Tangible investments … that lick your hand

This past week my husband and I had a wild hot date. It consisted of driving three hours north to a remote farm and buying a 5-month-old Jersey heifer, then driving three hours home again. Oooh yeah.

A Jersey is a cattle breed that gives rich, creamy milk. A heifer is a young unbred cow. A date is something my husband and I rarely experience.

The reason we bought this little girl is because our older Jersey is down to two out of four working quarters on her udder, and we're not getting nearly as much milk as we'd like. We thought buying a young, healthy animal was a worthwhile investment.

Investment, you ask? Why would we "invest" in a heifer rather than stocks or treasuries?

It's because we feel stocks and treasuries are worthless, and money isn't far behind. But a heifer grows. Bred to our bull, she will give us calves we can breed, sell, or eat. She will produce abundant milk from which I can make butter and cheese and yogurt. She will have a productive life of about 15 years.

Not a bad investment after all.

And this is the tactic my husband and I have decided to take from now on. During the rare times we have surplus money, we are not putting it in the bank. We are buying tangibles such as heifers or building materials or fencing or canning jars or storable food or fruit trees.

Pat Boone offers foreword to vital book on the economy: "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse"

We've decided on this radical tactic because money is losing its value at a startling rate. In the last eight months it has lost 14 percent of its value. This "dollar's road to hell," in the words of Gonzalo Lira, mean useful things like heifers and canning jars and storable food will only cost more and more as time goes by. So why not purchase them now while we can still afford them?

At this juncture I'll point out that I'm not a financial adviser. I don't even play one on TV. I'm a housewife on a limited budget. But my husband and I can't afford to have that limited budget evaporate in value because we naïvely swallowed Ben Bernanke's lies that our economy is just fine, thank you, and recovery is right around the corner.

We believe foolish people trustingly keep their money in the bank and don't notice when its purchasing power dwindles (or when their solid dependable bank just … goes away). We believe foolish people think the stock market can never fall to catastrophic lows (again). We believe foolish people think our economy is fundamentally sound despite all evidence to the contrary.

We believe smart people pay off debt and get rid of unneeded luxuries and put their money into things that will provide a useful function in the future. We believe smart people invest their retirement money in physical gold and silver rather than 401(k) plans.

Missing the point on Apple — it’s a retailer

Everyone (myself included) misses the point when considering this perspective. The first thing you do is compare Apple’s four /quotes/comstock/15*!aapl/quotes/nls/aapl (AAPL 349.95, -0.49, -0.14%) items — Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad — with IBM’s /quotes/comstock/13*!ibm/quotes/nls/ibm (IBM 161.07, -0.30, -0.19%) huge range of products, services and licensing. Or with H-P /quotes/comstock/13*!hpq/quotes/nls/hpq (HPQ 42.10, -0.04, -0.10%) and its scope. Even Microsoft Corp. /quotes/comstock/15*!msft/quotes/nls/msft (MSFT 25.40, -0.01, -0.04%) delves into more things than Apple.

Jomo Moir/MarketWatch
Consumers line up for the iPad2 at an Apple store in San Francisco.

Yes, well, what’s overlooked is that Apple is not getting rich from four products. Apple is not first and foremost a hardware maker, a software maker or a dream maker. Apple turns out to be one of the world’s greatest retailers.

And that is the real reason why Apple is huge. It should not be compared with H-P, IBM or anyone else in the tech industry. Apple should be compared with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!wmt/quotes/nls/wmt (WMT 52.12, -0.07, -0.13%) , Target Corp. /quotes/comstock/13*!tgt/quotes/nls/tgt (TGT 49.55, -0.40, -0.80%) and even Macy’s Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!m/quotes/nls/m (M 23.17, +0.01, +0.04%) . Best Buy Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!bby/quotes/nls/bby (BBY 29.35, +0.13, +0.44%) is a better point of comparison than H-P.

Heck, Apple has more in common with McDonald’s Corp. /quotes/comstock/13*!mcd/quotes/nls/mcd (MCD 75.29, +0.29, +0.39%) than with H-P.

Apple stores, which are modern event-driven showcases, have made the company what it is today. Using some of the most advanced ideas in retailing, Apple married Silicon Valley to retailing, using its sense of style to make each store a Vegas-like experience.

The store itself is a form of entertainment, and often when people are bored, they will just go to an Apple store, hang out and help create the atmosphere of a perpetual “happening.” The store itself is an event.

