in the back of the paper there is an article about the fact that although Gorbachev has received extraordinary powers that the is issuing decrees that are no longer obeyed and that armed men are beginning to appear, paratroopers in Moscow and there are eminent rumors of a military coup.

Now just a few weeks back that would have been on the front page. Today it was on page 10 or 11. So suddenly it is as though we can only cover one story at a time.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Nothing now but the Middle East. But on the Middle East everything that is being said is being said over and over again.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] People keep saying they hope for a diplomatic solution when we have laid down an ultimatum that makes a diplomatic solution impossible.

[Rushdoony] Another aspect of this whole adventure that we don't hear about is this. In a modern age every military engagement has meant a decrease in freedom and an increase of the power of the central state. What was once called the happy republic came to an end with Lincoln and the Civil War.

[Scott] True.

[Rushdoony] Wilson with World War I vastly increased the powers of Washington which was once...

[Scott] A sleepy little town.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Where sheep grazed on the White House property and where the Tafts, not too long before Wilson, in fact, just before Wilson, had a family cow tethered out on the grounds on the lawns or what we now have as lawns. And World War II created the power center that Washington has since become. Korea increased it. And Vietnam vastly increased it.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] And now we are already seeing more powers concentrated in Washington.

[Scott] Well, we are fortunate in the fact that the president has not asked congress for a declaration of war. If he asks for a declaration of war and congress passed it, which is, of course, the law, immediately a whole series of controls would swing automatically into effect, censorship, stamps, shortage... rations, you name it. And, of course, the draft.

Now if we do get into a shooting war here, an undeclared shooting war under the aegis of the UN, Mr. Bush now has to hope that the UN will allow a shooting war to take place. If the UN doesn’t vote of a shooting war, he doesn’t have a rationale to go in.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... because he is now claiming that he is doing this on behalf of the UN and the UN’s six resolutions. But if we do go into a shooting war, the next thing we could anticipate would be a draft. Now I wouldn’t like to see a return to Lyndon Johnson’s idea of a draft which exempts everybody that had enough money to go to college. I thought that was one of the most unjust things that ever happened and people like Gary Hart and others afraid to come out of college while the war was still on went on to divinity school and to graduate school and to I don’t know what all in order to keep from being drafted.

They called men who were drafted grunts. It was a wonderful period.

[Rushdoony] Well, one newspaper story recently stated that the Democrats are watching the public reaction and when they see the war is sufficiently unpopular, if it becomes a war, they will demand a declaration of war which would immediately make the administration unpopular with everybody.

[Scott] Well, they will do what they did in Vietnam. First the Democrats put us in there.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Mr. Johnson, President Johnson was the one that put 450,000 troops in Vietnam. And when he ... when his successor was defeated at the polls the Democratic party had the nerve to turn itself into a peace party.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the press let it get away with it. There are men still there in congress who defeated, who under... under... just subverted the results of the Vietnam effort by refusing to allow any further assistance to be sent to South Vietnam when it was actually invaded. Those congressmen who rally in a better society should have been put up for treason are some of them still there.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In the 98 percent incumbency congress that we have. Do you Realize that Senator Nunn and a bunch of others are going to run unopposed this year?

[Rushdoony] It takes too much money to fight them and the incumbent has everything in his favor.

Well, meanwhile we are seeing increasingly a news blackout. John Mark {?} has said the purpose of the press the world over has become not to inform but to form the public.

[Scott] Very true. Very well put. Very well true. It is... it is almost as though the media considers itself an educational vehicle. There is an alliance between the media and big government.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And whatever the government wants, the media is in favor of. The media is in favor of the government regulating everything except the media.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They don’t think the First Amendment has anything to do with the rest of us. it certainly has nothing to do with religion.

[Rushdoony] Well, meanwhile we are seeing a progressive move against the freedom of the Church and the freedom of the Christian school and especially the freedom of the home school And I think under the disguise of military necessities it will make it easier for them to push such things into law.

[Scott] Well, of course , the voucher plan is a very sinister one.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because it means that all the private schools will be immediately flooded and then the government will follow the children with its curriculum. So, in effect, it will wipe out private schools.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That was how the Fabian Socialist society destroyed the Christian schools of Britain at the beginning of this century.

[Scott] With vouchers?

[Rushdoony] With state aid.

[Scott] State aid.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Whatever form it makes no difference.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And one of the governing counsel of the Fabian society resigned in protest at the fact that the Fabians had come out in favor of state aid to Christian schools, it was George Bernard Shaw himself who wrote to the man and told him he was a fool, that the simplest way of destroying the Christians and their schools was not to fight them, but to buy them.

[Scott] He was a very mischievous man.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, let’s go back to the Middle East. Let’s assume that the army ... our forces get large enough and other countries come along and a shooting war starts. It will probably start with artillery from the air and from the sea.

