Barbara Branden responds to my post:

> Roderick, you don’t take into account the fact that

> America rules none of those countries. It could have

> acted like Soviet Russia; it didn’t. That’s a difference

> worth noticing.

It doesn’t strike me as a deeply significant difference.  Just as communist countries prefer to nationalize industries directly, while fascist countries prefer to keep industries nominally private but under a regime of government favoritism and control, so the Soviet Union preferred to administer its colonies directly while the U. S. generally prefers puppet dictators and client regimes (including, in times past, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban).

> To say that 9/11 was a response to “American acts of

> war,” is, I’m sorry to say, simply preposterous. There is

> no evidence for it, and much evidence to the contrary.

What evidence is there to the contrary?

> You cite our bombing of Iraq after the first Gulf War. We

> bombed it because Iraq kept shooting at our airplanes as

> they flew over what they had agreed was to be a safe zone.

I don’t see how that keeps the Iraq bombings from being American acts of war.  I didn’t say they were initiatory acts of war.  (Well, they were initiatory against the civilians killed, but not against the Iraqi regime – just as the 9/11 bombings were initiatory against the civilians killed, but not against the U. S. regime.)  What Ms. Branden had said was that the U.S. was not at war prior to 9/11 and that was what I was disagreeing with.

Orion “Reasoner” responds to my post:

> Oh, golly... Let me see... Why did we bomb

> "poor widdle" Sudan?
> Why did we bomb "poor widdle" Libya?
> Why did we bomb "poor widdle" Iraq?
> I mean, it couldn't possibly have anything to do

> with the fact that all three of these "poor widdle"

> countries WERE BEING RUN BY COMPLETE

> GODDAMN LUNATICS, BENT ON SPREADING

> THEIR VICIOUS LUNACY, COULD IT??? 

Again, this is completely irrelevant to my point.  The heads of those countries certainly were bad guys (though not lunatics, particularly).  American acts of war against them were indeed in response to acts of war on their part – which in turn were acts of war in response to previous American acts of war, and so on and on back over the course of the last century.  Note that my argument didn’t turn on those bombings by the U.S. being unjustified.  As it happens I do think they were unjustified – both morally, because of the civilians killed, and strategically,  because they provoked more attacks than they repressed – but even if one thought those bombings were completely justified one would still have to admit that the U.S. has been at continuous war in the Middle East for decades – and so it is a mistake to say that 9/11 initiated some war.  The argument I made was the argument I made, and not some other imagined argument.

> WHY DO YOU EVEN HAVE TO HAVE THESE

> RIDICULOUSLY OBVIOUS THINGS POINTED

> OUT TO YOU?  I mean, are you being PAID by someone

> to PRETEND THESE THINGS NEVER HAPPENED? 
 
Ad hominem and ignoratio elenchi.

Lindsay Perigo responds to my post:

> Roderick Long is simply a Saddamite pseudo-intellectual

> of the "yes-but" variety - snide post-modernism at its

> loathsome worst.

> The truth is, he'd more readily acquiesce to Islamic theocracy

> than defend Jeffersonianism.

Golly ... ad hominem again, ignoratio elenchi again!  Who spiked these guys’ drinking water?

On a broader point:  something I find puzzling.  Why is it that so many Objectivsts are so willing to trust the good intentions of the U. S. government when it comes to actions overseas, though those same Objectivists wouldn’t trust it around the block on domestic issues?  The advantages of the U.S. system derive not from the fact that our rulers are nicer but simply from the fact that they are more constitutionally restrained – as we can see from the unrestrained way they behave overseas when freed from constitutional limits.  In Stephen Pearl Andrews’ words:  “The advantages which we enjoy in this country ... come entirely from the ... small quantity of government which we tolerate, not at all, as is supposed, from any superiority in the quality of the article.”

I’m not talking about economic competitiveness per se, rather the conditions under which an economy can perform. My gist is that global economic interests require a global military presence.

The US could possibly function without that presence, or with a greatly reduced presence, but the result would be a world less friendly to US commerce. As to the balance between military and other government expenditures, and between government and private expenditure, that’s a separate issue, one for the administration of the day to deal with

Brendan.

Sure, we want to dominate the globe militarily just as we dominated the other countries we helped, such as Germany and France. And the economic benefits of the Iraq war have been overwhelming: $120 billion spent, to say nothing of more than a thousands soldiers killed. As for clout, yes, the world is certainly afraid of us, which is why our supposed allies, France and Russia (not to mention China), were selling arms to Iraq which have been used to kill Americans, while we wondered why they refused to help us.

I’m not expressing approval. I’m saying that’s the way superpowers act. At least in part this is because economic interests follow military presence, as we see in Iraq, and cannot survive without a military presence.

“Switzerland is "isolationist" by your standards, but it is relatively free and prosperous and maintains good trade and diplomatic relations with other nations…Exactly what is wrong with this approach?”

Nothing at all – if you’re Switzerland. But Switzerland was never colonised by people determined to create a New World, and nor will it ever have a leading role in the world akin to the United States’, so different considerations apply.

More to the point, the trajectory of United States history has almost invariably been expansionist, to the point where it is now the word’s number one military and economic power.

You can’t turn back history. Great power status cannot be divorced from economic and military strength, and great powers only relinquish their leading role when they begin to decline. So the issue isn’t whether or not the US should be a great power -- with all that implies – so much as how it should use its power.

Brendan

Three thousand innocent people ware murdered on 9/11 by a gang of fanatical, suicidal thugs who were trained and financed by wealthy, multinational terrorist organizations

Like the Left, a great many libertarians - including members of the Libertarian Party and many who are not - are united in the vilification of America, a vilification which is now almost as prevalent as hatred for George W. Bush.

If it were not for America’s disastrous foreign policy for many years (which clearly had nothing to do with Bush, who has been president for less than four years), there would be no problem of terrorism, say both the Left and these libertarians

 the result of America’s support of dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia

It is a sick irony that most of the countries of the world are damning, as imperialists, the one country that has invaded other countries only in order to free them.

It is an even uglier irony that so many people calling themselves libertarians have joined America’s leftist European critics and are echoing their denunciations of the most decent and generous nation that has ever existed.