Anthony Gregory wrote:

AG: A foreign occupier cannot "institute self-determination."

This assertion is multiply refuted by World War II counterexamples alone: Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Japan.  It's just not a serious argument to pretend that self-determination is somehow spurious if its inauguration involved foreign assistance. This is a particularly addled version of the already-confused CleanHandsitarian argument, which is one of the many arguments I've seen made against the invasion. I order them here by decreasing weakness: 

1. ChickenHawk: if you've never personally faced danger or risked loss in this or any war, then you cannot argue this war was justified.
2. Chicken: invading Iraq might increase the danger you personally face from terrorism, so you shouldn't argue that the invasion was justified.
3. Patriotic: Americans would be justified in resisting a foreign invasion, so any American invasion can expect justified resistance.
4. Sovereigntarian: the state of Iraq did not initiate force against the state of America, and/or/thus invading Iraq was a violation of international law.
5. Noncoercitarian: our military is funded with coercive taxes, so anything it does is un-libertarian.
6. AmericaFirstitarian: the duty of America's military to defend human liberty stops completely at the current borders of the American state.
7. CleanHandsitarian: America does not have clean enough hands at home or in the past abroad to try to increase liberty by force abroad now, even by toppling a murderous aggressor.
8. WhiteGloveItarian: if a policy is likely to result in the death of even a single innocent, then that policy is immoral no matter how much it otherwise increases human liberty, or how much one attempts to avoid such deaths.
9. Miss Congeniality: invading Iraq decreased America's popularity abroad, and so therefore it was wrong.
10. Monday Morning Quarterback: the aftermath of the invasion isn't going as well as we expected, therefore the invasion was wrong.
11. Fatalistic: invasions have never increased liberty and will never increase liberty, so we shouldn't have invaded.
12. Slippery Slope: if we invade Iraq under these circumstances, aren't there other countries we should be invading too, and isn't that absurd?
13. Pessimistic: we should have known that the invasion wouldn't increase liberty, so we shouldn't have invaded.

1. To propose this non sequitur would be to disqualify oneself from being taken seriously.
2. You would be well-advised not to repeat Mark's mistake in advancing this argument.
3. Your invocation below of the Patriotic argument is not a good sign for your discernment in choice of arguments.
4. You were wise to repudiate the Sovereigntarian argument from the start.
5. You've offered no response to my rebuttal of your flimsy arguments that 1) libertarianism is whatever the anarcho-capitalist LP platform says it is, and 2) libertarianism implies anarchism because anarchists have re-interpreted the LP Pledge that way.
6. You haven't invoked the AmericaFirstitarian argument, but I can't rule that out since you've already invoked the even-weaker NonCoercitarian argument.
7. You've offered no response to my answer to your shockingly-uninformed when-did-Saddam-murder question. You've offered no response to my reiteration of the U.S. military's obvious aversion to collateral damage. You've failed to justify your historically uninformed assertions that America sponsored Saddam's regime or its aggression against Iran (see below).
8. I answered your WhiteGloveItarian hypotheticals and gave you counter-hypotheticals that apparently have led you to abandon this argument.
9. The Miss Congeniality argument is really only interesting as the meta-argument that if invading Iraq were right, then we need to explain why so many abroad think it was wrong. I shouldn't need to explain to a Libertarian why what's right isn't always what's popular.
10. You now seem to be relying most heavily on the Monday Morning Quarterback argument. This argument is irrelevant to the Iraq invasion decision for the obvious reason that time travel is not available. However, it's extremely important for you that the Iraq invasion be seen as a failure, or else you'll have to start ignoring questions about the whole of Iraq just like you ignore questions about increased Kurdish liberty after 1991.
11. The Fatalistic argument is interesting only for its appeal within the libertarian movement. Libertarians are so instinctively contrarian and conspiracy-believing that they are susceptible to arguments even (or especially) if those arguments blatantly contradict the consensus of mainstream peer-reviewed scholarship on empirical questions of e.g. history or economics. Despite your refusal to accept this consensus, you don't dispute that the U.S. military occupation replaced tyranny with liberty or at least self-determination in 10 of the 17 nations I listed, and thus fatally undermine your own fatalism.
12. The Slippery Slope argument is unattractive to platform-fetishizing Libertarians, because even they must dimly perceive that a variety of lines could be drawn and defended so as to eviscerate this argument and leave some forms of intervention justified.
13. The Pessimistic argument is even more unavailable to platform-fetishizing Libertarians, because it plainly admits of a logical possibility that their dogma denies -- viz., that an invasion could increase liberty. This argument is also flawed on empirical grounds, as I note that you (as I predicted) did not address my point that the Iraqi Kurds are an existence proof that the U.S. military can increase liberty for Iraqis.

