Just thought I would share an extract from a letter I wrote to someone asking if I was ant-war or not:
Not all the contributors to Samizdata support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not an ‘editorial policy’. Some of us do and some of us do not.
I am no more anti- or pro-war than I am anti- or pro-knife. It rather depends what it is used for. There are justified wars and there are unjustified wars and in this imperfect world in which we live there are wars which are shades of both.
I am not a neo-con who supports anything the US or UK state does overseas because it is the US or UK state doing it. I spent a considerable time in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990’s observing the war there at very close quarters indeed. That experience well and truly cured me of any residual pacifism or squeamishness about the fact there are many truly evil people in this world who need to be confronted with violence. In fact there are some people with whom the only reasonable form of interaction is to put 8 grams of copper jacketed metal through their skulls at 710 metres per second.
However I suspect that is not what you are asking me…if you want to know do I have a problem with just shrugging my shoulders at the fact a homicidal mass murdering tyrant with a history of invading neighbouring countries had controlled Iraq for two decades with some help from my tax money … well, I do have a problem with that and so I did support the drastic remedial action of ejecting Saddam by force on the basic and rather non-purist notion “the bastards are going to tax me to fund the volunteer military regardless, it might as well be used for something that actually reduces the sum total of evil in the world even though that is going to be messy as hell”.
Afghanistan on the other hand was a no-brainer: the Taliban governed state supported a direct attack on the USA, ergo the Afghan state was the one who actually initiated the war, not the USA.
Unlike many, I did not expect the aftermath in either Iraq or Afghanistan to be pretty but I did not (and still do not) see that as an excuse for giving the Ba’athists a free pass to keep gassing entire villages and feeding people they do not like into wood-chippers feet first.
Ideally the Iraqis themselves should have done for Saddam, but of course when they tried immediately after Gulf War Episode I, the wonderful George Bush senior left them hanging out to dry after having previously openly encouraged them.
So yes, I supported the war in Iraq (for rather different reasons to the US and UK govts, it must be said) because I find nothing libertarian about drowning out the screams of two decades of tortured Iraqis by holding a couple copies of Murray Rothbard’s ‘The Ethics of Liberty’ over my ears.
All jokes aside – Rothbard does have his uses. Consider that he made one of the best cases(Link) for returning to the gold standard.
I can support the use of military force when I see a clear and direct threat, I think anyone would (see how very disparate groups cohered in France in the face of German agression in WWI). If the threat is clear and present enough, the martial spirit will rise. The trick is having it fall away again afterward. Fighting a perpetual war in the name of perpetual peace is a short bridge to cross.
The main problem I see in the waging of war (by the U.S. anyway) is how tightly it is controlled by the bureaucracy in D.C. Defending ones right to survive is one thing, turning the process over to bureaucrats who use military force as public relation moves with muscle is clearly wrong.
I guess the long and short of it is we have fought wars improperly for at least 50 years. If enough force is not used because of skittish bureaucrats, and the “mission isn’t accomplished” then what good was it? Spending billions on D.C. run wars and being no safer is a waste. And for the average person (again in the U.S.) people being fed into woodchippers thousands of miles away doesn’t rise to the level of threat necessary to stomach real war, much less the war-lite tossed about by suits in D.C.
So does liberty have to be enforced?
What about invidividual liberty and national self-determination? Do we need to occupy foreign countries in order to protect liberties at home? And the CIA, which is an organization so independent from our own government even, and so ineffective, and so anti-libertarian with its faulty paternalist regime-changing, which usually ends up in civil war and decades of unrest (Guatemala, for example.)
The CIA and its wanton-war-waging is no different from an arbitrary and coercive tax code. We should oust it just like we should their filthy, war-mongering taxes.
Sure, we need compensation for their abuse of our tax money. But that’s our government’s fault our money went to fund terrorism or oil-for-food screw-ups. And sure, Saddam and the Taliban are, am I saying this right?, barking moonbats. But its not the nightwatchman state’s prerogative to go around policing other nations and changing their regimes.
Perry,
You and I are of one mind on this one.
