War and Foreign Policy

Mises was not surprised by WWI, 1914-1920.  He was posted on the Northern Front of the Austro-Hungarian towns as a Lieutenant in an artillery unit.

The world would be a much safer place if Giuliani and those other eight "bomb Iran" candidates were behind bars, and police stopped harassing Paris Hilton and her girlfriends in Hollywood.

As Quigley aptly notes, military force is supposed to be the last resort in a crisis, not the first.

Randy Barnett lectures us that libertarians can and should be all f

They have merchants of death in their districts that get the cash. They benefit from the huge spike in "homeland security" funds, and so have every incentive to keep the level of war hysteria high and growing. They are part of the state apparatus, and war is the health of the state. They too have much to lose from ending the war and much to gain from keeping some form of the war going.

John Quigley's book has a valuable main thesis and, I suggest, an even more valuable claim that underlies this thesis. The purpose of his book, Quigley tells us, is to explore "U.S. military actions abroad over the past half-century.

Adding more government intervention in virtually every aspect of our lives because politicians who oppose war call everything else a war, cannot stand up to careful examination.

Lebanese Muslims saw aggression, not liberty, and fought back with the only effective weapons that they had at the time. The point is not that Americans deserved to be attacked, but that they would not have been attacked but for being placed in the middle of a distant sectarian conflict. No wonder US policymakers prefer not to talk about the causes of terrorism.

The US government is the enemy of the American people and their values. It is not peaceful, it is not friendly, it is not motivated by the Christian faith but rather power and imperial lust.

Society is too complicated, too far reaching, too much a reflection of the free volition of individual actors, for government to be able to accomplish its ends.