Incredibly, Donald Rumsfeld compares the current situation in Iraq, ruled by a occupying foreign military power that is widely despised, to the US in the years following American Revolution (WSJ). (A closer analogy would be the years preceding the Revolution). In passing, he smears the Articles of Confederation, which he says ”failed miserably.” Compare to Murray Rothbard, who wrote of the Articles: the government “was not permitted to levy any taxes upon the public; and any fundamental extension of its powers required unanimous consent by every state government. Above all, the military and war-making power of the national government was hedged in by restraint and suspicion; for the eighteenth-century libertarians understood that war, standing armies, and militarism had long been the main method for aggrandizing State power.” Thus they did fail in every way that Rumsfeld cares about.
