17 July, 2007

Libertarians and the Iraq War

Gautam emailed a while earlier to point me to a piece by Randy Barnett in the Wall Street Journal on how libertarians were divided by the Iraq War. It reminded me of an excellent post by Don Boudreaux on Cafe Hayek in which he nailed it:

Libertarians properly don’t trust government to run our pension plans, to deliver health care, to educate our children, or to provide disaster relief. Why be so trusting of government to wage war?

Much to my embarrassment now, I supported the Iraq War when it happened. If every intelligence agency in the world believed Iraq had WMD, I figured that must be credible. Removing the evil regime of the monstrous Saddam Hussein would also be a great benefit. The thought of democracy in the middle east also made me happy. Well, naive, stupid me.

I changed my mind on the war once it became apparent how badly the Americans handled the aftermath, with their inflexibility and arrogance exacerbating their serious strategic errors. Given how government functions, how it is essentially just a collection of people with the wrong incentives spending other people’s money, how could I possibly have expected otherwise?

I’m not an American citizen or taxpayer, so it may seem that I don’t have to bear the costs of the war. (I don’t mean merely the monetary ones.) But I am—as are you, I would imagine—on the same side as them on the War on Terror, and their screw-ups affect us all. There are no islands, as John Donne might have said.