It's not a smartphone; it's a Snapfon

While there were plenty of smartphones on display at CTIA, the Snapfon is decidedly at the other end of the spectrum — and proudly so. Like the better known Jitterbug, the Snapfon prides itself on big buttons and simplicity, aiming at the growing market for seniors.

Even before the first Apple store opened, I often said that computer companies need their own owned-and-operated sales palaces so they can control the sales pitch just like an auto dealer. Other companies have tried, but their formulas were off.

Not being in any meetings regarding these failures (CompuAdd, IBM, Gateway, etc.) I don’t know what they were thinking. Someone at Apple thought different, and it had to be Steve Jobs and his esthetics.

I say this because an Apple store is actually a Bang & Olufsen store writ large: a high-concept store selling high-concept designer items. The Apple store wouldn’t work if its products looked like black-box Dell Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!dell/quotes/nls/dell (DELL 14.79, -0.27, -1.79%) computers. The Apple store is a gestalt of appealing modernity.

These observations will become more apparent when Microsoft rolls out more stores, and their designs seem to ape Apple’s — as far as the stores themselves are concerned.

However, this won’t work because the Bang & Olufsen product-design element will be missing. The experience will be incongruous and off-putting.

I think I need to get a look at Microsoft’s effort. All I know is that the company predates Apple with an experimental retail store in San Francisco (since closed).

Few people ever went to this Microsoft store, but it was slick and professional and could be best described as one of those Discover stores where all the nature and science toys were replaced by boxes of Microsoft Office.

Back to Apple. What I’ve concluded is that to understand the future of Apple and its valuation, you have to have a firm understanding of what the company really does that makes it different and so successful. And that’s retailing. This is not your father’s Apple.

The famous venture capitalist, John Doerr, years back once described Apple jokingly as a vertically integrated advertising agency. It was a cute comment that didn’t quite make sense, but was memorable.

But now I think it can be rephrased accurately. Apple is a vertically integrated retailer. And if investors want to understand the company’s future and its value, this must be understood

Rebels With an Attitude

(Flickr/Fr. Dougal McGuire)

A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love With Rebellion in Postwar America, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Oxford University Press, 386 pages, $29.95

Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, John McMillian Oxford University Press, 277 pages, $27.95

Around 1950, Americans began to see signs of a new kind of discontent. A generation of young rebels started popping up in fiction and films -- Holden Caulfield, the characters played by Marlon Brando and James Dean -- who were fleeing from or revolting against the phoniness of American life and white middle-class adulthood.

America's iconic heroes had always included plenty of rebels, going clear back to the nation's founders, but white middle-class American adulthood wasn't what bothered them. Brando's and Dean's predecessors included weary figures like Humphrey Bogart's characters and anarchic tough guys like James Cagney's. They weren't young, and they had nothing against middle-class whites per se.

Nobody -- and that includes Grace Elizabeth Hale in her smart new study of post-1950 American rebelliousness -- has definitively identified the reasons behind this new kind of ferment. Surely it has something to do with the triumph of New Deal economics, which was creating, for the first time, a nation with a middle-class majority. Surely it has something to do with the rise of a bureaucratic, professional -- and to some, denatured -- class even as the nation's agricultural and manufacturing sectors shrank.

The ferment among the young also surely had something to do with the growth of a youth market -- teenagers with sufficient discretionary income to support artists and entertainers who spoke specifically to them. Young middle-class whites, Hale says, "learned to use mass culture to critique mass culture." And for the first time, Hale continues, they sought models of authenticity from outside their own ranks -- from African Americans and poor rural whites in particular. The young Elvis, she notes, appropriated the look, movements, sensibilities, and songs of black musicians ("Hound Dog" had been Big Mama Thornton's rollicking lament of her man's infidelity) to invent an identity and a sound that thrilled white teens. Brando, Dean, and the Elvis of "Love Me Tender" "created a new model of the white male hero as a blackened and feminized outsider who expresses his feelings and desires."

The attraction that outsider (chiefly, black) authenticity held for the white middle class, Hale argues, is crucial for understanding much of postwar liberalism and the white New Left in particular. Her perspective is particularly helpful in charting the New Left's evolution after whites were expelled in 1966 from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had been the primary organization bringing together young black and white leftists. The white New Left thereafter not only intensified its focus on opposing the Vietnam War but also identified itself with Third World revolutionary movements. Radicals even redefined young whites as an outcast vanguard unto themselves, as Jerry Farber did in a classic of the period, his 1967 article "The Student as Nigger."

