Paul Ireland wrote:

> The U.S. Military is defined and limited by the
> Constitution as being for the DEFENSE of America. 
> Not anywhere else.  The first president of the U.S.
> warned of entangling alliances.

No libertarian should regard either the U.S. Constitution or George Washington as an unquestionable moral authority. As a libertarian, I'm more concerned about the defense of liberty than about the defense of any particular nation, state, county, or precinct.

> The tired "Tyranny anywhere is a threat to liberty
> everywhere" line is just a way for people to excuse
> their desire to practice imperialism and military
> interventionism.

Are you questioning the honesty of my self-report in saying that I desire liberty for the Iraqi people? Are you a mind-reader?

> The U.S. isn't a "liberating army", it's a "defensive army"
> and any attempts to use it as a liberating army are a flagrant
> misuse of the military.

To a libertarian, the purpose of the state military is to defend liberty. I disagree with the assertion that defending liberty outside our borders is never helpful for defending liberty inside our borders.

> The valid and limited role of the U.S. government does NOT
> include choosing who will or won't be free, who will or won't
> rule a country, what kind of government they will have,
> what weapons they will or won't have, etc.

I agree that the U.S. government should not be the guarantor of every human's liberty. I do not agree that the U.S. government's duty to fight tyranny ends completely at America's borders.

> There are hundreds of thousands less Iraqi people today
> than there were before this blatantly unconstitutional war in Iraq. 

What is your evidence for this claim?  Even the most pessimistic estimate (published in The Lancet) estimates only 100,000 "excess" deaths since the 2003 invasion. 50,000 fatalities is probably closer to the truth; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_in_the_conflict_in_Iraq for details.

If you are indeed more concerned about fatalities over there than you are about having clean hands over here, then consider that Saddam caused around two million deaths. The Iran-Iraq war he started killed an estimated million people. He got about 100,000 of his troops killed by invading Kuwait. He caused several hundred thousand excess deaths of Iraqi children by refusing to comply with the United Nations' oil-for-food conditions in the aftermath of his war of aggression against Kuwait. He killed hundreds of thousands of Kuwaitis, Kurds, Shiites, and dissidents. For details, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Iraq_War
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/2000/09/iraq-000918.htm
http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/hussein.htm
http://academic.regis.edu/jriley/saddam_hussein.htm

> People have been leaving the LP in droves thanks to
> the kind of people I mentioned.

What is your evidence for this claim?  I know quite a few liberty sympathizers who are put off by the LP's crypto-anarchism, but I don't know anyone who left the LP because it's not anarchist enough. 

> The only people who should be in the party are actual libertarians
> and this disqualifies anyone who supports the war in Iraq.

Are you saying you would favor the expulsion of anyone who would ever advocate America forcibly replacing tyranny with liberty?  To my mind, an "actual libertarian" is one who seeks to minimize coercion by everyone, and who isn't afraid to do more about it than simply set a good example. But I wouldn't expel those who fall short of this ideal.

> You asked what I specifically oppose about the RLC.  I oppose
> to all of it.  I don't care what libertarian sounding rhetoric they use,
>  or what they CLAIM to support.

Do you have evidence that what they "claim to support" differs from what they actually desire?  Or is this more mind-reading? :-)

> If you support the war in Iraq,

I disagree with much about the way the Bush administration initiated and conducted the war. But I have no problem with the U.S. military deposing a tyrant who killed well over a million people, invaded one neighbor, annexed another, fired ballistic missiles at two more, and defied disarmament mandates.

> you support using force for political gain and social engineering,
> and you are absolutey NOT a libertarian and you have no
> valid place in the LP.

I proudly support the use of force for defending human liberty.  Unless you're an anarchist, you agree with this principle and simply disagree with me about how to apply it. (Do you think someone who is on trial should be allowed to compel the attendance for testimony of an innocent bystanding witness? If so, you support the initiation of force.)

Like you, I too think that some Libertarians -- I'm thinking of anarchists, isolationists, non-coercitarians -- fall short of my own standard of 100% libertarianism. But since we all want to move America northward on the Nolan chart, I think it makes sense for us to join forces in a party that pulls in that direction.  America is stuck in the ditch of nanny-statism, and I'll gladly pull with anybody who wants to get it out.  The time to part company will only come when America is back on the high road of liberty, and the misguided few still want to keep pulling toward the opposite ditch of anarchism.