I know that the EU has rules about this kind of thing, but when talking about matters firearm, could you use non-metric units in future? I needed a calculator to figure out that you’d prefer to put down a despot with a sniper rifle than with a handgun. And grains are more precise than grams anyway.
I know, it’s not really relevant nor even important, but one would think, given the practicality of your argument about warfare, that you’d stick with a measuring system founded upon practicality rather than a totalitarian one.
7.97 g. to be precise… that’s 123 gr. to you Kim 🙂 A 7.62×39 seemed the most appropriate in the context.
Saddam torturing and murdering Iraqis by the freightcar load: BAD!
Iraqis torturing and murdering Iraqis by the freightcar load: Not so much.
I like this blog even though I’ve only owned paintball guns before. My favorite libertarian authors are the minarchist Nozick, but even though he and Rothbard clash on the coercion debate, I like Rothbard too. I also like futurists and extropians.
off-topic, but what are the most interesting blogs you know of? Do you go to marxist blogs ever?
Ah, one more thing. I saw some literature here on the EU.
I’m taveling to an EU economics study program in Germany in a few months. We talk to EU representatives, heads of state, spies, and that sort of thing. Then we travel to Turkey for 2 weeks.
*curious*
What do the sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati think about the EU?
Smaller, possibly, but neither more nor less precise.
Precision applies to measurements, or the recording of measurements, or variation across measurements – but not to units of measurement. A mile is just as precise as an inch. Rounding your measurements to the nearest mile will make them less precise than measurements rounded to the nearest inch.
I now return you to your previous, non-pedantic, existence.
Indeed. It is the not the job of a liberal nation to act as the world’s sober driver while all the passengers want to get pissed. Altruism is a bad guide to foreign policy. To put it into Rothbardian or Randian terms, the guide to foreign policy must be hard, rational, long-term self-interest. By acting in such a fashion, we also persuade the rest of the world to grow up.
Judged on that basis, some “pre-emptive” actions are justified and wise, some are plain crazy and foolish. Prudence is the key word. I think the removal of the Taliban was just and wise, I think the overthrow of Saddam was just about justified, although with hindsight I can see why the doubters were right given the uncertain consequences. But I think you have to decide these matters on a case by case basis. Or, to use a rude word, we have to be “pragmatic”.
That is where the doctrinaire Rothbardians like Justin Raimondo miss the point. They treat the issue of national sovereignty as an almost religious principle guiding their views. They assume that the non-initiation of force priinciple – the bedrock of much libertarian thought – trumps basic survival. Against homicidal maniacs, this principle breaks down.
Another problem with some, not all, Rothbardians is they are escapists. Their approach to things like terrorism is to deny that it exists or dramatically play down its significance.
Spot on! I have always been amazed that people who claim to be so anti-statist seems to have such reverence for the nation-states other run by mass murderers like Saddam Hussain and Slobodan Milosovic. One might almost get the impression they actually quite like statism just as long as it is for people out of their immediate experience.
State… bad
Super-state… super bad
So has the “war on terror” achieved this?
The Taliban no longer control of all Afghanistan and Saddam is now plant food, so I’d have to say “yes”.
The ‘War on Terror’, or ‘The Long War’ is a PR exercise pure and simple. It will be used from here on in to justify any military action that the west takes, either against other nations or its own citizens. Iraq was in no way related to the war on terror, though it can be used now as a source of propaganda; “Look what the extremists are doing in Iraq, they want to do it here.” Remembering that the sheeple won’t remember that the current situation in Iraq was caused, not by the invasion itself, but by the mismanagement of the situation afterwards.
Keep the sheeple afraid and you can get away with just about anything, that’s what the ‘War on Terror’ is for. Not that the threat of Islamic terrorism (or any other kind of terrorism) is not real, it is simply nowhere near as urgent or deadly as our leaders make it out to be. Its aim is not to kill and maim innocents, that is merely a means to an end. Its true aim is to change the policies of our governments, in any way it can. So far the terrorists are winning.
The Taliban and Saddam needed to be removed, by rights they should have been removed years ago. These are not victories however, neither are they part of the ‘War on Terror’ in anything but an ancillary way. They were actions against enemies who, given the opportunity, would have attacked us (again in the case of Afghanistan.) I don’t believe the sum total of evil in the world has been reduced by either the death of Saddam or the removal of the Taliban, it has merely been diluted. Those perpetrating the violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan are just as evil, but lack the wherewithal to extend their reach beyond those countries in anything more than symbolic gestures.
