From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Monday, October 03, 2005 10:41 PM
To: 'LPCalPeace@yahoogroups.com'
Cc: 'marketliberal@yahoogroups.com'
Subject: Re: To Brian Holtz
Paul Ireland wrote:
BH: The state's duty to oppose and prevent aggression shouldn't end abruptly at its borders
 
PI: Wrong.  The state's duty to oppose and prevent aggression can, and should end where our borders end.
That's a perfectly self-consistent position to take. We'll just have to agree to disagree over whether it's a liberty-maximizing one.
BH: Saddam's regime killed over a million people, invaded one neighbor, annexed another, fired ballistic missiles at two more, and defied UN disarmament mandates after building a track record of 1) harboring terrorists, 2) using chemical WMDs, and 3) pursuing nuclear WMDs. 
 
PI:  All of which is entirely and completely irrelevant and absolutely no justification to use the U.S. Military.  It wouldn't matter if Saddam was taking over the entire middle-east, developing nuclear weapons, building and using WMD's against his own people, raping women, murdering their husbands, and boiling their children alive in oil.  None of that is justification to use the U.S. Military.
There are indeed solid AmericaFirstItarian principles for Americans not ever fighting aggression in Iraq, just as there are solid CaliforniaFirstItarian principles for Californians not ever fighting aggression in Maine. You can call such principles "libertarian" all you want, but that won't make it so.
 
But even from an America-centric perspective, you conveniently 1) omitted any mention of Saddam's support for anti-American terrorists, and 2) artificially qualified Saddam's WMD ambitions as being against only his own people. Thus you failed to even face the self-defense argument made from the conjunction of Saddam's nuclear ambitions and his support for anti-American terrorists.
PI: only a GlobalGovernmentitarian would claim ignoring something the UN ordered them to do was a violation worth invasion.
You were the one who was trying to apply a hyper-legalistic Sovereigntarian individual-liberty-ignoring state-personifying argument that the American state can only invade the Iraqi state if the latter initiates force against the former. I simply pointed out that as a Sovereigntarian, you should also consider it an initiation of force for a state to violate its contractual agreements with other states.
BH:  Saddam's support for anti-American terrorists is indisputable. Saddam harbored Achille Lauro terrorist Abu Abbas, WTC bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin, and Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal
 
PI:  America harbored and trained all of the 9/11 terrorists in exactly the same way Saddam did. [...] He never helped anyone who attacked America, never paid them, and never "harbored" them in anyway America didn't do the same for the 9/11 terrorists
Laughably false. Al Qaeda WTC bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin fled to Iraq where he lived freely and apparently drew a government salary.  Abu Abbas used an Iraqi diplomatic passport to flee Italy after killing a wheelchair-bound American on the Achille Lauro, and Saddam protected him from extradition for years in Baghdad before he was finally captured by the U.S. military in 2003.
PI:  Also, you ignore the fact that Iraq, was attacked by America without justification or cause in 1991.
That America had no "justification or cause" for answering Kuwait's appeal to reverse its brutal annexation is not a "fact", it's simply your opinion.  An example of a "fact" is that Iraq's annexation of Kuwait was blatant aggression, and that Kuwait appealed to America and its other allies to reverse that annexation under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 678.
PI: America, and the rest of the world are in MORE danger, not less because of the Iraq war.
 
BH: Defending liberty does not always increase security. The tension between liberty and security is the essence of the Nolan Chart.
 
PI:  The Nolan chart does not determine who is or is not a libertarian.
Thank you for not disputing my claim that defending liberty does not always increase security.
PI: The Non-Aggression Principle does.
Yes, I'm familiar with your repeated assertion of this. However, my dictionary says:
 
libertarian n. One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state.
 
I don't agree that the incidence of aggression is minimized -- i.e. that the incidence of liberty is maximized -- if liberty-lovers merely promote aggression-virginity through the example of their abstinence.  I instead advocate the Anti-Aggression Principle, which says that the role and incidence of aggression in human society is to be minimized. You assume that the landscape of attainable levels of liberty has no local maxima, i.e. that an investment in force initiation could never lead to a net reduction in the overall incidence of force initiation. This assumption is in my judgment obviously false, and is what distinguishes non-aggression anarchists from anti-aggression libertarians.
PI: America's role in defending liberty ends where America's borders end.  As much as you wish for a world without borders, the fact remains that we have them
Borders are a very good thing. I just disagree with your AmericaFirstItarian claim that the American state should have absolutely zero role in defending liberty outside its borders.
PI:  This is all pure opinion and also irrelevant.  Ask the Shiites and Kurds in Iraq whose family has been murdered by the American military while defending their homeland [..]
It's laughable to dismiss the views of the majority of Iraqis as "pure opinion" and in the same breath invoke the opinion of the tiny fraction of Iraqis who have lost a family member as a consequence of the invasion.
 
