Bruce Dovner writes: "Dictatorships are prima facie initiators of force. Therefore any third-party would have the right to defend the oppressed victims of dictatorship, and topple the dictatorship."

Anthony Gregory  writes in response:

AG:  This does not, under any circumstances, mean that third-parties have a right to initiate force against the innocent to achieve the goal of liberation. Killing innocent Iraqis because of the crimes of Saddam Hussein is no more defensible than [...]

Iraq's liberation was not planned around the question "how many innocents should we kill in order to liberate Iraq?"  The question you fail to confront is: can tyrants immunize themselves from third-party opposition if they just arrange that such opposition will inevitably kill one innocent despite all reasonable efforts not to?  The reason you flee from this question is obvious. If you say yes, you surrender any pretense of being a liberty-maximizer.  If you say no, you surrender the clean hands and moral purity that you (selfishly?) value more than liberty maximization.

AG: Americans will each be robbed more than a thousand dollars on average once this is all done, and thousands of Iraqis have been killed and maimed for this socialist project. Add to that the 2,000 young Americans who have died [...]

Whoops, you accidentally wrote "killed" and "died" instead of "murdered" -- but you made up for this momentary lapse of rhetorical sanity by gratuitously calling what America is doing in Iraq a "socialist project".  Such clumsy name-calling can be answered merely quoting a dictionary:

socialism n. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy

And of course, we non-anarchist libertarians do not agree with your anarchist dogma that taxation is always robbery.

AG: and I find it perplexing that anyone could endorse such senseless death and tragedy

By contrast, I'm not too perplexed that a self-described advocate of liberty could oppose replacing a million-bodycount totalitarian aggressor with a federal democratic constitutional process aimed at protecting minorities and fundamental human rights. The theory that best explains the available evidence about your position is that you value having clean hands more than you value maximizing the net incidence of human liberty. Such values could be described variously as noble or selfish, but they're just not maximally libertarian.

AG: even if you believe that murdering 10,000 Iraqis is worth it to save the freedom of the remaining Iraqis --

THAT'S the question-begging facile rhetoric we know and love from you. For a second there I was worried that you were gearing up to mount an actual intellectual defense of your position... :-)

AG: Iraq is in many ways _worse_ off than it was before,

AG: steadily becoming an Iranian-style theocracy, run by Shi-ite mullahs and entrenched in civil war.

There are important differences between Iraq's current path and Iranian-style theocracy. According to professor Juan Cole (often published on antiwar.com), Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani rejects Iranian-style direct rule by clerics and instead "feels the clerics should intervene through their rulings (fatwas) to ensure that Islamic law and Islamic principles are upheld by any Muslim-majority parliament."

The draft Iraqi constitution is far from theocratic, but if you've followed the ethnosectarian rivalries that its drafting has surfaced, then you know that partition is a real possibility. The example of the Iraqi Kurds shows that de facto partition isn't necessarily a bad thing in Iraq.  If the only choice in Iraq was between 1) Sunni totalitarian oppression of the remaining 80% of Iraqis and 2) tensions between self-determining Kurdish, Shi'ite, and Sunni Arab partitions, then that's not a very hard choice to make. If the Iraqis had a chance of making a multi-ethnic democracy work, then they deserved the opportunity to try. If they fail, they must assume the major share of the blame.