TheAgitator.com
Kill Your Idols
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2003While I’m burning bridges, I’ll point to this post by David Beito and the one just above it (not permalinked, unfortunately) by Scott O’Bryan calling one-time minarchist Randy Barnett to account for his cheerleading the war and occupation in Iraq.
O’Bryan and Beito are correct, and that’s really too bad.
Barnett’s is a mammoth intellect, and he’s never failed to impress me every time I’ve heard him speak. I’ll also concede that there are bona-fide libertarians who supported the war in Iraq, and while I disagree with them (more profoundly every day), I’m not in the business of excommunicating anyone from the “movement” (if there is such a thing).
But Barnett’s guest-blog posts over at NRO and Volokh have been particularly disconcerting. Barnett’s more than a liberatarian. He’s a credentialled anarchist, or at least a minarchist. Not only that, but he’s probably the most eloquent defender of the that position this side of David Friedman.
So when one of libertarianism’s brightest bulbs starts gushing over tried and true big-government neocons like Victor Davis Hanson and blogosphere darling Steven Den Beste, yeah, I have to say, it’s pretty damned disappointing.
The kicker for me was this Barnett post on NRO, where he links favorably to a Den Beste screed, with this endorsement:
For an interesting discussion of when concealment may be necessary in the interest of achieving misdirection to accomplish widely shared national security objectives, you should read this by Steve Den Beste, or this by TM Lutas.
Et tu, Professor Barnett? Could an avowed libertarian/minarchist scholar really be saying it’s appropriate for government to mislead, conceal and “misdirect” the public into support for war it might otherwise have questions about? Is this appropriate only when the war itself is just? Or just when there’s a Republican in office? If a war is just on its face, wouldn’t concealment, misdirection and misleading be unnecessary to drum up public support?
Once we concede that it’s okay for government to mislead us into supporting wars we might not fully understand — once we say we’ll just go ahead and trust that the Pentagon and White House know what’s best for us — how are we to know when the wars we’re fighting are right, and when they’re wrong?
These are rhetorical questions, of course. It is never appropriate for government to mislead the governed, because legitimate governments serve only at the discretion of the governed.
I’m always amazed at how willing otherwise sound libertarians are to cut government slack in times of war. History has shown us over and over and over again that wartime is the time when we should be most scrutinous of our leaders, when government is most willing to lie to us, and when government is most likely to usurp power from us, power that it rarely returns.
“National security” doesn’t give the government moral lisence to lie to us. On the contrary, when government starts invoking “national security,” it ought to set off alarm bells — it’s a pretty good sign that government’s about to try to do something it shouldn’t.
Yeah, this isn’t excommunication, this is witch-hunting and irrational purism. I wish people wouldn’t confuse the two
Could this be a case of “too scared to deal with reality” that so many Americans felt after Sept 11. Quite a few of the libertarians and consevetives I know, now sownd more like socialists in their calls for “government protection” from the terrorists of the world.
I guess that it’s easier to be like Clinton and say “we have to give-up some freedoms in the name of security”, than to be like Franklin “any man who gives up any measure of freedom, in the name of security, deserves no freedom at all”
I know that I buchered both quotes, but what do you expect from the home of the Arizona Cardinals?
It must be nice to live in a world where winning democratic office doesn’t require lying, and where intelligent people can keep a straight face when pleading with politicians for honesty.
I wish I lived there.
Where I live, all politicians are liars and everybody with any sense knows it. They also know that there are details of reasonable plans that must be kept secret to protect lives and success.
clay: can you believe that libertarians expect police and fire protection too? they must also be secret neocons.
As one of the quoted links in Professor Barnett’s Corner post I think it’s appropriate to chime in. I’m a minarchist. Functionally, that means that if you can show it’ll work, I’ll be pro-free market on just about anything and am not philosophically opposed to anarchy, I just won’t hold my breath until the bugs get worked out.