The killing of aggressors is never murder, nor are unintentional collateral deaths caused by those fighting aggressors while seeking to minimize such deaths. You can bleat "murder" all you want, but in doing so you're preaching a conclusion to your choir, rather than arguing for that conclusion.
PI: But even if they were better off, is this justification for misusing the U.S. military to invade a nation that never posed a credible threat to the U.S.?
I didn't say that merely making Iraq better off makes the invasion justified. I just refuted your laughable claim that "the people of Iraq are no better off now than they were with Saddam in power".
PI: But don't take my word for it, take the word of the 9/11 commission which stated clearly that Iraq NEVER POSED A CREDIBLE THREAT TO AMERICA.
Flatly false, yet again. The 9/11 commission report mentions Iraq 158 times. The closest it comes to saying the above is that after the plot against G.H.W. Bush's life, "no further intelligence came in about terrorist acts planned by Iraq".  But the report notes without any criticism a DoD paper described as saying that
Iraq posed a strategic threat to the United States. Iraq’s long-standing involvement in terrorism was cited, along with its interest in weapons of mass destruction.
The invasion of Iraq was outside the scope of the 9/11 commission report, and the report simply does not dispute the charge that Iraq's involvement with WMDs and anti-American terrorism constituted a threat to America. If you claim otherwise, I defy you to quote the report.
PI: Bush planned on invading Iraq before he was even selected by the Supreme Court as president
Even if Bush had spent his high school prom night planning the invasion of Iraq, it wouldn't affect whether the justification I've given for it is reasonable.
PI: Hundreds of thousands were murdered, and tortured by America, just as they were under Saddam
 
BH: Your charges of mass torture by America are absurd.
 
PI: your claims that America did not torture people are absolutely laughable.
What's "laughable" here is your reading comprehension. I denied that "hundreds of thousands" were tortured. I didn't claim that no Iraqis have been abused by the American military.
BH: Fatalities caused by all sides in the entire conflict since the 2003 invasion are perhaps 50,000:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_in_the_conflict_in_Iraq.
 
PI:  I don't recognize anything at wikipedia as a valid reference  source.
The Wikipedia article includes 30 source citations, and a bibliography of 14 references. But don't let a few pesky facts stand in the way of your dogmatic beliefs...
PI: Also, if you're going to count casualties caused by America, you'll have to include the 200,000 who were starved to death and kept from medicine,
The deaths in question were Saddam's fault for his six-year refusal of the U.N.'s oil-for-food humanitarian offers while he was refusing to comply with UN Security Council resolutions concerning the reversal of his aggression against Kuwait. You can ignore all the relevant facts documented by Reason Magazine at http://reason.com/0203/fe.mw.the.shtml, but ignoring them won't make them go away.
PI: If you expect others not to use force against you, you must not use force against them, even if you don't like what they're doing.
If what others are doing is initiating force unrestrained by any effective justice system, then true lovers of liberty consider themselves free to organize to stop it.
PI: You have only as much sovereignty as you give.
No lover of liberty recognizes an absolute sovereignty to commit arbitrary aggression against third parties.
PI: Libertarians support individual, state, and national sovereignty.
If you say the sovereignty of an aggressive tyrannical state trumps the liberty of individuals, then you're just not as libertarian as I am.
PI:  As a HugeGovernmentitarian, it must get confusing that we have so many different names for countries, and so many maps with lines on them.
The map hasn't been drawn that can confuse me about whether state sovereignty is more important than individual liberty.
BH: I already corrected you on the alleged unconstitutionality of all U.S. interventions at
http://humanknowledge.net/Correspondence/Paul_Ireland/2005-02-14.htm.
 
