"Our Islamist enemies want to kill us all — starting with Jews and gays, but continuing to anyone who doesn’t convert to Islam and accept shari’a and the whole nine yards. That’s not melodrama, it’s reporting of the plain and simple statements Al-Qaeda uses in their recruiting videos. They want to kill us all. They demonstrated the deadly seriousness of this aim on 9/11.
The choice between “support the war” and “allow the pressure off of enemies who want to kill us all” is not a difficult one. As a libertarian, I’m deeply sorry we live in a world where governments are doing the fighting for us, and I fear the consequences of the power they will amass while doing so. But I don’t see an alternative.
If I had a magic wand that could instantly materialize a world of private security agencies, insurance pools, and mercenaries capable of fighting the war on terror, I would have waved it long before 9/11. But I am not capable of changing the objective conditions of the war any more than I am of changing the murderous intentions of our enemies."
Regardless of why the Islamists want to "kill us all" (mostly because of Western interference with their private affairs), one must keep in mind that a mere want is not enough to justify action. As a libertarian, this is made explicitly clear. Force is only justified in order to defend life and property. That is, force should only be used in self-defense (in both attacks and threat of attacks) and for retribution. That's it. Anything outside the scope of what I just mentioned implies the unjust initiation of force. He then continues:
Though I’ve been accused of abandoning my libertarianism for a conservative position, I still believe in the non-initiation of force as strongly as I ever have. I saw one damn huge freaking initiation of force on 9/11 — not just an attack on one city or one country but an assault on Western civilization. Everything al-Qaeda’s propaganda organs have said since confirms that is what they intend.
I think that you indeed have abandoned your liberianism. There's little debate that what was done on 9/11 was done by al-Qaeda (there are other theories but let's not go there now). So therefore, the correct response would be to catch everyone who helped commit those murders. Send the military to find those individuals responsible, wherever they might be (perhaps mostly in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia) and capture them. When they are found guilty, then punishment becomes totally justified and necessary.
[...]We’ve shown far too much of a tendency to slide into denial about the war on terror and the consequences of refusing to fight it.
Sliding off into denial and fantasyland is not noble, it’s an abdication of our responsibility as human beings and members of a civilization. If that denial becomes “the” libertarian position, our statist opponents will damn us as for deserting our neighbors and our civilization in its hour of need — and they will be right to damn us.
Other libertarians may fail this test. I will not.
Mr. Raymond claims that libertarians must sit in meditative idleness and wait to be attacked before being able to use retaliatory force. What he does not seem to realize is that libertarians are not pacifists. As I explained before, the use of justified force is perfectly consistent with libertarianism. If A tries to hurt B, B is totally justified in using force to repel A's attack. This is not pacifism at all, Mr. Raymond; you should know better. If one has the right to life and property, then it follows that their defense is justified. To not believe that, that is, to be a pacifist, would mean that resistance to murder would be wrong.
Moreover, it is wrong under libertarianism (and really, under almost any theory of punishment and law I can think of) to kill innocent people. Those who have not tresspassed against your property are not guilty of anything. Therefore, any act of force against them would make you the initiator of force --that force would be unjustified. What can we conclude here? That the war on Iraq is not libertarian (it is also not moral or constitutional). It is not libertarian because the U.S. is killing innocent people who had nothing to do with the mess in New York. Those "insurgents" in Iraq are defenfing their country. Those armed civilians, Mr. Raymond, are acting properly to attempt to repel a foreign invader. You of all people, being an advocate of individual armed self-defense, should be able to understand this particular point. It makes no sense to send an army of one hundred thousand troops to find a few hundred or thousands. There is no need to plunder, kill innocent people, destroy cities, set up puppet governments or forcibly establish constitutions.
If one is to assume Mr. Raymond's position on preemptive attacks, then the U.S. should be waging more illicit wars, wars againt Iran and North Korea. Surely they want to kill us too. Also, to take Mr. Raymond's position seriously would also mean that the U.S. should be fighting itself, since the federal government is also jailing and killing innocent people via the drug war, for example. If we continue taking this position, it would mean that anyone who says "I want to kill you" should be immediately executed, even if that person poses no credible threat and lives thousands of kilometers away.
The "fantasyland" that he is talking about is already here and has been since the arrival of the 20th century. We are living in times where life is not respected, when innocent people are killed by governments all in the name of defense and freedom! But defense can only occur as the result of violence or the threat threof. If an angry Muslim says "I WANT YOU TO DIE," let us not go into apoplectic spasms and push the "NUKE THE MOTHERFUCKER" button. By doing that, by initiating force, one becomes the aggressor. Mr. Raymond's support of this preemptive and unlibertarian war is on even shakier ground because of the physical distance between those who claim who want to kill us and ourselves. This does not mean that one cannot and should not keep an eye open. There is a need for security. That being said, however, principled libertarians cannot condone the use of any military resource outside of the country. If the purpose of the military is to defend, then the only reason to deploy it outside of the country's border is to fend off an imminent attack. The rest of the time, it should just keep watch.
As I said before, force is justified also when there is a real and imminent threat made against life or property. Were the Iraqi's about to attack anyone in the U.S.? Probably not. And even if that had been the case, you would have to target the military and not the people in general.
I would like to offer an alternative foreign policy, one that has worked for centuries. Let's look at Switzerland. This has traditionally been the best paradigm of neutrality. This country is armed to the teeth. For example, every male citizen there is required to do military service; they also have a large arsenal of privately owned firearms. Their foreign policy is very simple: don't mess with anyone. And guess what? It has worked. Wars have been fought all around Switzerland. Potential enemies prefer to avoid them since they know that they are armed and ready to defend their nation. However, Switzerland has few enemies since they themselves do not embark on military campaigns all over the globe. Thus, I propose instead that the U.S. should adopt a similar policy: that of armed neutrality (of course, by armed I mean sufficient to defend the country, not to destroy the world, so a downsizing becomes imperative).
In the end, Mr. Raymond has aimed his guns at the wrong crowd and fired upon innocent people.