The ‘War on Terror’ is not designed to reduce the sum total of evil in the world, it is a tool of oppression and a sham. It will never achieve its aim and the sooner we realise this the better.
sheeple LOL! there’s a blast from the past, I thought only overweight teenage goths used that term.
“7.97 g. to be precise… that’s 123 gr. to you Kim”
My point precisely. Any unit of measurement which requires multiple decimal places is going to be less precise than one with greater granularity.
And considering that the “metre” has been redefined no fewer than three times since its inception…
And Perry: your choice of caliber is quite sound, although I’ve always been more in favor of the (metric, hah!) 6.5x55mm Swede myself.
Mmm. Yeah. Pretty much.
Not sure what Gabriel’s talking about. I think he’s resorting to ad hominem in lieu of commenting on your statement.
“…we have fought wars improperly for at least 50 years.”
And always will…
Wars are a messy thing, there is no “proper” or ideal way of fighting them. Saying that the Iraqi war and it’s aftermath have been mismanaged is a hollow thing, an idle speculation.
“In fact there are some people with whom the only reasonable form of interaction is to put 8 grams of copper jacketed metal through their skulls at 710 metres per second.”
Yes. One of these people turned out to be an elected mayor, executed by the the failed Socialist candidate for the same position.
(Link)
Your judgement as to who does and who does not need to be shot (whilst possibly arousing to other caliber-fetishists) is not a convincing argument.
Dear Mr. de Havilland,
Your last 2 paragraphs (especially) are inspired. Thank you.
Julie
Thanks Perry, you articulated my thoughts far better than I could have done.
Perry I agree with nearly everything in your post. Still, I disagreed with going into Iraq. Unfortunately, my reasons are being confirmed. Time for a rant.
Remember what happened to the South Vietnamese. A certain political faction not only “re-deployed” their supporting American personnel, they cut the funding for continued material aid. The South was over-run because they ran out of ammunition. And everything else. We (The US) betrayed those people. Stabbed them in the back. Abandoned them to a nightmarish fate.
The Certain Political Faction has returned. Iraquis yearning to be free are next.
As soon as it next takes full power, the Democratic party in the US will pick up our marbles in Iraq and go home. The Aussies and Brits will be unable to finish the job alone, as the majority of their Labour parties will support the betrayal. The Iraquis will lose any chance at freedom, and half of those that survive the ensuing civil war will come to the West as refugees.
Naturally, the taxpayers of Australia, the UK and the US will foot the bill. For a generation.
It was predictable. That’s why I didn’t support going after Saddam. I knew damn well we’d screw it up.
Whilst all actions have consequences, they are often not the ones that are obvious. Saddam was brought down by the power of a nation. Consequently, that nation will feel it can resort to force for other reasons. The state will have grown because of the war, and will try to at least stay as large as it is. (I.E., The Patriot Act would have required more enforcers, and gave the state more powers.)
I’ll bet we see more use of American force in other countries, because of the precedent set by this war.
I agree that Saddam should have been deposed, and long ago, but I think that this way will bite us all in the future.
I lose no sleep when members of rival gangs kill each other.
.280 Ross, if I may…
On the present Iraq war (or rather on the judgement to go into Iraq in 2003 – the 1991 conflict over K. having never formally ended and cease fire having been broken many times by Saddam’s forces) I came down on the other side to Perry.
However, that does not alter the need to win the war now.
It is like the war of Jenkins ear in 1739. Sir Robert Walpole was (in my opinion) correct in not wanting to war over the attack on Captain Jenkins (although there was a legal right to do so), but once he had been forced to go to war with Spain – Britain had to win the war.
For the war was no longer over “Jenkins’ ear” – it was a trial of strength between Britain and hostile powers, a trial Britain had to win.
