The saga of Myles Kantor's sudden transformation from a mild-mannered, libertarian writer for LewRockwell.com into a strident advocate of U.S. empire and intervention at FrontPage Magazine has sorely troubled many of his libertarian friends. But, as I will attempt to illustrate, there is a very good explanation for Myles' seemingly erratic behavior.

Part of the "mystery of Myles" was the very swiftness of his metamorphosis. Immediately in the wake of 9/11, Myles published a piece, entitled "Soft Pedaling the Barbarians," in which he attacked libertarians Justin Raimondo and Harry Browne for sympathizing with the terrorists.

Now, if Myles had simply wanted to pick on someone he felt was too soft on the terrorists, there were many on the left that would have made better targets. Why single out fellow libertarians? One possible reason was that Myles wanted to show David Horowitz, the editor of FrontPage, just how fully he had sold his soul to the neocons, in a cynical ploy to advance his career.

Many libertarians reacted with understandable dismay to Myles' seeming betrayal of the cause. Our own Jeremy Sapienza read Myles out of the libertarian movement. Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com contended that Myles' brain had become addled by war fever.

Justin's charge gained credibility based on the evidence from subsequent columns. First, Myles published an interview full of puffball questions with that great defender of social democracy, R.J. Rummel. Rummel's decidedly non-libertarian proposition that "increasing centralization in the federal government" was good in response to 9/11 did not raise so much as an eyebrow from Myles. Myles also did not question the extensive statistical chicanery by which Rummel achieved his claim to fame: his "finding" the democracies do not ever go to war with each other. (Basically, the way to prove that is to examine all wars that might be interpreted as being between democracies, then make sure that your definition of democracy somehow excludes at least one of the countries involved in all questionable wars.)

Further evidence of an unbalanced mind was seen in Myles' hunger strike in support of imprisoned Cuban dissident Oscar Biscet. Now, libertarians are fully in favor of Dr. Biscet's release, of the dismantling of the Castro regime, indeed, of the release of everyone unjustly held in the prisons of the State -- like maybe even the hundreds of thousands of people held in U.S. prisons for drug "crimes." But, some libertarians asked, shouldn't we try to make sure our actions are useful? Is Castro really going to be sitting in his palace thinking: "Ay caramba! Has Señor Myles lost more weight? Then I must release Biscet."

But the method in Myles' madness recently has been revealed by his marvelous parody, "Lay the Axe to the Root." In that piece, Myles exposes the loony nature of the warmongers at FrontPage Magazine, by calling for the U.S. to be prepared to attack Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Equatorial Guinea, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Myanmar, if they will not "capitulate" (i.e., agree to become U.S. satellite states).

Joe Sixpack, who may be roundly in favor of the attack on Afghanistan and might approve of going on to attack Iraq, is certain to be taken aback by Myles' list. Do we really have to attack that many countries? He's heard military experts wonder if the U.S. military is fully prepared to fight two simultaneous wars, so his mind is going to boggle at the thought of eleven of them. (Sure, we could attack them one after another, but since we'll have to occupy each one to ensure "our kind" of democracy emerges, we ultimately would be engaged in at least eleven countries at one time.)

Furthermore, the list of countries is bound to leave him a little puzzled. Take Equatorial Guinea: Is that some troublesome Italian guy who lives in the tropics? No, when he digs out his atlas, Joe finds that there is such a place! But, has Joe been feeling threatened by the military might of Equatorial Guinea? Will the slogan "liberate Equatorial Guinea" resonate much with him?

And Saudi Arabia? Didn't we fight Iraq, among other purported reasons, in order to protect the current regime? Don't we have troops stationed there? Well, that does make it convenient to attack Saudi Arabia, though, doesn't it? It's very cost effective to be able to peacefully move your troops into a country before invading it -- sort of a pre-invasion invasion. On the other hand, if Joe has bought into the idea that the U.S. should be running a world empire, he may wonder if an attack on Saudi Arabia might not make other countries a little nervous about allowing U.S. troops onto their soil.

And what about that Vietnam? "Gee," Joe thinks, "it was a lot of fun the last time we invaded that country, wasn't it?" And besides, didn't we just make up with them, tell them all was forgotten? And aren't they becoming a lot more capitalist? As long as things are moving in the right direction, Joe will wonder if we shouldn't just leave them alone. Will the U.S. bomb all formerly totalitarian regimes that are not reforming at a sufficient pace? One bomb for each day behind schedule, so spit spot!

Of course, libertarians would point out that if we really wanted to help the people in such countries, we would tell them to resist any attempts to have Western social democracies forced on them, as would surely happen under U.S./U.N. supervision. Instead, we would direct them toward their own traditional forms of local governance as a way of rebuilding their civil societies. Look, we have an example now, and it seems to be working: Somalia. (Well, working at least until it makes it onto the list of places to blow to smithereens.)

It is clear to me that Myles has penned a reductio ad absurdum of the interventionist position. He has become the Alan Sokal of the libertarian movement. (Sokal is a physics professor at NYU. He published a famous hoax paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," in Social Text in order to highlight the vacuity of most deconstructionist literature.) Myles' work will do more to discredit the neocons than one hundred mocking pieces about Jonah Goldberg at LewRockwell.com.

But, in going over the top like this, doesn't Myles risk exposing himself as a mole to the neocons? And here, my friends, is the explanation for the hunger strike! Myles first had to convince Horowitz et al. that he did, in fact, crack a bit under the strain of 9/11. (The neocons already think libertarians are a bit cracked, after all.) "True," they are thinking, "the lad is somewhat hyper-enthusiastic, but hey, it's nice to have someone around who makes us seem reasonable by comparison!"

You may wonder, however, if I'm not doing Myles and the cause a disservice by blowing his cover? Don't worry. First of all, Myles will, of course, deny everything -- hey, I understand, he has to do it. But, more importantly, even you are not going to believe me. You see, I have this odd problem that when I'm kidding around, people take me seriously, but when I'm serious, people think I'm joking. To be sure, that assertion itself you'll take as "just another example of Callahan's weird humor." So Myles is safe.

Keep up the good work, brother!

December 11, 2001