Now I was at the invasion of Saipan and I recall that island was bombed and strafed every day for 40 days by our air force and shelled every night by the battle wagons for 40 days and 40 nights. We had total air and sea control. There was no way that the Japanese could get any reinforcements. They were limited to what they had and so forth. We left with 700 wounded and ambulatory insane. When we got to San Francisco weeks later the fight was still going on. It went on for quite a while to dig out 40,000 Japanese troops. That is what artillery means. It really doesn’t mean that much.

I the Battle of the Somme in World War I, I read where the artillery was so heavy that they thought the Germans would be totally wiped out and yet the first day they sent the men over the trenches out they lost 39,000 people. So we are not going to have a push button war if it is a war.

Now I would assume that Saddam Hussein will not attack. He will try not to create an incident. He will insist that if anybody fights that the fight is brought to him. The this about... what is what Nasser did.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And if you remember, we told Britain, France and Israel to get out when they did it. Remember the indignation?

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Scott] The indignation over the Suez incident, the moral indignation of the United States.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The praise of President Eisenhower...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...for forcing our war time allies out of the Middle East?

[Rushdoony] You mentioned that the various rulers of the Middle East are, in the main, are the ruling families of the Turkish era. I think it is important to note that not only are they holdovers, but even more the law of all those countries, including Israel is Turkish law.

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] And there is not much you can say in favor of Turkish law.

[Scott] Turkish law... Israel has never yet produced a constitution.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] It is operating under an amalgam of Turkish law and English war time emergencies. And, of course, as you know, Christian marriages and deaths and births are illegal in Israel.

[Rushdoony] So we have, in effect, the continuation of tyranny under ostensible independence and the people have no more freedom now than they did under the Turks.

[Scott] None whatever. The whole .... they were cheated out of the whole.... all the wartime efforts.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] .... of World War I. And World War II they retreated as though they didn’t exist.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean the... the Allies and the Germans fought across territories as though there was no inhabitants there at all.

[Rushdoony] In Saudi Arabia the officials of the Saudi government feel they can walk into our embassy and take what they please. They have defrauded any number of businessmen who went over there believing that a contract with a Saudi Arabian government was a valid one. We have been the greatest beneficiaries and I think it is worthy of note that while everybody is damning, at this present point, the oil companies, the oil companies in Arabia changed that whole area, because not only did they pay money that they never would have had otherwise and good wages, they created hospitals, not only for their health, but for all the peoples of the countries. The result has been a revolution in the life of that area. All the advances that have been made in those countries have not been due to the regimes as much as to the oil companies which have eliminated a great many diseases that plague every Arab.

[Scott] It is interesting that the oil companies are always selected for abuse when there is a crisis. The government of the United States at one time... at one time favored the major oil companies and did its best to advance their fortunes in various parts of the world on the theory that what promotes American business promotes America. That pretty much ended by the 60s. And today the oil companies have the pleasure of paying the lobbies a lot of money and giving politicians a lot of money and getting the back of the hand. Now we see some very strange things. I don’t know what they teach in schools now. There was an oil crisis and the price of gasoline went up. And immediately the man in the street was encouraged to say, “Why should the price go up? After all, they are selling us gasoline that they manufactured some time ago. It hasn’t had time to hit their refineries yet.”

But the fact is that if you sell something at five dollars and it is going to cost you 10 dollars to replace it, you can’t afford to sell it for the old price of five dollars.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You have to sell it for the 10 dollars that you need to replace it with. So when the price goes up in the marketplace it has to go up in the product. Otherwise you won’t be able to replace the product.

Now I knew that much when I was a kid scrambling selling newspapers. What is going on in this country? This is supposed to be a commercial country and tell me that poor John Brown who is down there filling your tank at the filling station is a war profiteer?

[Rushdoony] Well, when we went to school we were taught geography which has disappeared in virtually every country of the world. The only two were... and my brother is a professor of geography... the only two where there is any reasonable teaching of geography are Canada and the Soviet Union. Everywhere else there is a total ignorance of the subject on the part of most youth. And one aspect of our geography was to learn what the products of each country were, how they were shipped abroad. We learned a great deal of what we now call economics in our geography courses. And we had—at least I did—all kinds of tests on the main produce and mineral resources and what not of the various countries and where they went and so on.

[Scott] Don’t you remember that we were taught on apples and oranges and eggs and railroad schedules?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Our arithmetic was all that way.

[Scott] It was all that... all the arithmetic was tied into the market place.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes, I am glad you brought that point up, because arithmetic books now are totally out of stripe.

[Scott] Just the numbers.

[Rushdoony] Just the numbers.

[Scott] Not the product.

[Rushdoony] Those that I have seen and I perhaps have not seen all...