Whatever the present war was about in 2003 (and there were links between Saddam and certain Islamic terrorist groups – contrary to the constant statements of the media that there were not, for example there was a base in norther Iraq) it is now about a struggle between the West (although most of the West is not helping) and the Islamic terrorists (both Sunni and Shia) who wish to not only defeat the West but to suppress the civilized majority of Muslims in Iraq.
As for the rest of what Perry says:
Afghan war – agreed.
George Herbert Walker Bush (“Bush 41”) and the appeal for the people of Iraq to rise up agianst Saddam.
Yes he ordered Norman S. not to destroy the Republican Guard (which the General had trapped near Basra), and he went along with the judgement to let the Iraqi forces fly their helecopters.
In short he called on the people to revolt – having set up the conditions for them to be defeated (indeed slaughtered).
This is one of the reasons why some Shia do not trust the West now. However, it was not a wicked plan by Bush 41.
As with the tax increase and the Americans with Disablities Act, it was just stupidity (or, to be polite, lack of wisdom – not quite the same thing as intelligence).
“But he has a degree from Yale, and had a fine war record, and was a Congressman, and was Director of the C.I.A., and was Vice President for eight years and was President and………”
What many people do not understand is that it is possible to be rich and to have all these academic qualifications and (indeed) a high I.Q. score – and be “as think as two short planks” when it comes to political matters.
Let say you were taught the doctrine of (among others) David Hume – that all government, in the end, depends on majority opinion. So if people really wanted to get rid of Saddam (or whoever) they could.
Now Hume was pissing about (to use a vulgar form of words), he was trying (in order to be irritating – and to show how clever he was) to make the argument that there was no basic difference between an nation like Britain, where the Parliament really limited the power of the King and his ministers, and a nation like France under Louis XIV where the limits were much weaker (or indeed Russia where there were none).
To bring it in to the modern age – that there is no basic difference between Iraq under Saddam and the United States under Bush (“oh there are differences, but basically……”)
This was similar to Hume’s arugments that “I” (the reasoning agent) did not really exist (it is just a stream of sansations – who is having the sansations, no one for a thought does not mean a thinker, at least not if one is playing about). And that the external world was just impressions in the mind of the agent (the very agent he holds does not really exist).
Now “this is not the place for philosophy” – O.K. but let us say one is a “good student”.
One is not going to say “this man is pissing about”, one is going to carefully learn either Hume or (more likely) some set of authorities who got their ideas from Hume and others and just put them into more complex language.
Having no abilty to “smell bullshit” is the mark of the “good student” (whether in economics, philiosophy or any other part of the humanities or “social sciences”.
And George Herbert Walker Bush is a classic example of the “good student”. Everthing he did (from the tax increase to the mess up of 1991) was establishment approved by all the “best expert opinion”.
The current President Bush has many flaws (which I, and others, have pointed out many times). But at least he was not a “good student”.
I would much rather a man spent his undergraduate days getting drunk, than spend them agreeing with his teachers.
On Murry Rothbard:
There is a contradiction in Rothbard’s thinking on war.
As an historian Rothbard claimed that in every war the United States faught it was in the wrong – with the exception of the war starting in 1776.
But as a philosopher Murry Rothbard claimed that that to decide to go to war is always wrong if it will lead to inncent people losing their lives and other goods.
The war of 1776 was a revolt against the existing government (the Royal Governors, the Judges, the King in Parliament himself and so on).
It does no good to point at the assemblies in the colonies – for (as the lawyers often pointed out) these depended on charters that were granted from London – indeed the very borders of the various colonies had been changed (by order of the King in Parliament) in the past.
So the revolt may have been the right thing to do (as it was against regulations and against taxation without representation), but it was a revolt – i.e. the war was started by a faction of the colonists.
And remember (whatever some people might like to claim) there was never the aim of getting rid of government (it was not an archocapitalist revolt) – the question was should the colonies be under the government in London (as well as under the local governments) or should there be a new government in the colonies (a “United States government” as that Welfare Statist Thomas Paine named it).
The war also led to the deaths of many civilians and the plundering of their property – especially if they could be claimed to be “Tory” (i.e. supporters of Britain, or at least not in favour of war with it, especially not war in alliance with such traditional enemies as France and Spain).
Therefore under Rothbard’s philosophical doctrines he should have been against the war of 1776 as well.
