| | Jeff (post #33) writes:
"And who ever said the U.S. military should exist but 'never' be used?" Jon Trager
Jon,
Based on long observations, I conclude that as the de facto position of Michael Marotta and a great many other libertarians who have expressed similar views over the past few years here and on other sites. (Actually, the view expressed usually goes much further to declare the military, and the whole of the U.S. government, has no business existing in the first place.)
Then, from Bill Dwyer (post #34):
I went to an event a few weeks ago at the Independent Institute, a libertarian think tank in Oakland, California. . . .In the Q&A, I asked for the respective views of the panelists on the appropriate response to 9/11.
Professor Hummel said that we should have done nothing [about going after al Qaeda after 9/11] -- that the attack of 9/11 was blowback for a failed U.S. foreign policy stretching back decades, and that the corrective response was to unilaterally withdraw from all foreign involvement, starting now. Professor Payne said that he would have sent troops into Afghanistan to go after Al Qaeda, but that was all. President David Theroux said that the proper military response would be to authorize "Letters of Marque and Reprisal" in which a private, mercenary army would be authorized to go after Al Qaeda. So, two out of three respondents said that the U.S. military should not be used even in this case. I gather they might have sanctioned U.S. military involvement if the war were taking place on U.S. soil.
The link between Perren's and Dwyer's posts is that the Independent Institute is an anarchist organization. I went to college with Jeff Hummel and know him well: He's been an anarchist since the late Sixties. His view of 9/11 appears to be "blame America first," writ large, as: "blame America only." I believe that David Theroux is an anarchist, too. I don't know about Payne. However, the Independent Institute has taken consistently anarchist positions on virtually all issues, notably leading the charge for a completely privatized legal system and criminal justice system. (For example, they publish anarcho-economist Bruce Benson's books, such as To Serve and Protect, which promotes a completely privatized justice system, and which explicitly attacks my own retributive theory of criminal justice, as advanced in my book Criminal Justice?)
So, Jeff Perren is right: The reason this group wants no U.S. military retaliation for the 9/11 attack grows from the fact that these guys don't believe in a U.S. military -- period.
But Bill Dwyer grants them too much credit when he says, "I gather they might have sanctioned U.S. military involvement if the war were taking place on U.S. soil." Bill, that presupposes that they believe in a "U.S." -- a nation-state that has both national boundaries and a military. No, I am confident that if you'd query someone like Jeff Hummel about this, he'd reject any defensive governmental military action even against terrorism taking place in America, simply because he doesn't believe in the legitimacy of the American government.
So much for the fate of "national security" under anarchism.
But it gets even sillier and more convoluted.
David Theroux's fall-back position -- the Constitution's article concerning the federal government's issuance of Letters of Marque and Reprisal -- is certainly a curious position for an anarchist like him to take. Anarchists do not even recognize the validity of the federal government or the authority of the Constitution -- and hence, they cannot honestly recognize the government's legitimate authority to issue such Letters in the first place.
However, for sake of argument, let's forget the disingenuous arguments of anarchists like Theroux and concentrate solely on the merits of this "alternative," since Ron Paul (who is not an anarchist) has endorsed it, too.
Let me re-quote what Bill offered from Prof. Fred Foldvary:
"Marque" is related to "marching" and means crossing or marching across a border in order to do a reprisal. So a Letter of Marque and Reprisal would authorize a private person, not in the U.S. armed forces, to conduct reprisal operations outside the borders of the U.S.A.
Such Letters are grantable not just by the U.S. Constitution, but also by international law, which is why it was able to be included in the Constitution. The Letters are grantable whenever the citizens or subjects of one country are injured by those in another country and justice is denied by the government of that country, as happened with the attack by persons who were in Afghanistan. . . .The Letters combined with high rewards for the capture of terrorists would create an incentive for Americans to conduct these operations.
Now, try to follow the logic here, folks:
If the U.S. government sends its armies across foreign borders in retaliation for injuries, that constitutes "interventionism," and it is both unconstitutional and terrible, because it will lead to "blowback."
However, if the U.S. government authorizes private mercenaries to cross foreign borders in retaliation for injuries, and offers them rewards to do so, that is constitutional; it is (somehow) consistent with "noninterventionism"; and there will be no "blowback."
