| | Randy is right but that doesn't mean that anything goes as a libertarian foreign policy. Very, very few things follow deductively from first principles such as individual rights to life, liberty, etc. Yet many things can be inferred from such principles, or derived from them, conceptually and inductively, including most provisions of the criminal law, limited government, etc. Actually, that is most that any practical science can do--arrived at basic principles and infer from them solutions for practical problems.
So, on the matter of foreign policy, a free society's government would not engage in preemptive war because it is wrong to send the military into action other than what constitutes defending the rights of the citizenry from foreign aggression. What is true, however, is that what exactly constitutes aggression against one's country is not simple to ascertain in a world in which the government of one's country has been quite interventionist; nor is it clear what is the right response to such a government's involvement with various treaties, including those drawn up by the United Nations; nor is it clear how to assess the involvement of a country such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq in terrorist attacks on one's country's people.
The muddled character of all this does make it difficult to sort out just what is the proper course to support for those who firmly adhere to principles of individual rights. Those, like me, who believe that the UN resolutions aren't ones our government ought to have agreed to and who also believe that the US military should not be sent off to fight even the worst dictator unless this dictator has launched attacks upon the USA (and that does not include attacking an American company's employees who work in Iraq or the Middle East), and who also hold that there are better ways of placating foreign dictators than with deadly force that cost American lives--such libertarians would oppose the Iraqi war. Others, like the people at the Ayn Rand Institute, actually advocate nuclear war against not just Iraq but all countries that have given even the slightest support to terrorists (and against North Korea and Cuba, one may assume). There are those, like Randy Barnett and (I believe) Jack Wheeler or Alex Alexiev who think the terrorist links of Iraq are significant enough to include it among those countries that need to be treated as enemies of the USA and dealt with in the appropriate strategic fashion.
So, yes, it isn't a matter of deductive inference but it is a matter of careful reasoning, nonetheless, in which first principles must figure in heavily.
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