The problem is one of foreign policy intersecting with something that is foreign to most modern westerners, a shame culture. One of the central characteristics of a shame culture is that they absolutely will be willing to chop off their nose to spite their face. In dealing with such a culture, if you straight out say that they’re a bunch of screw ups and we’re going to take over a central country, show them how to create a free society, and leverage that working example into a general elimination of governmental lackwitism in the region, you’re going to activate that shame culture in spades.
The negative effects of that are that nobody will help you, everyone will fight you, and it will happen on a level that is much more aggressive than what’s actually been going on in Iraq. That means more casualties, a great deal more, as well as a lower chance for ultimate success.
Now that we’ve established that it’s impossible to tell the bald truth to their faces, the pro-open truth libertarian has to come up with a method to tell the 280+ million US residents the truth without fatally embarrassing the rulers of the Middle East into launching a suicidal assault against the US.
The best that I’ve come up with so far is to hint like mad in ways that bright people in the US will figure out and get the word out through unofficial channels up to and including tiny ones like yours truly.
Is there a better way to do it? I haven’t heard a practical one to date. Solutions that increase casualties and lower the chance of success in draining the terrorist swamp need not apply.
I’d say if you’re going to endorse the following: “we’re going to take over a central country, show them how to create a free society, and leverage that working example into a general elimination of governmental lackwitism in the region”–you’ve adopted a degree of faith in the federal government’s competence and benevolence that goes far beyond minarchism. Odd institution that federal government–too ham-handed and dumb to successfully run a war on poverty, yet smart and sophisticated enough to fix the Middle East and induce a revolution in Islamic theology.
I have full faith that the US goverment is smart enough to smash a genocidal terrorist dictatorship and powerful enough to prevent another from rising. But then again, I am all for the destruction of Terror-STATES and justify this under Anti-Statism.
But I suppose being libertarian today one must be Anti-United States.
I do too, but that wasn’t the question, you anonymous twit.
If the results are such an obvious benefit, why say anything at all? The president didn’t have to justify his actions. If his cause was so just, why not simply do what he thought was right, rather than fabricating a defense for himself?
Truth and Lies, a Libertarian Conundrum
A month ago, I wrote about a dilemma facing the Bush administration’s prosecution of the War on Terror. Yesterday, The Agitator got around to addressing the issue and he’s not happy with the idea of anything but full, immediate disclosure….
Gene - You’re talking about a society that has been under decades of dictatorship. The War on Poverty was a farce and profoundly self-destructive but that’s not the kind of thing that we’re doing in Iraq. We’re not trying to create a dependency to get votes in the future but to create a functioning society. I think that the Coalition armed forces can keep killing off Baathists and jihadists as they pop up while letting Burke’s little platoons go to work in Iraq and build up a local civil society. Ultimately, this is something that the Iraqis are going to build for themselves but there are powerful forces at work to crush it from Iranian mullahs to the east fearing to lose political power, Sunni fundamentalists to the south looking to spread their uncompromising creed and nationalist Baathists to the west and north who would fear a free Iraq giving a living example of the difference between Baathism and freedom.
Without the US to defend them until they are strong enough to defend themselves, the democrats of Iraq have no chance. That’s the kind of building that the US can do and I hope that it continues to do it.
Let’s remember that this entire argument is not about whether Iraq should have been invaded but rather about the timing of the campaign. If we would have gone Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, then Iraq, the same justifications would have been said for the Iraq campaign and they would have been just as true. Saddam was and is perfectly capable of attacking the US and is motivated to do it. Eventually he would have slipped his leash and we would have been in trouble because of it.
TM Lutas writes :”Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, then Iraq”
The only sequence that makes sense is Saudi Arabia, then Pakistan. If you want to know who’s funding terrorism, and who’s spreading WMD, that’s the two.
Jon H - So in World War II the only sequence that made sense would have been Japan, Germany, then Italy?
In reality, we went N. Africa, Italy, France, Germany, then Japan Yeah, the actual sequence is a lot longer and more complicated but I think I’ve made my point.
What did North Africa ever do to us that it deserved invasion in WW II?