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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (25450)	7/31/2006 1:00:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541674

I simply found it reckless to go off on such a half-assed adventure. Iraq is obviously going to be mentioned in, and relevant to this discussion, but the issue wasn't specifically Iraq. The blog post and the comments to it are a more general than that. Can libertarians support wars that aren't in direct self defense? Does the non-aggression principle mean you don't commit aggression against regimes that are themselves committing aggression? Issues like that... Since war is an application of state power, and since the existence of a war has a tendency to help strengthen other applications of state power, some libertarians argue that supporting any war except on in direct defense is inconsistent with libertarian ideals. One of the comments to that blog post says - "You can’t be a consistent libertarian and support modern wars. It’s as simple as that." I disagree. Apparently you do as well. OTOH these reasons are good reasons for libertarians to have some skepticism when the possibility of war arises. As for being "skeptical that a top-down intervention will create the robust civil societies necessary for liberalism to thrive", I can agree with that. At best top-down intervention will not be sufficient. OTOH an argument can be made that it is necessary condition when you have someone like Saddam in charge. Saddam and his regime wouldn't last for ever. But then OTOH (how many hands do I have <g>) it could easily have been another generation or more before the odious regime collapsed. No one will ever really know how things would have gone had we not intervened, including the possibility that the war would have just been delayed. Personally I was never a strong supporter of the decision to go to war, although I did move from "on the fence" to being something of a supporter (a mild supporter, and a fairly strong opponent of some of the arguments made by opponents). Perhaps I'm moving back to the direction of "on the fence" now (still opposing some of those arguments, but not necessarily being fully behind the idea that the war was a good decision), but that issue is mostly moot, except maybe in terms of the upcoming congressional and future presidential elections, where Republicans might take a hit for the war. The real issue now is where do we go from here.