PI: You have never "corrected" me on any subject.  In fact I can't think of a single time you've been correct about anything.
I'm in awe of the polemical incompetence it takes to offer such desperately hyperbolic vouching in this context. What you can or can't remember is irrelevant. Do a search like
"paul ireland" jurisprudence
on Google or Yahoo and check out the top result. Your abysmal performance in our discussions will be associated with your name for as long as there is indexing and archiving on the web and its successors. Welcome to your legacy.
PI: I have PROVEN that the role and scope of the US Military is solely for the DEFENSE of American ships and soil and for nothing else.  Any case law you bring up to the contrary is irrelevant.  The U.S. Constitution is the HIGHEST law of the land, and it defines the role of the military. If you want to discuss case law, you can look up Marbury vs. Madison where the first Supreme Court said that any and all laws, court cases, acts of congress, etc., which contradict the U.S. Constitution are AUTOMATICALLY null and void without the need for judicial review.  Congress is given limited war making powers to be used in the DEFENSE of American soil or ships.  They may not use this power except in such defense.
Every single word of the above -- even the capitalized ones -- is already rebutted either in the above link, or in the subsequent message (to which you never mustered a response) at http://humanknowledge.net/Correspondence/Paul_Ireland/2005-02-15.htm.
PI: Only congress has war making powers and may not grant such powers to the President.  The War Powers Act is unconstitutional in its face
"The Congress shall have power [...] [t]o make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers" Art I Sec 8 cl 18.
PI: there was no Constitutionally mandated formal declaration of war.
The House voted 250-183, and the Senate 52-47, "to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678". Your position on the invasion would be unchanged if the text had met your definition of a declaration of war, so this complaint is specious.
PI:  If you want to use MY DEFENSIVE military to make an unprovoked invasion of a nation that poses no threat to America, you are stealing from me and misusing MY military.
Ah, the NonCoercitarian argument again, this time combined with your usual ignoring of the conjunction of Iraqi involvement with WMDs and anti-American terrorism. Sorry, but I'm a minarchist not an anarchist, and so the not-with-my-taxes argument doesn't work on me.
BH: If as a SovereignTarian you believe that the signatures of kings and tyrants take precedence over individual human liberty in future generations, then you should note that King Faisal II's regime voluntarily committed Iraq to the United Nations Charter in December 1945. Thus your commitment to SovereignTarianism trumps not only individual liberty, but also the notion of contractual claims of sovereign states on each other.

PI:  I do recognize contracts.  No contract can give away sovereignty.
Above you wrote that "Libertarians support individual, state, and national sovereignty".  If individuals have sovereignty and sovereignty can nullify any contract, then you just discarded the entire concept of contract. That's an odd brand of libertarianism you're selling there.
PI: If the U.N. suddenly told America to get rid of our WMD's, what would you say?
It's easy for me to agree that the U.S. should comply with any demand from the U.N. Security Council, because the U.S. has a veto on the Security Council.
 
But I'll even answer the hard question you didn't know how to ask. I deny that state sovereignty or state contract rights necessarily trump individual liberty. I'm not the one here fetishizing states as moral agents, that's you.  You claim that states have absolute immunity from force initiation just like individuals, except on alternate Tuesdays when they're allowed to initiate force by abrogating the written agreements they've signed.
PI: I seem to remember not discussing things with you because you refused to answer questions directly.  Until you answer whether or not America should comply with a UN directive to disarm, this will be our last  communication and you will have proven the lack of courage for your convictions.
I personally challenge you to identify any substantive question in your earlier correspondence with me that I didn't address.  That correspondence is available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/messagesearch?query=ptireland , along with your final message (that was not a reply-to-all) at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian/message/31400. I don't bother rebutting people unless I address every substantive point they raise. By contrast, I quite explicitly remember you failing to answer these two questions even when I repeated them:
I also wrote in my final message to you:

I stand for minimizing the overall incidence of coercion. You seem to stand for merely setting a good example of abstention from coercion. (I made this point in each of my last three messages, and each time you had no specific rebuttal to this diagnosis of our differences. If you ever come up with one, be sure to let us know.)
And since you never responded to my final message, every other substantive point in it could be claimed to count as one that you lacked the "courage of your convictions" to face. So it's laughable for you to claim you've made any substantive points in our correspondence to which I haven't responded. In case you haven't figured it out yet, my M.O. is to systematically rebut my critics pretty much clause by clause, and to never concede the last word. I don't say that having the last word means I'm right, but I never let anyone claim that I must be wrong because I yielded the last word. For you to try to claim I ever yielded you that last word is hilarious.
PI:  and your dishonesty
That's an interesting mental tic you have there, in which you compulsively label those who disagree with you as "dishonest" or a "liar". If you really needed to, could you disagree with somebody without calling him a liar, like maybe to win a bet?  Just curious... :-)
 
I invite any reader here to anonymously let Mark Stroberg know if that reader has ever seen me be evasive or dishonest. They might consider me wrong or confused or obstinate or arrogant or pedantic, but I'd be surprised if anybody but Paul thought me evasive or dishonest or lacking intellectual courage.
PI:  Saying, "If they just cooperated, they wouldn't have gotten hurt" could be used as a defense for rapists in your warped world.
Your analogy fails under my libertarian values because a rapist is an initiator of force. The initiator of force here was Saddam, whose annexation of Kuwait by force was utterly unjustified by any pretext.
 