I am must stress that I am not against the war of 1776 and (like Edmund Burke) I hold the British government to be in the wrong. But that is not how Rothbard should have called it.
Indeed there is something vile in holding that America was in the wrong in the war against (for example) Nazi Germany or the Communists in Vietnam – but it was right to go to war against George III and Lord North.
I do not deny that Rothbard was a great economist, and had many interesting things to say on history, philosophy, and even theology.
However, one must be careful in dealing with his thought. Although, of course, one should not follow anyone blindly.
I think Perry and other commenters capture much of the frustration I have felt with this fiasco.
The war was botched very badly by smug civilians bragging about how ‘bad’ they were and how they knew better than history. I don’t like politicians (or anyone else for that matter) who smirk. What ever happened to ‘Walk softly and carry a big stick?’
There is a group that makes me angrier than the incompetent managers of this war. That is the other side that CFM describes. The political faction that is seeking to maximise to the greatest extent the losses both we and the Iraqis suffer from this effort. These anti-
warsuccess activists are so purely political that they would throw away every life spent so far so they can, like they did in Viet Nam, brag about their how rightous they are. How did they vote? Does anybody recall? These people are, just like the legislative branch is on every other level, energetic only in seeking relection and in avoiding their constitutionally assigned work, all difficult decisions, and any degree of accountability. Just like they bundle their spending decisions into gigantic bills so that they can wash their hands of any unpopular decisions, they have washed their hands of the responsibility they share in Iraq.We broke Iraq. We owe it to our own conscience to fix it and support the free factions in the future to the maximum extent we are capable of. And I curse the political parties that forced us to choose between Bush and Gore or Bush and Kerry and any number of other candidates they conspire to prevent alternatives to. I very seldom meet anyone anymore who is willing to admit to any party affiliation at all, Republican or Democrat. I haven’t in some time. But on those rare occasions, I make sure those people understand they are the problem, not the solution.
And can we please do our part here on Samizdata to keep the dicussions of the war in Iraq and the ‘War on Panicy Frightened Emotions’ er, ‘Terror’ separate in the minds of all those who discuss them?
Mandrill is right. The ‘War on Scared’ really is a PR stunt to cover the government’s conquest of its own people.
War was the wrong choice in Iraq. There are other, better ways that oppressive regimes are replaced -see the book “A Force more powerful” by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVal for details of relatively peaceful regime changes all over the world in the 20th century. Also please note the scarcity of successful – ie free and stable successor regime – regime changes by war. Of course the case for war in Iraq was strengthed by the results of years of our governments bolstering Saddam’s regime as a counterweight to Iran (or maybe just as a market for the armaments industry), which just shows how one mistake creates the condidtions for another.
Let me ask you, should NATO have gone to war in 1980 over Poland, to put an end to 40 years of evil oppression ? If not, why was it right to go to war in Iraq ?
United States, Netherlands, Germany, Japan, France, Italy?
Whose armaments industry? I assume you mean the Russian, French and Chinese ones because as I am sure you are aware, US/UK assistance to Saddam was mostly political (but no less despicable or harmful for that)… but I am sure you know all those 122mm artillery pieces, Katusha, Scuds, AK-47s, Mirages and Migs were not made in Texas.
No, but only because in 1980 NATO would have almost certainly lost an offensive military move into Poland… plus the risk of a general nuclear war was rather too great just then.
Because it is quite possible to win and moreover it does not carry a serious risk of a thermonuclear exchange.
It is one thing to say (as Bill O’Reilly does) that we (Britain and the United States) should have left Saddam to carry on with his wicked ways – as the war has given such a boost to the left (especially in the United States) and the Iraqi’s have continued to mutilate and kill each other anyway (although Bill O’R. still believes there is a chance of victory and we should try for it).
But it is quite another to try and “have it both ways” as Steve Roberts (along with so many others) tries to do.
To say “I am against the war, Saddam should have been got out of power some other way” “forgets” that lots of other ways had been tried – and they had failed.
Why can not people be honest?
Why can they simply say “we should have left him with his dogs ripping people’s testicles off – because the war has hurt us” rather than come out with all this nonsense about the “peaceful alternative”.