Ayn Rand said: Don't bother to examine a folly; just ask yourself what it accomplishes. Well, what is accomplished by this "privatization"-of-war folly?
For one thing: delegitimizing America's armed forces as our defensive agents.
Observe that exactly the same violent actions that are declared illegitimate if performed by soldiers wearing our nation's uniform, suddenly acquire legitimacy if they are performed by plain-clothes, gun-toting gangs.
The position of both Theroux and Ron Paul is thus hypocritical and nonsensically incoherent. The idea that violent retaliatory actions by private American citizens authorized and rewarded by the U.S. government, and conducted inside Islamic nations, would not be perceived as "intervention" or lead to "blowback," is completely ludicrous.
But more ludicrous is the idea that a mercenary army operation (which would be just as enormously expensive to fund as would a U.S. military operation) could be as effective in America's defense as the combined resources of the various branches of the American military -- including the vital intelligence-gathering capacities of the CIA, NSA, etc. Try to conceive of how a mercenary group could possibly have gone after the well-armed al Qaeda operation inside of Taliban-run Afghanistan. The Taliban regime had clearly been giving aid and sanctuary to al Qaeda. Imagine the scale and cost that the reprisal operation would have required. Well, you don't have to. . .because it was conducted by the U.S. military. Using satellite intell, CIA and U.S. Special Ops guys on the ground directed massive U.S. bombing runs against al Qaeda and Taliban forces, driving them from power and their mountain sanctuaries.
Anybody think Blackwater has that kind of hardware and firepower, folks? And frankly, what would be their motive for doing it -- unless they were paid billions? You think the families of the 9/11 victims have that kind of cash on hand? And if the rewards and bounties are to be paid for by the U.S. government anyway, why not send in the U.S. military and be done with it?
Even more ludicrous is the idea that this privatization of warfare would not lead to wholesale atrocities on a horrifying scale. The U.S. military operates under strict rules of engagement and within a publicity fish bowl -- as we have seen from various episodes of troop misbehavior, such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and others. No national military is under more critical public scrutiny. The actions of our soldiers are held to account and must take place within certain rules and parameters, the Geneva Convention being among them.
But under what constraints would private mercenaries operate? On foreign soil, how could their actions possibly be monitored and controlled? And what happens to America's reputation when a gang of hired thugs dispatched from the U.S., paid by our government, but under no legal supervision, shows up in Iran or Turkey or Sudan to "right" some wrong for private U.S. citizens, by means of unconstrained violence?
I do agree with Bill that such Letters could and probably should be issued by the U.S. government, but only in certain small-scale cases in which a private victims had grievances against individuals in foreign nations. The Marque (marching orders) for such operations would have to be strictly defined, and their issuance come only after some verdict in an American court of law had determined that a crime had indeed been committed by someone using a foreign address as a safe haven. (The famous Ross Perot-funded mercenary operation that rescued kidnapped U.S. citizens from the Middle East comes to mind.)
But Letters of Marque and Reprisal would be utterly useless for large-scale military actions against hostile governmental regimes (Iran, the Taliban) and their agents; or against international terrorist networks (al Qaeda) operating in multiple nations; or against large, formidable gangs operating on foreign soil (Mexican crime lords, the Mafia, etc.).
In the broader context of national defense, then, this whole "Marque and Reprisal" proposal is phony, through and through. Nobody could really expect mercenary operations to serve as a successful alternative to U.S. military operations. And privatizing military ops abroad would give a green light to atrocities committed by private U.S. citizens, which would rightly enrage foreign nations. This proposal is merely a diversionary effort, a smokescreen issued by anti-American-government anarchists (and picked up by naive people like Ron Paul), intended to delegitimize U.S. military action on foreign soil in defense of American national-security interests.
That "noninterventionist" Ron Paul, in order to avoid "blowback," would keep American troops on bases inside the U.S., but authorize, reward, and dispatch mercenaries to fight America's battles in foreign lands, underscores the monumental incoherence of his thinking. The man is utterly disqualified to address the number-one issue confronting any commander-in-chief: our nation's security.
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