by Patrick J. Buchanan – September 30, 2002

As Americans debate the wisdom – or folly – of war on Iraq, someone had best look in on the global economy. For it has taken on a sickly pallor. Five years after the IMF bailouts of the 1990s, some of the rescued regimes are swooning again. And America appears in no condition to conduct new global bailout operations.

When we rescued Mexico in 1995 and Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Russia, Brazil and Argentina in 1997-98, America was enjoying boom times. The government was about to project budget surpluses all the way out to the horizon.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – September 25, 2002

Inherent in the Natural Law right of self-defense is the right to strike first if one’s life is in peril. If a criminal demands your money at gunpoint, you have no moral obligation to inquire if he also intends to kill you before shooting him.

People have an innate sense of this right. Americans thus rallied to the side of Bernie Goetz, the “Subway Vigilante,” who, threatened by thugs with screwdrivers demanding five dollars, dropped all four in that subway car in the style of Wyatt Earp.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – September 23, 2002

With Russia, China, France and Saudi Arabia shifting to back a U.S. invasion, Saddam played his ace of trumps. U.N. inspectors, he told Kofi Annan, can come back in and inspect whatever they wish.

The White House was caught flat-footed. But the Russians seized on Saddam’s offer as ending the need for new U.N. resolutions. The Arab League, which had a hand in coaxing Saddam to cooperate, declared there was now no need for the U.N. to threaten war. Within hours, the momentum of the president’s U.N. address had dissipated and the coalition forming up behind a U.S. invasion had disassembled.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – September 18, 2002

Whatever one may think of the wisdom of invading Iraq and opening a third front in the war on terror, President Bush’s address to the United Nations was a tour de force.

The president gave it to the Tower of Babel with the bark on, as “Cactus Jack” Garner used to say. With Kofi Annan seated behind him, Bush bluntly told the U.N. what it already knew: A decade of its commands had been treated by Saddam Hussein with utter contempt. Either the U.N. acts now to enforce its resolutions, or the U.N. becomes as irrelevant as the League of Nations in the 1930s when it failed to sanction Mussolini for his invasion of Ethiopia.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – September 16, 2002

By most opinion surveys, the majority that supports the president’s resolve to invade Iraq has been shrinking. But were Saddam close to getting an atom bomb, four in five Americans would back a pre-emptive war.

Thus, the administration and the Brits last week have trumpeted a report by the International Institute of Strategic Studies on Iraq’s progress and got the headline they wanted in the London Evening Standard: “Saddam A-Bomb ‘Within Months’”

A look at that IISS report, however, suggests the Evening Standard is dishing up war propaganda as news. What does it say?

by Patrick J. Buchanan – September 11, 2002

The fires had not yet gone out at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a year ago, before the War Party had introduced its revised plans for American empire. What many saw as a horrific atrocity and tragedy, they saw instantly as an opportunity to achieve U.S. hegemony over an alienated Islamic world.

President Bush initially directed America’s righteous wrath and military power at al-Qaida. But in his “axis-of-evil” address, he signed on to the War Party’s agenda.

BY Patrick J. Buchanan – September 9, 2002

The World Trade Organization has just given Europe the right to hit the United States with $4 billion in tariff sanctions – to punish us for giving tax breaks to U.S. exporters like Boeing, Microsoft and GE.

Under WTO rules, we are not permitted to retaliate. We must stand and take the EU sucker punch, however hard it wants to hit.

Perhaps this “stick-it-to-the-Americans” ruling will at last awaken us to the folly of having created this monster. A showdown with the WTO over whether free trade trumps U.S. national interests was inevitable the day we joined this outfit. Let’s get it on, and let’s get it over with.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – September 4, 2002

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” So declaimed Churchill to Parliament as the Battle of Britain began.

Six weeks before, on May 10, 1940, the Battle of France had begun suddenly when Hitler’s Panzers, bypassing the Maginot Line, slashed through the Ardennes and cut to the Channel to isolate the British Expeditionary Force on the French-Belgian coast.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – September 2, 2002

Vice President Dick Cheney has just made the most powerful case yet for the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive War.

There is “no doubt,” said Cheney to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that Saddam “is amassing [weapons of mass destruction] to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.” And when Saddam gets a nuclear weapon, he “can be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East and subject the United States to nuclear blackmail.”