Hale's argument is a helpful addition to our understanding of the American left, but she also applies it unconvincingly to the postwar American right. To be sure, unlike such earlier conservatives as Robert Taft and Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley had a playful and rebellious air. The American establishment had moved just enough to the left (there's that New Deal again) so that a young conservative could rail against it. But Buckley wasn't upset with white middle-class life. Hale lumps such latter-day right-wingers as the Young Americans for Freedom and even anti-abortionist Randall Terry into this anti-liberal-establishment rebellion, but the nuance that made her dissection of the left so resonant is missing here. The causes and role models embraced by the postwar young and the New Left were, in fact, new and distinctive, but those that the postwar right upheld were decidedly more conventional. At least as far back as Lexington and Concord, Americans have been claiming the mantle of rebellion, but while some are genuine revolutionaries, most are retreads.

Why liberals hate Clarence Thomas and Sarah Palin Read more: Why liberals hate Clarence Thomas and Sarah Palin

In days when slavery was legal in this country, all slaves did not willingly resign to the grim fate cast upon them.

The human spirit longs to be free. In some individuals, that longing beats so strong in their breast that they will take large personal risks, against great odds, to rebel against tyranny that has transformed their life into a tool for someone else's will and whim.

Slaves who had the temerity to run away from their plantation "home" paid dearly if they were caught and returned. Measures were taken to make them an example to others who might harbor similar thoughts about freedom.

Among those measures were brutal public beatings of rebels to which other slaves were forced to bear witness and digest with great clarity the price of rebelliousness.

Such is the fate today of those uppity souls who choose to challenge the authority and legitimacy of our inexorably growing government plantation.

Those with interests for the care and feeding of this plantation cannot physically punish these rebels with the whip.

Their whip is the mainstream media and the means of punishment of this virtual whip is not beating of a physical body but assassination of character.

What's behind Justice Clarence Thomas' foundational beliefs and jurisprudence? Find out in "My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir"

This perspective helps us understand the ongoing liberal obsession with destroying Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Thomas and Palin are particularly threatening to liberals because their lives fly in the face of liberal mythology. According to this mythology, the essential and ongoing struggle in our nation is a power struggle of interests between "haves" and "have-nots" rather than an ongoing struggle for human freedom.

According to this mythology, there is an elite class of "haves" who, by virtue of fate and birth, control power and wealth. They are conservative because their only interest is to keep things as they are.

Fighting against this conservative elite are noble "have-nots", struggling, by any means possible, to get their fair share of wealth distributed by an unjust and blind fate.

A high-profile conservative whose very life and personal history poses an open challenge and affront to this mythology is a liberal's worst nightmare.

If being a conservative means simply protecting the bounty passed on to you by your forebears, why would a man from a poor black family in the South, or a woman from a white working-class family in Alaska, be a conservative? No less a conservative whose conservatism plays a role in a successful professional life?

Off to Mecca with Eric Holder's Blessing

The village of Berkeley, Ill., 15 miles west of Chicago, is small enough to proclaim its population (5,245) on its welcome sign. It is also small enough to escape mention in the national news -- most of the time.

But the village, which, according to The Washington Post, is majority African-American and Hispanic, has attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. The department is suing the Berkeley School District on behalf of a former teacher.

Here are the facts: Safoorah Khan, 29, was hired to teach middle school math in November 2007. According to her lawyer, she was happy in her job, which included preparing sixth- through eighth-graders for state tests, and running the "math lab." After nine months on the job, Khan requested a three-week leave of absence in order to perform the hajj -- the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are obliged to undertake at least once in their lives if they can afford it.

Employers are required by law to honor requests for religious accommodations provided that they do not impose "undue hardship" on the employer or other employees. Berkeley officials maintained that a three-week absence in December -- which would have denied the school its only math lab instructor right before exams -- was unreasonable and was not covered by the teachers' union contract. They denied her request. Khann decided to make the trip anyway and submitted her resignation.

She also submitted a letter of complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charging that the school board's refusal to grant the 19-day leave amounted to religious discrimination.

"They put her in a position where she had to choose," her lawyer, Kamran A. Memon, told the Post, and this revealed "anti-Muslim hostility."

