First of all, a bit of self-disclosure. I was a registered Libertarian for several years but resigned from the party in disgust shortly after 9/11 because of the appalllingly high number, IMHO of course, of Libertarians who chose to blame the US for the attacks. Since then, I’d say I’ve been mostly a member of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, but not too rigid about where I stand on most issues. I can see the logic of extreme libertarian, moderate libertarian and middle of the road with just a tiny bit of libertarian thinking thrown in positions on just about anything.
But there is one exception. I just don’t get how Libertarians or libertarians can maintain the position that the US is to blame for 9/11 and if we would just pull back to our borders then everything would be fine. Have these people read anything about the history of Islam? This is a political movement/religion that started in one small spot in the Middle East and expanded to take over Spain and reach the gates of Vienna in the 1700s. This didn’t happen because someone pissed them off and and then they retaliated and won. They consistently invaded countries, killed lots of people and forced many others to convert.
OK, so you might be saying that I’m just another dumb Islamophobe. They have no interest in expansion. We have nothing to worry about. Fine. But would you at least concede that throughout history there have been wars? And that it’s not just bad guys that get attacked? So therefore nations should acknowledge that there will be enemies and defend ourselves against them? And that sometimes preemptive attacks are by far the best way to go?
I can see the point of extreme libertarian isolation up until maybe 1950 or so. But after that we have ICBMs and WMDs with suicide bombers attached. I just don’t get it how we can be safe just by playing defense and having a really good first responder system.
Also, I’m not sure if getting into the microdetails really settles anything. I can see that supporting dictators pisses people off and we’ve done a lot of that. Both parties. But even if we stopped that 100% I don’t see how that affects my basic arguments. For instance, I don’t know of Poland supporting any dictators in the 1930s but they still got whacked pretty hard.
So, I’m open to hearing how we would be safe by pulling back to within our borders. In fact I’d be happy to change my mind on this, if possible.
It’s a little disingenous to claim that Muslims are inevitably going to attack the United States because they invaded Austria in 1683. That was the Muslims’ last attempt at territorial expansion. In the three hundred years since then it’s been Christian countries invading Muslim countries. Worrying about present-day Muslims because of what the Ottoman Empire did makes less sense then worrying about the British Empire trying to reclaim us as lost colonies. (And it was the Arabs who attacked Spain and the Turks who attacked Austria. Saying Muslims attacked Europe is like saying the Buddhists bombed Pearl Harbor.)
As for the motives of the current Muslims who attacked us, the libertarians point out that al Qaeda and other radical groups haven’t made any secret about their goals. They’ve openly stated that they attack countries that intervene in Muslim countries. They didn’t attack the United States before we had a military presense in the Middle East, attacked us when we first sent troops to the Middle East (in 1983) and then stopped when we withdrew those troops (in 1984). There were no more attacks until 1991 when we sent troops back to the Middle East. Then they’ve been attacking us steadily ever since. So the idea that an American military presense in the Middle East is what’s motivating the terrorists is strongly supported by the evidence.
As for the idea that we should pre-emptively attack countries that could potentially attack us, leaving aside the moral issues, shouldn’t we practice such a policy on a rational basis and attack countries in the order that they have the ability to harm us? Canada and Mexico are right next door - they could attack us a lot easier than any Middle Eastern country. England, France, Russia, China, and India all have nuclear weapons - they’re more dangerous than Iraq or Afghanistan. Western Europe and Japan are stronger than any Middle Eastern country, so they’re a bigger threat to. Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria all have bigger populations - they’re more dangerous than Iran or Libya. On the threat to America scale, the Middle East is actually pretty minor league.
And Poland was a dictatorship in the 1930s and was actually a supporter of Germany right up to the point when Germany set its eyes on Poland.
Forget Libertarians. The bipartisan 9-11 Commission found that Osama bin Laden declared war on the US on the basis of the continuing American occupation of the holy land of Saudi Arabia. I mean, that’s pretty much a fact. I don’t see that making reference to that fact is “blaming” America for 9-11 – Al Qaeda is clearly to blame for 9-11, but pretending that America never did anything to offend anyone is just fantasyland.
I don’t believe in an isolationist foreign policy. I think foreign aid is a good thing, setting me well apart from most libertarian dogma. But the premise of the OP is pretty questionable.
Possibly because Libertarians tend to be quasi pacifists, in the genuine, not the Gramscian sense.
To a Libertarian, free, peaceful trade and social give and take between peoples and nations for mutual benefit is all that’s needed.