The Iraq war is for American libertarians as the Kosovo war was for American leftists and the Vietnam war was for American jingoists: it's the first American war in their living memory whose circumstances challenged their unthinking spinal reflex concerning American wars. These wars separated the critical thinkers from the dogmatists in the respective groups.

Now on to your specific comments:

AG: I'm not talking about implementing the LP platform. I'm talking about the fact that Iraq will likely be less free than it was under Saddam. Before the war, average Iraqis had easy access to weapons you couldn't buy in DC, New York or most of America:

http://www.iraqjournal.org/journals/030218.html

DemocracyNow is left-wing propaganda, and all this report tells us is that in the weeks before the war a DemocracyNow "reporter" was shown a single Baghdad gun shop as part of an obvious publicity stunt to deter the imminent invasion (that DemocracyNow has always opposed).

AG: After the war, these guns were rounded up, and arms dealers and those with too much ammo fell to summary execution, in many cases:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60E12F73A5A0C728EDDAC0894DB404482
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-03-23-baghdad-guns_x.htm
http://www.rednova.com/news/general/17053/troops_kill_suspected_iraqi_arms_dealers/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4578755.stm

"Many cases"?  The only thing close to a "summary execution" in the above was an attack on people unloading weapons (presumably illegally) in Tikrit, Saddam's home town and a center of Baathist insurgency. The men attacked (not "summarily executed") had an Improvised Explosive Device and a photo ID issued by Saddam's regime to its supporters. The single "too much ammo" case above was an arrest (not "summary execution") for "having too much ammunition for a licensed weapon", implying civilian access to both ammo and weapons.  The USA Today report is about the gun dealing that increased AFTER the defeat of Iraq's army. It tells how the dealers of AK-47s and RPGs have been deterred by the increased security that makes shopowners no longer feel the need to carry handguns. The NY Times article is about "automatic weapons and heavy weapons".

Your uncritical and distorting use of the above sources seriously damages your credibility.  Your prediction that "Iraq will likely be less free than it was under Saddam" is unsupported by your evidence..

BH: Remember the Kurds? Try as I might, I can't get any anti-war Libertarian to discuss what's been happening in Northern Iraq for the last fifteen years. The reason for their reluctance is obvious, especially for someone like you whose primary argument seems to be that the invasion of the rest of Iraq was likely to turn out badly.

AG: The Kurds were better off before this war. Now the pesh merga gangsters dominate Kurdish affairs even more than before,

As I predicted, you decline to discuss the embarrassing fact that before liberation by the U.S. military, the Kurds were having their cities forcibly Arabized and entire towns were being exterminated with chemical weapons. After liberation, Kurdish Iraq north of the 36th-parallel no-fly line enjoyed a peace and prosperity that has been widely acclaimed. From http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7230132/:

"Here, under the protection of the American military for more than ten years, Kurds have built a haven of peace and prosperity which, thanks to political maturity learned at the feet of American development agencies, now controls 75 seats in the new Iraqi parliament and leaves Kurds poised as kingmakers in negotiations to form a national government. [...] Sulaymaniyah's population has mushroomed to more than half a million, including many Iraqis who have fled north to escape the violence paralyzing their country and drawn here by security and economic opportunity. [...] Saddam's  Baath party chased Kurds out of Kirkuk in the 1980s, replacing them with Sunni Arabs from southern Iraq to work in the nearby oilfields. Now the Kurds want their homes back, and a share of the oil revenues."