[Scott] It is interesting, because some of these kooky ideas come from university level people.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They can’t understand the mechanics of the market.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] They can’t understand why gasoline should go up when the price of oil goes up. Well, if you don’t know that, what do you know?

[Rushdoony] Yes. I think I told you the incident of the man who when we entered into this Kuwait adventure was at a gas station, self serve, and the man ahead of him he knew and the man was grumbling to him about these profiteering oil companies raising the price of oil immediately. Annoying the man he said, “Hurry up and fill your tank. I want to rush to get to your coin shop to buy coins before the price goes up.”

And the man shut up immediately and muttered something about people not understanding economics.

[Scott] Yes, yes. Yes. The other guy always makes too much money.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, let’s assume that the shooting war begins in, say, another three weeks, or a month and people are ..... they ... a lot of damage will be done, but he Iraqis will be eventually overcome. Baghdad, 3000 year old city will be bombed and strafed and shelled and so forth. Tens of thousands will die. We remember the bombing of Beirut.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We have never found out how many thousands died.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And we don’t know what good that was... with what good that accomplished, but that is something we are no longer concerned with that. That is part of the past.

Let’s assume that Saddam Hussein is driven out of Kuwait and out of office and killed or they are talking about putting him on trial as a war criminal, you know? That is apparently going to be part of the new world order.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That anyone who loses a war will go on trial as a war criminal, provided he is not Russian. In any event, what then? I understand that from reading the press, of course, that the next step will be to strip Iraq of all its military potential. That will leave only Syria and Israel as having any military potential, so we could assume that Syria would be next in line to be reduced in order that the Middle East could be stabilized, in quote.

Now President Bush said today in his address to the UN that the United States would not maintain a permanent presence in the Middle East, that they would pull out... we would pull out as soon as Saudi Arabia wants us to. Well, what will we leave behind us? I think a pyrrhic victory.

[Rushdoony] Yes and consider this. If we eliminate Saddam Hussein, what reason have we to believe that any successor will be any different?

[Scott] Who would we put in?

[Rushdoony] Yes. When Idi Amin in Africa became so unpopular with the media because he was so flagrant in his acts...

[Scott] Mainly in his rhetoric.

[Rushdoony] Yes. He was replaced, but Christians there say the present regime makes Idi Amin look good by comparison, but we hear nothing of that.

[Scott] Well, as you mentioned earlier, there are festering areas of inhumanity all around the world. We... we cannot ally ourselves with Syria, for instance, and claim to be in a moral position any more... we abandoned moral position in World War II when we made the Soviet Union an ally.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We could have let the Soviet Union fight German on its own and we could have fought it on its own, but we wanted to do it in the cheap, so to speak.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There are lots of people in the United States that want to fight a war on the cheap. They want to fight a push button war. They want to fight a war from the air. They want to fight it from the sea where we have all the advantage. They don’t want to think about actual putting men in there in a dirty, bloody struggle. But that war is much easier to start than to finish and before the war is finished, if Americans are fighting Arabs, we are not going to ever have an Arabian friend again in the Middle East in our time.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I will be surprised if it results in military action if it is a short war.

[Scott] I wouldn’t expect it to be short. We haven’t seen a short war in 70 years.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean, we have seen small wars that go on for years.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Like Angola. Like the Philippines. Like Central America. There doesn’t seem to be any short wars anymore. And in just a few years from now every country with any claim to being a nation or a power of any sort, excepting, of course, in darkest Africa, they will all have the A bomb. They will all have biological weapons. And what sort of a new world order are we setting up to handle that kind of world?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, it is an ugly situation and if Christians line up on any side they are wrong. What they have to say is, “A plague on both your houses.” We have nothing in this. We have to stand apart from it and work for the restoration of Christian freedom and we have to recognize that Bush is as wrong as Saddam Hussein. Now I would prefer to live next to Bush than to Saddam Hussein, by far. But that doesn't mean in this situation that Bush is any more in the right than Saddam Hussein is.

[Scott] This is a power play.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And power plays are not moral.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] To try to put a moral enamel on to a power play is really demeaning our intelligence.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And Bush having treated the President of Lithuania with such disrespect cannot claim a moral stance here.

[Scott] Well, what about china?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Incidentally, China has a big unknown card in this event. China and Iran have become very close.

[Rushdoony] Iraq you mean.

[Scott] No, Iran.

[Rushdoony] Iran, oh.

[Scott] China and Iran are very close. And Iran is delighted at the idea of the Iraqis fighting the Americans. They are going to do everything they can to keep that going as long as possible and China may veto a UN force against Iraq.

[Rushdoony] Which would leave us high and dry.

[Scott] Which would leave us without our great rationale...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... which is the UN.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is over. Thank you all for listening. This is a matter that should be of great concern to you. The future does not look grim ... does not look anything but grim on the short term, but God is still on the throne and we have to work for his order.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.