Motivations that fall outside the scope of this assumption do not and cannot exist because the bedrock assumption of a Libertarian is that at bottom, ‘everybody’ would rather conduct their business on a peaceful basis and that this the natural order of things.
Throughout history, violence, threats of violence and war is far more common and is still resorted to as the preferred choice of doing business by many junta style gangster states. This is particularly the case if gangster states calculate that they can achieve faster and better results through violent means.
Libertarians also have a tendency of ignoring the power of ideology as a motivation for human behaviour. The thought that people would deliberately act in a destructive and murderous manner simply to satisfy a set of deep seated beliefs falls completely outside the boundaries of a Libertarian mindset and bedrock assumptions. For them: ‘It does not compute.’
Libertarians do get one thing right. Appeasement can buy you a little time. Unfortunately, Libertarians also have a tendency to believe it can buy a lasting peace.
I doubt that it would work.
The fact that you are still breathing oxygen can be interpreted as an act of aggression by many of your fellow denizens of Earth .
Well, I’d like to politely disagree, especially on that last point. I think if you follow the news of the last year or so you’d find that in the near future Iran poses more of a threat than Nigeria. But at least you are willing to concede that sometimes it makes sense to attack countries who pose a threat. So we agree on that.
I guess I’ll by avoiding the use of irony in this thread.
My point was that you have to distinguish between two seperate qualities; a foreign country’s ability to attack the United States and a foreign’s country’s intent to attack the United States. Your post mentioned both of these but muddled them together. You wrote that we should attack countries that intend to harm us but, even if they didn’t intend to harm us, we should attack them anyway becuase they have the ability to harm us. However, we shouldn’t attack other countries that had the ability to harm us because they have no intent to harm us.
Reading your post, the one consistent pattern is you think we should attack Muslim countries. It makes me wonder if your pre-emptive claim that you’re not an Islamaphobe is due to the accusation having been made in the past.
I’m not suggesting that we allow other countries to dictate our foreign policy - we should do what we think is right even if other countries disagree. But we do have to consider that other countries will do the the same and will carry out their foreign policy in a manner that they think is right in their self-interest. If China had invaded Mexico and had a large army stationed right next to the United States, we’d be worried about the possibility of China invading us next. And that’s how we look to Iran. So don’t blame Iran for acting the same way we’d act if we were in their situation.
It’s a little frustrating that people think we can only be threatened by a naton, not a movement. for historical background check out the following Wikipedia article: Muslim conquests - Wikipedia
It’s very important to distinguish fundamentalist movements like al qaeda and the muslim world. AFAIK, most muslims (say well above a billion of them, close to 1.4 actually) are more tolerant and peace loving than, say, Plan B.
I’m a libertarian and I never blamed the US for the 9/11 attacks. There was a severe lack of intelligence, to be sure, but Bush et al weren’t the perpetrators.
A libertarian doesn’t believe in non-defense of a country, and it is possible that some could argue that attacking Hitler was a defensive act. But it’s a lot harder to say that attacking Iraq is in the same category.
In fact, Ayn Rand said one of the few proper functions of a government is defense. She didn’t say offense.
Libertarianism doesn’t mean isolation, but it does mean keeping our nose out of others’ affairs, or at least avoiding the force (draft, taxes) necessary to pursue such an action. Libertarians believe that peaceful trade to get what you want is preferable to having it grabbed by the biggest army, and peaceful trade benefits both parties more than war benefits either.
I happen to be quite incensed that no one is doing a damn thing about the Dust mite genocide going on in the region of Plan B’s alveoli.
American foreign policy is very disruptive and doesn’t really pay much attention to the consequences in the countries where we meddle. The notion that we are hated for no reason is naive. You don’t become the most powerful nation on the planet, EVER on the planet for that matter, without pissing a few people off. Throughout the cold war toppling foreign regimes was common policy, and well it has had it’s negative consequences.
However, at the same time, people don’t want to be like China and be aiding the genocide in Darfur due to a doctrine of non-interference in the domestic politics of the countries where we do business.
It’s important to remember that the US convenes private wars that rarely make the news on a regular basis. Try looking into the movement of troops into Paraguay if you are interested in something going on right now that you probably know nothing about. Did you know there is a large Lebanese population in the part of Paraguay that has little government influence? The locals claim we are trying to seize the Guarani Acquifer which is one of the largest fresh water acquifers in the world. You think the oil wars are bad, wait until people start fighting over water. Oil is negotiable, you can live without it. Try living without water, you’ll last only a few days.