The town's former mayor disagreed. "The school district just wanted a teacher in the room for those three weeks," said Michael A. Esposito. "They didn't care if she was a Martian, a Muslim or a Catholic."

Now the Justice Department has taken up her case. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez explains that he took the case in part to combat "a real head wind of intolerance against Muslim communities" and that Khan's lawsuit seeks to ratify the "religious liberty that our forefathers came to this country for." Perez has spoken before of his belief, shared by Attorney General Eric Holder, that "our Muslim-American brothers and sisters" have been the victims of a post-9/11 backlash.

Now we see how Perez and Holder can assert that Muslim-Americans are suffering a "backlash." If they can see religious discrimination in Khan's case, it's no wonder they see it under every mattress.

The Ego Advantage

He gives rambling incoherent speeches at places like the United Nations. His head is stuffed with oddball conspiracy theories and strange obsessions, like calling for the elimination of Switzerland or blaming the J.F.K. assassination on Israeli intelligence. He shows up in foreign countries in odd dress, with odd make-up and hair-gel preferences, once having pinned a photograph to his chest.

He has an all-female bodyguard contingent. In 2008, he announced that as part of a government shake-up, he was going to abolish all government ministries except Defense, Internal Security and a few others.

These are not the actions of a cold, calculating Machiavellian. Yet Qaddafi can’t just be dismissed as a comic loon. He’s maintained dominance in a ruthless part of the world, and he may outlast the current shambolic attempts to unseat him.

It seems that there is something advantageous in the megalomania that is his defining lifelong trait. He was kicked out of school for trying to organize a student strike. He began plotting a coup to take over the country while in college. He has repeatedly compared himself to Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad. He calls the Green Book, his book of teachings, “the new gospel.”

That book, which Libyans are compelled to read (he canceled student summer vacation at one point and replaced it with indoctrination sessions), is filled with oddball notions and banal assertions. It consists of three parts, “The Solution to Democratic Problems,” “The Solution to Economic Problems” and a section offering

How killing Libyans became a moral imperative

© 2011

"Who would be free themselves must strike the blow."

So wrote the poet Byron, who would himself die just days after landing in Greece to join the war for independence from the Turks.

But in that time, Americans followed the dictum of Washington, Adams and Jefferson: Stay out of foreign wars.

America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own," said John Quincy Adams in his oration of July 4, 1821.

When Greek patriots sought America's assistance, Daniel Webster took up their cause but was admonished by John Randolph. Intervention would breach every "bulwark and barrier of the Constitution."

"Let us say to those 7 million of Greeks: We defended ourselves when we were but 3 million, against a power in comparison to which the Turk is but as a lamb. Go and do thou likewise."

When Hungarian hero Louis Kossuth came to request a U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean to keep the czar's warships at bay, when Hungary sought to break free of the Habsburg Empire, Webster backed him.

But Henry Clay and John Calhoun stood against it.

"Far better is it for ourselves," said Clay, "for Hungary and for the cause of liberty that, adhering to our wise, pacific system and avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore as a light to all nations than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe."

When Hungarian patriots rose up against the Soviet occupation in 1956, Khrushchev sent in hundreds of tanks to drown the revolution in blood.

Hungary was behind the Iron Curtain, the Yalta-Potsdam line to which FDR and Truman had agreed. There were no U.S. troops on any Hungarian border. So Eisenhower did – nothing.

Indeed, that same month, Ike ordered British, French and Israelis to end their intervention in Sinai and Suez and get their troops out or face sanctions, including the U.S. sinking of the British pound.

LIBERALS: THEY BLINDED US WITH SCIENCE

In response to my column last week about hormesis -- the theory that some radiation can be beneficial to humans -- liberals reacted with their usual open-minded examination of the facts.

According to Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters, MSNBC's Ed Schultz devoted an entire segment to denouncing me. He called me toxic, accused me of spreading misinformation and said I didn't care about science.

One thing Schultz did not do, however, was cite a single physicist or scientific study.

I cited three physicists by name as well as four studies supporting hormesis in my column. For the benefit of liberals scared of science, I even cited The New York Times.

It tells you something that the most powerful repudiation of hormesis Schultz could produce was the fact that a series of government agencies have concluded -- I quote -- that "insufficient human data on hormesis exists."

Well, in that case, I take it all ba -– wait, no. That contradicts nothing I said in my column.