AG: and their ties to the central state will mean little for the actual Kurdish masses.

Thus you don't deny that the rest of liberated Iraq will integrate the Kurdish provinces without undoing the peace and prosperity inaugurated there by the U.S. military.

AG: maybe if a libertarian government from Mars came to America, killed fifty thousand Americans and said it was trying to liberate us, and thought it was worth trying, you'd be skeptical of the claim.

Yes, because it would be an absurd claim. America's constitutional democratic republic has been increasing personal and civil (though not economic) liberties almost monotonically for two centuries.  Combining three different indices of freedom, only 10 nations are classified as more free than America (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_indices_of_freedom).  It's just silly to pretend that all nation-states must be freely interchangeable in the moral calculus of whether nations can be justly invaded, which is why I rank this Patriotic argument as among the weakest available to you.

BH: I also notice you did not even attempt to rebut my material on alleged U.S. sponsorship and encouragement of his war with Iran:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/182
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/189
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/198

AG: I see not reason to "rebut" denialism of the plain and obvious truth. But I suggest you look at this:
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0304p.asp

Sorry, but you're shooting blanks. Nothing in your sources says that the U.S. encouraged Saddam to invade Iran. The NY Times article merely says what I already noted in my messages above:

During the Iran-Iraq war, the United States decided it was imperative that Iran be thwarted, so it could not overrun the important oil-producing states in the Persian Gulf. It has long been known that the United States provided intelligence assistance to Iraq in the form of satellite photography to help the Iraqis understand how Iranian forces were deployed against them.

The way I put it was: "at certain times during the Iran-Iraq war when Iran was perceived as the greater threat, the Reagan administration sought to punish Iran and forestall Iranian victory by offering limited support for Iraq, the most significant part of which seems to have been satellite intelligence."

I already addressed the Rumsfeld cable and Teicher affidavit in my links above. The rest of your links seem to be about not the absurd notion of U.S. sponsorship or encouragement of the invasion of Iran, but rather are allegations about tenuous connections between Iraqi WMD programs and shipments of mostly dual-use materials from western nations like the U.S.  (The same sort of connection-finding was the basis for the mistaken U.S. intelligence assessments of Iraqi WMD before the 2003 war.)  I've seen no evidence that the U.S.ever had a policy of assisting Iraqi WMD programs.

BH: The US has forcibly replaced tyranny with liberty or at least self-determination in the Confederate States of America, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Japan, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Kurdistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

AG: Ah, yes. I see. Except for the half of Germany that ended up in the hands of the Soviets, for the fact that the Confederacy was not "freed" by that war but denied its Constitutional right of secession, that slavery ended peacefully throughout the western hemisphere without any other government killing more than half a million people, for the devestation done to Grenada and Panama, for the fact that the Balkans have been a mess since Clinton's murderous bombing campaigns there (which, in the case of Kosovo, only led Milosevic to capitulate to the same conditional terms he was willing to before the bombing began), for the fact that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is "free," and for the sad U.S. record of creating the conditions for fascism in Europe upon entry into WWI, turning over half of Europe to Communism, and killing millions of innocents throughout the 20th century, I think you make a good point.

Your complaints are easily addressed:

• You don't even deny that the U.S. military occupation replaced tyranny with liberty or at least self-determination in 10 of the 17 nations I list: Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Japan, Kuwait, and Kurdistan. Your only complaint in these cases seems to be that the U.S. didn't liberate other territory at the same time, but it is a fallacy of the excluded middle to say we should liberate everyone or no one.
• The Constitution (unfortunately) has no provision for secession. If slavery was known to be ending in the western hemisphere, then the Confederacy can be blamed for killing half a million Americans for the dubious privilege of enslaving people for a few extra years. Libertarians cry "slavery" over even a small sales tax, so it's a little odd for a libertarian to counsel patience in the face of what was perhaps the largest case of actual non-metaphorical slavery in human history. At any rate, it's absurd to claim that U.S. military conquest of the Confederacy resulted in a decrease in the aggregate amount of liberty there.
• Grenada and Panama were not "devastated". I note that you don't deny that liberty increased there, as documented by the graph of Freedom House ratings over time at http://www.doctorweevil.org/archives/000791.html.
• The Balkans have their problems, but the fact remains that NATO precision bombing ended years of the largest-scale ethnic killings and displacements in Europe since WWII. Again, your "murder" mantra is a clumsy and transparent attempt to conflate unintentional killing with malicious premeditated killing, and to conflate arguably noble ends with clearly nefarious ones.  It still wouldn't be technically accurate to call collateral deaths manslaughter, but it at least wouldn't be so intellectually inept. Your claim about the terms ending the Kosovo war is at odds with reality; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War.
• You're careful above not to deny that U.S. military conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in a increase in the aggregate amount of liberty there. Given your anarcho-capitalist extremism, your substitute denial that they are "free" is vacuous.
• Blaming Wilsonian America for Europe's subsequent fascism is to confuse path dependence with sufficient causation. Europe's fascism was caused primarily by economic developments and by the extremism of the Versailles Treaty that Wilson in fact had tried to moderate.
• I'd love to see some scholarly sourcing for your claim that the American military "kill[ed] millions of innocents throughout the 20th century". The most comprehensive work I've seen on civilians killed by governments is by R.J. Rummel in Death By Government, 1994. I reproduce his data at http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#CiviliansKilled, and of course, America doesn't even make the list.

My claim thus is unscathed: U.S. military occupation has a long track record of bringing increased liberty and increased self-determination.

AG:  it's good to know that pro-war libertarians such as you might have sided with the British during the American Revolution.

No, I think the revolutionary means chosen were proportionate to the increase in liberty that was the end. Given that you apparently would have opposed a war to liberate 3.5 million people -- 40% of the Confederacy's population -- from chattel slavery, and given that our neighbor colony Canada achieved the eventual peaceful liberation that you seem to claim invalidates any resistance to tyranny, it is you and not I who presumably would have sided with the British.

AG: Read the libertarian material at Antiwar.com, the Future of Freedom Foundation, The Independent Institute, and LewRockwell.com. You'll see all the pro-war arguments destroyed.

I've identified over a dozen anti-war arguments and shown how easy they are to rebut. I challenge you to nominate the single most succinctly powerful anti-war text from the above sites, and I'll gladly give it the same dismantling that your efforts here have received.

AG: The best I've seen from the pro-war side is the jingoistic sloganeering that America fights wars for freedom, and that America has liberated the world.

Your usage turns the term jingoism on its head. True jingoists oppose the use of force to liberate others, and reserve it only for protecting or advancing national strategic interests.

AG: And so we shouldn't think about the millions it has killed

We should always think hard about those America has killed. For example, see http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=187.

AG: and the fact that the world has never hated us more than right now.

If it were true (which it's not) that the world has never hated us more than now, then the world is ignorant, because there was much more about us worth hating when we were installing anti-communist authoritarians or suppressing civil rights or enslaving millions. America has much to be both ashamed and proud of, but people who are ignorant or dogmatic will always be susceptible to simple-minded and myopic anti-Americanism.

P.S. A big reason why you are losing this debate is the asymmetry of burden of proof. Your position is that no reasonable libertarian could have supported the invasion of Iraq on any grounds. To refute you, I just have to show that reasonable liberty-lovers could have disagreed on whether to invade. I in fact do more than that, and argue strongly that liberty-lovers in fact should have supported the invasion. But I'm not going to put much effort into changing the minds of anti-war Libertarians on this score, because for most of them their opposition to the invasion is an unavoidable consequence of an intricately rigid worldview that for reasons of temperament and personality structure they are unwilling to unravel over an issue like this.  My policy is to eventually rebut any serious criticisms of my writings, but as it becomes clearer that you cannot meet your burden of proof here, my responses will become even more leisurely than this one was. But rest assured that they are inexorable.