I was a definite left-winger early in life, but I’ve found my thinking trending libertarian lately. With that caveat, I’ll try to answer Plan B’s questions.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
No.
My stance on war is the same as that of G. K. Chesterton:
A preemptive attack is still an attack. It is not defense. But beyond that, there are reasons why a libertarian should not support preemptive war.
The government decides who to preempt with a war. But we, as libertarians, believe that government is naturally mendacious, deceitful, and corrupt. Hence we should naturally distrust any government claim that a preemptive war is necessary. Moreover, supporting preemtive wars gives the government a motivation to cast every war as a preemptive war. For example, if the government wanted to invade an oil-rich country to benefit certain influential oil companies, they might claim that the country had weapons of mass destruction and ties to an international terrorist group, and use that as a justification for invasion. (That’s obviously a purely hypothetical scenario with no relationship to anything that’s happened in reality.)
We, as libertarians, believe that the government can’t do anything right. So if the government goes charging into a foreign country in order to eliminate some threat, they’ll probably either (a) screw up and lose the war or (b) win the war, screw up the reconstruction effort, and create an even bigger threat. For instance, they might remove a nasty secular dictator, but then give the country over to a coalition of hard-line religious fanatics. (That’s obviously another purely hypothetical scenario with no relationship to anything that’s happened in reality.)
Supporting military action has consequences that go beyond the military. Generally, whenever you have a military campaign, it leads to growth in government. But when the military action is over, the growth in government remains. For example, during the 1950’s, the government started to subsidize mohair farmers because military uniforms were made of mohair and we didn’t want to depend on external sources that might fall to the communists. A few years later, the military switched to synthetic fabrics for its uniforms. But guess what? The mohair subsidies still exist.
One must assess risks. We’ve never been attacked by a single ICBM or WMD. Not once in history. Nor is it likely to happen any time soon. And if it did, there’s a good probability that our police and intelligence services would stop it form succeeding.
We cannot be totally safe by pulling back within our borders. Nor can we be totally safe if we’re invading third world countries all the time. The only question is, which option makes us more safe? Foreign invasions inherently do great harm, create new enemies, and raise tensions even with our allies. Pacifism is not a perfect option, but it is the best option.
I’m torn between liking libertarian ideology and thinking it is incredibly naive and unpractical. Truth be told, I think libertarians get a lot of stuff right, but in practice they tend to be too ideologically entrenched, in my opinion, to respond correctly to certain situations that don’t fit within their world view.
As an example, look at ITR champion (and by partially G.K. Chesterton’s) quote:
How do you define, “preemptive war?” I don’t agree with the general assertion that only defensive wars are defensible. But a lot of what I mean when I say that depends on how you define “preemptive war” or even “war” itself.
Going into places like Rwanda, for example, or some other random country to try and control a civil war and stop people from butchering civilians. Is that a preemptive war? Is it an “attack?” Is it really even meaningfully the same thing as a traditional war? A lot of the libertarian (and IR theory in general) ideas on warfare are still going back to a time when the definition of war was a pretty clear cut thing. Is it a “war” when you’re moving military forces into a country and you do not have the goal of conquest? Maybe not even the goal of fomenting a change of government.
What does one mean when one says “defensive war?” Does that mean the only war that is justified is one in which your country is being actively invaded? What about the case of the Barbary Pirates? They were notorious pirates who charged enormous tributes to law-abiding merchants. Was the United States wrong to attack them in order to stop their acts of piracy? They didn’t invade us by any means.
What about situations where another country clearly attacks our military or territory but then has no intentions of directly invading us (like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, for example?)
The notion that there must always be a rational reason to hate the US is naive.
Debatable, dubious and quite tripey.
Tripe.
Tripe.
Whose troops?
What kind of Lebanese?
How much government influence is a little?
Whose government influence are we discussing here?
Who are the locals? The large Lebanese population?
What oil wars?
I won’t claim omniscience. Was there some war after 1683 where a Muslim country invaded some Christian African country? If so, it was an aberration in the general pattern of the era - in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and so far the 21st century it’s been Christian countries on the offesnive.
Aquila Be It not about whether there ‘should’ be a rational reason to hate the US, but more of a matter of the fact that there IS a rational reason to hate the US. You act as though the US foreign policy takes into account the feelings of the indigenous people whereever we act, which in fact we don’t. Politics is about apportioning resources. If resources don’t get apportioned your way it’s not irrational to be pissed off about it.