Liberals should take up their quarrel with the physicists cited by both me and the Times. I'm sure the Harvard physics department will be fascinated to discover that the left's idea of the scientific method is to cling to their fears while hurling invective at anyone who proposes a novel thesis.

The fact that liberals are so terrified of science that they chronically wet themselves wouldn't be half as annoying if they didn't go around boasting about their deep respect for science, especially compared to conservatives.

Apparently this criticism is based on conservatives' skepticism about global warming -- despite the studies of distinguished research scientists Dr. Alicia Silverstone and Dr. Woody Harrelson. (In my case, it's only because I'm still waiting for liberals' global cooling theory from the '70s to come true.)

The left's idea of "science" is that we should all be riding bicycles and using the Clivus Multrum composting latrines instead of flush toilets. Anyone who dissents, they say -- while adjusting their healing crystals for emphasis -- is "afraid of science."

A review of the record, however, shows that time and again liberals have been willing to corrupt public policy and allow people to die in order to enforce the Luddite views of groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists (original name, "Union of Concerned Activist Lawyers Who Took a Science Course in High School").

As I described in my book "Godless," both the government and the entire mainstream media lied about AIDS in the '80s by scaring Americans into believing that heterosexuals were as much at risk for acquiring AIDS as gays and intravenous drug users. The science had to be lied about so no one's feelings got hurt.

In 1985, Life magazine's cover proclaimed: "NOW, NO ONE IS SAFE FROM AIDS." In 1987, U.S. News & World Report reported that AIDS was "finding fertile growth among heterosexuals." Also in 1987, Dr. Oprah Winfrey said that "research studies" predicted that "one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years."

In 1988, ABC's "20/20" claimed the CDC had discovered a shocking upsurge of heterosexual infections on college campuses. It struck no one as odd that 28 of the 30 infections had occurred in men (with alphabetized spice racks and at least three cats, one named Blanche).

Two years later, CNN broadcast that same 1988 study, proclaiming: "A new report from CDC indicates that AIDS is on the rise on college campuses."

A quarter-century later, and we're still waiting for the big heterosexual AIDS outbreak.

But at least science achieved its primary purpose: AIDS was not stigmatized as a "gay disease." Scientific facts were ignored so that science would be nonjudgmental. That was more important than the truth.

Liberal activists also gave us the alar scare in the late '80S based on the studies of world renowned chemist and national treasure Meryl Streep.

Alar is a perfectly safe substance that had been used on apples since 1968 both to ripen and preserve the fruit. It made fresh fruit more accessible by allowing fruit pickers to make one sweep through the apple grove, producing ripe, fresh fruit to be distributed widely and cheaply.

But after hearing the blood-chilling testimony of Streep, hysterical soccer moms across America hopped in their Volvos, dashed to their children's schools and ripped the apples from the little ones' lunch boxes. "Delicious, McIntosh and Granny Smith" were added to "Hitler, Stalin and Mao" as names that will live in infamy.

The EPA proposed banning alar based on a study that involved pumping tens of thousands times more alar into rats than any human could possibly consume, and observing the results. The rats died -- of poisoning, not tumors – but the EPA banned it anyway. Poor people went back to eating Twinkies instead of healthy fresh fruit.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization advised against an alar ban and Europeans continued to eat fruit with alar in their nice warm houses powered by nuclear energy (halted in the U.S. thanks to the important work of Dr. Jackson Browne and Dr. Bonnie Raitt).

Other scientific theories developed in the laboratories of personal injury lawyers and TV networks included the left's "cancer cluster" claim in the '80s. The Centers for Disease Control investigated 108 alleged "cancer clusters" that had occurred between 1961 to 1983 and found no explanation for them other than coincidence -- and a demonstrable proximity to someone with deep pockets.

As Yale epidemiologist Michael Bracken explained: "Diseases don't fall evenly on every town like snow." Random chance will lead some areas to have higher, sometimes oddly higher, numbers of cancer.

But just to be safe, we all better stop driving cars, eating off of clean dishes and using aerosol sprays.

Some of the other scientific studies and innovations that make liberals cry are: vaccines, IQ studies, breast implants and DDT.

After decades of this nonsense, The New York Times' Paul Krugman has the audacity to brag that liberals believe the "truth should be determined by research, not revelation." Yes -- provided the "research" is conducted by trial lawyers and Hollywood actresses rather than actual scientists.

