The Libertarian Foreign Policy problem.
Debating freedom's fight in Iraq
Surveying the political landscape in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, you might think Mohammed Atta?s group of hijackers not only knocked down the World Trade Center, but also ripped open a hole in the space-time continuum.
Since the attacks took place, up has been down, left has been right, and once-dependable stalwarts on one end of the American political spectrum have become equally dependable stalwarts on the other end. The quasi-isolationist candidate George W. Bush, who came into office promising a more ?humble? foreign policy, has metamorphosed into a relentlessly interventionist President Bush, whose ambitious foreign affairs would have made former US President Woodrow Wilson blush. This is only the most visible reversal we?ve seen in a political landscape where cautious conservatives have become neoliberal interventionists, Trotskyite dissidents have turned into Republican hawks, and rock-ribbed onetime Cold War warriors have turned into cautious isolationists.
Few political communities have made a more striking shift, or endured a more contentious split, than American libertarians, those hearty souls whose fondest aim is to refine the government out of existence. After a period of relative detente during the fight against Afghanistan?s Taleban government, the traditional antipathy between libertarians and the US government partially resurfaced during the much murkier war against deposed dictator Saddam Hussein?s regime in Iraq. The ongoing Iraqi campaign has deepened well-known fault lines in libertarian ranks, and revealed a few new ones.
Splits among the libertarians are nothing new. Libertarianism has many strains among them a radical anarchist wing suspicious of any efforts at cohesion (though often foamingly intolerant of perceived heterodoxy); a more conservative property-rights wing that is often visibly uncomfortable with libertarian permissiveness on drug use, prostitution and other ?lifestyle? issues; gun-ownership enthusiasts whose main concern is to safeguard the constitutional right to bear arms; various shades of hedonists who want only to be left alone by the authorities while they pursue their own happiness; people who don?t like paying taxes; and even religious types skeptical of man-made law and governance.
Nor should we forget the hopelessly dysfunctional Libertarian Party, which does its level best to ensure libertarian ideas remain a national joke. There are also motley collections of fellow travelers, who might agree with libertarian positions on specific issues (opposition to smoking bans, for example, or hostility to eminent domain abuses by the government), but reject embracing the libertarian package as a whole. If there is one common denominator among libertarians, it?s a deep skepticism of both local and national government and a conviction that where government interferes in human affairs, it just makes things worse.
Thus it has been paradoxical to see so many foes of state intrusion in the domestic American sphere become comfortable with an even more extreme form of intrusion at the international level in Iraq. After all, if you don?t trust the government to inspect your food, set reasonable zoning standards, or enforce laws conducive to public health, how can you believe the same government knows best how to decide the future of a sovereign state located thousands of kilometers and nine time zones away, whose religion, language and customs are barely known to most Americans?
Pro-Iraq war libertarians countered this argument by arguing that any principled belief in liberty went hand-in-hand with a desire to see Saddam Hussein an enemy of human freedom if there ever was one overthrown with extreme prejudice. Libertarian debate on the war was largely (and refreshingly) free from obfuscation about weapons of mass destruction and evanescent Al-Qaeda connections. Instead, the talk was about whether the oppression of Iraqis justified (an unrequested) US intervention, whether Iraq could be remade into a free state after the manner of post-war Japan and West Germany, and whether any of this was worth the expansion of American state power that inevitably takes place during wartime. Critic Randolph Bourne?s warning that ?war is the health of the state? rarely seemed so relevant.
I got a direct experience of this debate when, shortly before the invasion of Iraq began, Ronald Bailey, my colleague at the libertarian magazine Reason, argued for a foreign policy that assisted freedom fighters throughout the world including, of course, groups such as the Iraqi National Congress. The response was immediate and forceful. Many readers accused Bailey of being a latter-day Wilsonian, others applauded him for a principled stance in favor of liberty, and still others agreed with him in principle, while pointing out that the number of overseas interventions that worked as planned could be counted on one hand the mujahideen of Afghanistan, after all, started out as US-backed ?freedom fighters.?
As the practical reasons for the Iraq war have been discredited, the debate over the larger implications for liberty has, ironically, become more vital. Whether the war was a justified act of self-defense, an example of idealistic overreach, or an imperial crime, the question of how free Iraqis will be in the future and which institutions will ensure that freedom is now inextricably tied in to US foreign policy. In forming an answer, the varied libertarian voices are a vital resource and should be given careful consideration.
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