(This post is in response to this article, penned by Ryan Sager, a NY Post columnist. You would do well to read that article first, since this post will make better sense if you've read the arguments he presents in their entirety first. The arguments here are mine entirely, and in no way should be attributed to any institution with which I am affiliated.)
I have a lot of respect for some of the libertarian hawks. There was a perfectly coherent, libertarian argument, that went, "Saddam is preparing to attack us. We know that he has WMD, and the government is telling us that he is going to use them to attack us. After 9/11, we can't allow him to do that."
That was a perfectly coherent argument, and one I almost bought. Thankfully I didn't, but honest, smart, libertarian people could have made it. I know several libertarians who thought that, and have since retracted, allowing that they were misled by the administration and shouldn't have believed what the government was telling them. It takes a lot of intellectual balls to admit that, and I hold such people in high esteem.
There also seem to be people who bought that argument, but don't recognize that it's been proven untrue. These people continue to deride antiwar libertarians for their "unseriousness" and "incoherent" views without a hint of irony.
Ryan Sager is one of those people. It takes a lot of intellectual chutzpah to level such charges right now. Sager claims that antiwar libertarians need to "get serious" about foreign policy, and cozy up to the Republicans. Let's take a look at a few of the charges Sager levels:
[After 9/11] Instead of reassessing their minimalist instincts when it comes to intervention abroad, many in the institutional centers of the libertarian movement -- principally at the Cato Institute and, to a lesser extent, at Reason magazine -- have remained mired in a pre-9/11 mindset.
Sager has presented no argument why libertarians should "reassess their minimalist instincts." Cato's scholars promptly urged the president to take action against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, and to uproot their sanctuaries in Afghanistan. [Sager previously characterized those who took this position but objected to Iraq as being "pacifists," but has subsequently sort of recanted.]
The reason, perhaps, that Cato's scholars have not jettisoned their "minimalist instincts" and adopted what Sager seems to dub the only appropriate "post-9/11 mindset" is because Cato's policy was right all along. Back as far as 1998, Cato was authoring papers along the lines of this one, titled "Does U.S. Interventionism Abroad Breed Terrorism? The Historical Record." Sager, for someone who used to work at Cato, seems not to have read much of Cato's work on the issue. (More on this to come.)
As for being "mired in a pre-9/11 mindset," Sager presents no argument for what, specifically, an acceptable "post-9/11 mindset" would be, other than presumably more receptive to a misleading case for pre-emptive war or a utopian case for preventive war. Why noninterventionists should have ditched their principles and started supporting promiscuous interventions abroad after 9/11 remains unclear. Prudent foreign policy thinkers wondered what invading Iraq would do to public opinion in the Middle East, the region we intended to transform. With views of the U.S. in middle- to high single digits in most Muslim countries, hearts and minds seem rather far off.
Sager goes on to make a long, if nauseating case, that in case intellectual honesty is preventing noninterventionists from selling out, the prospects of political favor should help. Sager argues that getting rid of the libertarian position on foreign policy would allow libertarians to garner more "sway within its traditional home, the Republican Party."
For Sager's information, Cato is nonpartisan. Though we seem to have made some inroads with the R's on Social Security privatization, they have been no friends of ours on quite a few issues for some time. Drug legalization, federalism, constitutional interpretation, trade policy, social policy, and civil liberties have been just a few of the issues that have kept libertarians from lying in bed too long with the Republicans. I, for one, am okay with that. Helps me sleep at night.
Sager then presents a list of indictments against Cato's post-Iraq invasion foreign policy scholarship:
On Dec. 13, 2003 -- after the March 2003 invasion -- Cato published a policy analysis titled, "Iraq: The Wrong War." ("We told you so!")
Well, it seems that in the wake of the sweeping warmaking principles put forth by the Bush administration, one might want to look back and see how things worked out. Just because you're right doesn't mean you don't get to write.
On Jan. 5, 2004, Cato published "Can Iraq Be Democratic?" (Cato's answer: "No.")
Sager should read papers before he criticizes them. Patrick Basham, the author of the paper in question, is anything but an antiwar ideologue -- he is a serious scholar who wrote a comprehensive, meticulously footnoted paper on what criteria Iraq would have to meet to have a hope of emerging as democratic in light of the historical record. Sager demonstrates convincingly that he hasn't bothered to read the paper later in his own article when he offers the novel suggestion that "[l]ibertarians could delve into questions of nation-building -- all the better to help us disentangle ourselves from where we're entangled more quickly. What are the prerequisites of a free society? How can they be fostered?" Thanks, Ryan, but we've done that. Just because the evidence doesn't comport with your worldview doesn't mean that you get to claim it doesn't exist. Read the paper first.