Anti-Iraq War Bush-haters squirm to justify Libya

© 2011

"The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said in December 2007.

What a difference a change of job title makes.

"Let's just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates three weeks before President Obama ordered a no-fly zone over – and other military action against – Libya.

Like many anti-Iraq War/Bush-is-a-warmonger critics, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., supports the Libyan action. Bush-hater Rachel Maddow of MSNBC rationalized that unlike the bloodthirsty President George W. Bush, you see, Obama ordered the military into action under a different "narrative" – that is, reluctantly and without zeal. Understand?

The non-unilateralist Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama, unlike Bush, sought no congressional war resolution. Obama, therefore, ordered military action against Libya "unilaterally" – without the congressional approval that he once argued the Constitution demanded.

As Obama further explained in his December 2007 statement, "In instances of self-defense, the president would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent." So a president, according to Obama, does not need congressional authority – provided the action involves "self-defense" or "stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

What is the "actual or imminent threat" to America posed by Libya?

Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, spooked bleep-less after our invasion of Iraq, surrendered his WMD. The dictator admitted Libya's complicity in the bombing of the Pan Am plane over Lockerbie and paid financial settlements – after which the U.S. removed Libya from the list of terror-sponsoring states. The U.S. imports less than 1 percent of its oil from that country. What threat to national security?

Fast-forward to March 2011. Rebels threaten to topple Gadhafi's brutal regime. But the dictator fights back, and unless stopped by outsiders, his military appears poised to put down and slaughter the rebels. Enter Obama. "We cannot stand idly by," he said, "when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy."

Obama thus approves this act of war – for humanitarian purposes.

(Column continues below)

But Iraq's Saddam Hussein created a far greater humanitarian nightmare. "The Butcher of Baghdad" slaughtered, at minimum, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – far more people than were killed in Bosnia and Kosovo, where President Clinton ordered military force for humanitarian reasons. Yet, when weapons hunters found no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, the dwindling number of pro-war Democrats turned against the war – never mind the sickening sight of thousands of Iraqis found in shallow graves.

If U.S. foreign policy dictates intervention during humanitarian crises, why stop with Libya? Why start with Libya?

The list of brutal thug leaders is long. Nearly 40 percent of the world's population lives under un-free, often brutally repressive, governments, and another billion or so people have only partial freedom.

Humanitarian in-harm's-way deployment of the military is treacherous and unpredictable. Consider Somalia ("Black Hawk Down" Battle of Mogadishu in 1993); Lebanon (241 servicemen, mostly Marines, killed when terrorists blew up their barracks in 1983); and Bosnia/Kosovo (President Clinton promised troops out by Christmas 1995).

The purpose of the military is to act on behalf of our national security. We are not the world's hall monitor. Bush-hating Iraq War critics used to say stuff like that – along with "war is not the answer."

Now, let's revisit the reasons for the – as pre-President Obama called it – "stupid" war.

Obama, like virtually everyone else, assumed Saddam possessed stockpiles of WMD while actively pursuing a nuclear capability. President Bush sought and obtained congressional authorization. He called Saddam's Iraq a "grave and gathering threat" to our national security.

Ninety percent of Americans, in the dark days following Sept. 11, 2001, expected another attack within a year – except perhaps this time with chemical or biological weapons. From the "oil-for-food" program, Saddam stole money, possibly re-routing it to terrorists. He financially rewarded families of homicide bombers. We learned, following the Persian Gulf War, that he was much closer to achieving nuclear capability than previously thought. Saddam kicked out the U.N. inspectors sent in to verify the promised dismantling and destruction of the weapons.

That Saddam possessed stockpiles of WMD, having used chemical weapons on the Iranians and his own people, was not in dispute. All 16 U.S. intelligences agencies thought so "with the highest probability." France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Egypt, Jordan, China, Israel – and even Saddam's own generals – assumed Iraq possessed WMD. Even U.N. weapons inspector and Iraq War critic Hans Blix thought Saddam likely possessed these weapons. As Blix admitted at a 2004 University of Berkeley forum: 'I'm not here to have gut feelings. But yes, in December 2002 (three months before the invasion) I thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.'"

Call Libya the Obama doctrine: non-national security, non-congressionally approved military attacks are perfectly legitimate for humanitarian reasons. Except not for Iraq under President George W. Bush – who awaits his apology.