I have no wisdom to offer about the current crisis in Iraq; I’m simply immobilized by astonishment over the idea, still dominant in Washington, that the United States should arrange and enforce a united Iraq. But I do have some thoughts about libertarian attitudes toward Iraq and other targets of American intervention.
Isolationists — and almost all libertarians are isolationists of some kind — can take pride in opposing the intervention that overthrew Saddam Hussein. It would have been better for virtually all concerned in this mess if Saddam, lunatic fool that he was, had stayed on his throne. Then at least we might not have seen the victory, in one part of the country, of a corrupt Shi’ite authoritarianism, and the worse victory, elsewhere, of a mob of howling Sunni fanatics vowing to lock women in their houses and behead or crucify all opponents of their holy cause. They have already advertised on the internet the massacre of hundreds or thousands of captured and disarmed soldiers of the Iraqi government — the kind of atrocity that even Hitler concealed.
It would have been better for virtually all concerned in this mess if Saddam, lunatic fool that he was, had stayed on his throne.
But there is something about this situation that isolationists should consider more carefully than we usually do. There is evil, intractable evil, in this world, and the more we isolate ourselves from it, the more intractable it reveals itself to be. America’s gradual withdrawal from world military conflict allows us to see more clearly that this evil cannot all be attributed to America, or the West, or colonialism, or imperialism, or G.W. Bush or Barack Obama or even the accursed Lyndon Johnson. The enslavement of women in Nigeria is not an effect of Western intervention. The vile fanaticism of the Iraqi insurgents is not the result of Western intervention. The modern steel gallows on which the religious leaders of Iran hang gay men are not the effect of Western hegemony. Like the other things I just mentioned, they are an attempt to appropriate the material culture of the West and place it in the service of depraved native ideals.
When I see a sign that says “Live and Let Live” my heart leaps up. That is liberty; that is what I believe in. But I do not believe that most cultures in the world are based on that principle, or that they would be if we would simply obey it ourselves. Libertarian commentary on American foreign policy often creates the impression that the extended meaning of “Live and Let Live” is “All Will Be Well If You Do.” It won’t. There is evil in America, and by the same token there is evil in the rest of the planet, and plenty more of it — inexhaustible supplies, in fact. Isolation is not the road to utopia. It should be the road to realism.