Sager goes on to claim that attempts to extricate ourselves from the Middle East would amount to "surrender" and "a sign of weakness." One wishes that he could at least have leveled the charge of "appeasement," which has become so nauseatingly frequent that I almost think of it as a term of endearment. Sager is partly right here: getting out without allowing for a sense of surrender or weakness is indeed important. Several of Cato's scholars have proposed that we could have followed a "declare victory and go home" strategy after the fall of the Taliban or Saddam Hussein. Of course no one is proposing that the U.S. pull every single government official out of those countries: we must absolutely have intelligence operatives and special forces hunting down, gathering information on, and, yes, killing al Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist groups. Changing one's mind about the desirability of a policy merely because someone else likes or dislikes it is not careful thinking. If Osama bin Laden said that he attacked us because our marginal tax rates were too high or we were thinking about passing the Federal Marriage Amendment, that doesn't mean we should raise marginal tax rates or pass the FMA.
Sager reaches back to his quiver of straw men for more ammo: in his view, the noninterventionist position during wartime is that "the job of libertarians...is simply to whine about spending and assist the ACLU in opposing the governmental bad guys at home." This is almost too silly to rebut, but I'll take the bait. I would submit that, when one believes a policy has gone off the rails, his job is to make persuasive arguments that the policy has gone off the rails and to prevent the conductor from shoveling more coal into the engine. That's what Cato has been doing.
Then Sager turns to a tired and vacuous maxim:
Libertarianism, in and of itself, does not in any way limit its adherents to a minimalist approach to foreign policy -- i.e. using the least amount of force possible to respond only to the most imminent of threats.
Is that right? Gosh, you could have fooled me! If I remember correctly, Murray Rothbard made a few arguments about war and peace, as did Ralph Raico, Ted Galen Carpenter, Earl Ravenal, and quite a few others. Sager would do well to at least briefly entertain the libertarian arguments about war and peace instead of denying that they exist. I can synopsize them pretty briefly.
Most libertarians believe, as Robert Nozick did, that: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights.)" I believe this, too. For me, this group of rights includes the right to one's own life. This right is possessed by all people, even Iraqis. This claim is not absolute, and can be overridden by other claims, such as the claims to protect a people from impending attack or to prevent a prior attacker from attacking again. In my world, though, it does not mean that Iraqis' right to their lives can be overcome by Ryan Sager's (or President Bush's) ideology about how things need to be run in the Middle East. The U.S. government, for all the arguments that have been made to the contrary, is not responsible for those who were murdered by Saddam Hussein. There are mediated consequences and unmediated consequences, and they are not of the same moral importance. When the U.S. government drops a bomb on an innocent Iraqi, his death is an unmediated consequence of the act. When Saddam Hussein murdered an Iraqi, the Iraqi's death was, at most, a mediated consequence of the U.S.'s failure to depose Saddam Hussein. Putting the same moral weight on the two is absurd.
It is possible to say, tenuously, I think, that the large-scale state killing the U.S. has done in Iraq is part of the war that was started on 9/11. Never mind that the dead Iraqis had nothing to do with it, never mind that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it. There's a neoconservative argument that says that the U.S. government must take over and administer certain countries in the Middle East to prevent them from contributing to or presenting threats like that which wrought 9/11. It is simply an astonishing leap of logic to think that libertarians, with their overwhelming skepticism about state power, would believe that such a staggering goal is attainable by a government that is unable to determine how many rolls of toilet paper our own country will need during any given week. I would submit that making those claims simultaneously is either intellectual dishonesty or intellectual incoherence.
Then comes the sweeping claim that capturing bin Laden "would be nice -- very, very nice -- but likely of little strategic import." Sager may have some information that they don't, but al Qaeda experts Michael Scheuer and Peter Bergen think that capturing OBL would be quite important. It certainly seems more important than painting schools in and dodging bullets in Mosul and Fallujah.
Sager goes on to suggest several positive steps for Cato's foreign policy team -- smuggling books, promoting trade with Muslim countries, working to get U.S. ideas into Muslim countries, et cetera. Some of these we've already done (trade stuff here, for instance), but some of them are not as important as preventing our government from making the terror problem worse. Which is what most libertarians believe is happening with the "war on terror" as it exists today.
What the libertarian movement really needs, contra Sager, is to hold thinkers like Sager to honest standards of accountability. This would involve asking questions like those I've outlined below to the libertarian cheerleaders of the Iraq war. It doesn't always need to be about recriminations for what stupid things the government has already done -- it's often about who has a coherent idea where to go from here, in addition to determining who has made bad judgment calls in the past. I would submit that the reason most libertarian hawks have clammed up about Iraq is because they don't want to have to marshal the type of arguments Sager's resorted to in his article, and because they don't want to face questions and responses like the ones I've posed here.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: sometimes the only thing sillier than the NY Post's Page Six is what its political commentators produce.