Your analogy should even fail under your state-fetishizing Sovereigntarian values, because Iraq was violating the United Nations Charter that it voluntarily signed in December 1945. But apparently you think that while violating a contract is always force initiation for individuals, it can fail to be force initiation for a state if the terms of the contract are inconvenient for your rhetorical purposes.
PI:  Wow, as a UnitedNationsItarian who supports a global government,
You're confused. I've been invoking the UN so much just to hoist you on the petard of your own anti-libertarian claim that the rights of collectives (i.e. states) regarding force initiation are analogous to -- and in fact trump -- the rights of individuals. If the UN never existed but all the other facts were still the same, my justification for the invasion would still hold up as liberty-maximizing.
PI: Libertarians support the right of anyone to own any weapon they choose.  Merely having weapons does not make someone a risk.
I didn't say it did.  I've said repeatedly that the risk here came from the conjunction of WMD ambitions and support for anti-American terrorists.
PI: Using your logic, I could punch someone in the face when I see a bulge in thier pocket because it MIGHT be a weapon, and they MIGHT use it against me.
Instead of fantasizing about bulges in pockets and punching faces, you should construct a non-silly analogy that incorporates Saddam's support for anti-American terrorists.
PI:  More irrelevant quotes which have since been proven entirely false.  I could care less what Al Gore, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or anyone else said about the danger posed by Iraq.
I include the quotes for my own future reference, because I debate not only fringe anarchists who see the invasion as a statist conspiracy, but also liberals who see the invasion as a right-wing conspiracy.
PI: The 9/11 commission which saw all of the evidence already proved that Iraq posed NO CREDIBLE THREAT to America.
I like how you use all-capitals to subconsciously mark your weakest arguments for your readers. Like so many of the redundant assertions in your message, this one is false in each of the places that you repeat it.
BH:  It's bizarre for a lover of individual liberty to say that our moral calculus changes completely at lines drawn on maps by the collectives known as states. I've never been to Maine or Iraq, and I don't know anybody in either place. How do the values of individual human liberty dictate that I should join with others to defend the liberty of Mainers under all circumstances, but never of Iraqis under any circumstances?
 
PI:  What color is the sky in your imaginary world?  Here on earth it's blue.  On earth we have borders, and Libertarians respect those borders.  What if I say the property lines around your house are just "imaginary" lines and I have decided I want to throw a party there?
I asked you a direct question about Maine and Iraq, and you lacked the intellectual courage to answer it.  Instead you made a content-free wisecrack about the sky, and then put quotes around a word that I never used to ask about a silly claim that I of course would never make.
 
As a libertarian and not a sovereigntarian, I of course think that the property lines of individuals have more moral significance than the borders of states. But I never made the extremist claim that state borders are "imaginary" or that the state should defend liberty to identical extents on both sides of its borders. I simply denied the opposite extremist claim that state borders mark the absolute end to the state's duty to defend liberty, and pointed out that this claim is not optimally libertarian.
PI: If you want to discuss "bizarre" support for someone who claims to love individual liberty, let's discuss your support of a one-world-government that controls everything.
Just because I believe that the state duty to defend liberty does not absolutely end at state borders, or that I mention the UN in a shorthand description of how blatant Saddam's behavior was, it does not follow that I believe in "one-world government".
PI: Every single part of your argument is untenable and is an insult to those who are actually libertarians.   
The FACT remains that there is absolutely no valid libertarian justification for the invasion of Iraq.  Those who claim such are fools, liars, or both.  They are trying to violate Libertarian Principles and to twist the truth, and play word games in an effort to rationalize their extremely non-libertarian and warped world view.
Your closing paragraph here nicely exemplifies so much of your polemical efforts:
This debate is going to end just like our last one: with me having answered your every substantive point, and with you calling me names and saying my answers aren't worth responding to. The only question is: before this predictable ending, how many times are you going to repeat the same old arguments that I've already answered?
 
Brian Holtz
Yahoo! Inc.
2004 Libertarian candidate for Congress, CA14 (Silicon Valley) http://marketliberal.org
blog: http://knowinghumans.net