The Key To The Whole Libertarian Business

By Will Porter

“I am getting more and more convinced that the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business, and that we will never get anywhere in this great intellectual counter-revolution (or revolution) unless we can end this damned Cold War…

The fact that we might spend a few billion less on public housing or on farm support no longer thrills me. Nothing will mean much without a radical dismantling of the State apparatus, and this cannot occur without radical disarmament, and an end to the cold war policy…”
These are the words of libertarian theoretician, activist and scholar Murray N. Rothbard, written in May of 1959 in a response to a letter from Bill Buckley, notifying him an article of his had been rejected by National Review—too critical of war, Buckley told him.

The warfare Rothbard spoke of rages on today, except in many cases it is no longer “cold.” Decades after Rothbard wrote the missive quoted above, the US government continues to dump trillions of tax dollars into a program of global imperialism, spreading faux-democracy and setting the world ablaze with conflict and extremism. Hundreds of thousands of corpses mount as a result.

The latest, and perhaps most egregious, phase in this unbroken chain of war and intervention is taking place in Syria, where the duplicity of US foreign policy is on full display.

US intervention began not long after the Syrian conflict got underway, arming, training and otherwise assisting the rebel opposition and looking the other way while Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other US allies did the same.

Who are the rebels? A declassified Defense Intelligence Agency memo from 2012 describes the Syrian opposition as heavily supported by al-Qaeda, and even acknowledges “the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria…”

Incredibly, the document continues: “…and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.” [Emphasis added] The document lists “The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey” as the supporting powers.

Make no mistake, “Salafist principality” is a synonym for Islamic State, and the memo says in no uncertain terms that such an entity could be useful to help “isolate” the Assad regime.

Last September the New York Times obtained a leaked recording of a closed-door discussion between then-Secretary of State John Kerry and Syrian opposition activists that again reveals American thinking on the Islamic State.

“[ISIS] was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus and so forth. We were watching. We saw that [ISIS] was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened,” Kerry told the activists. He “thought we could probably manage.”

In the same recording Kerry explained that the United States was “putting an extraordinary amount of arms in,” and an aide added that the situation is tricky, because “when you pump more weapons into a place like Syria, it doesn’t end well for Syria. Because there’s always someone willing to put in arms from the other side.”

They did it anyway. So far, over 400,000 human beings have perished in this conflict, and imperialists like Kerry feign shock at the carnage.

While all of this took place under President Obama, it is not yet clear that Trump will alter the on-again off-again policy of regime change favored by the prior administration.

“[I]f this ‘race to Raqqa’ is won by the US military rather than by Syrian government forces, the chance that the US will hand the territory back to the Assad government is virtually nil,” writes Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

“In other words, this is an operation far less about wiping ISIS out from eastern Syria and much more about the United States carving out eastern Syria as a permanent outpost from where it can, for example, continue the original neocon/Israeli/Saudi plan for ‘regime change’ in Syria.”

Both options are extremely undesirable—regime change, or merely a fight against ISIS—because both entail yet another years-long American occupation of a Muslim country, billions of tax dollars dumped into a black hole, and a mountain of new material for Islamist recruitment propaganda.

Murray Rothbard’s approach to war and peace has become the guiding star for many libertarians, even inspiring the creation of one of the top libertarian news sites on the web.

His words today are truer than ever. War, to echo 20^th century writer and intellectual Randolph Bourne, is the health of the state. In virtually every way, warfare bolsters the power and prestige of not only the state institution, but its personnel.

In economics, civil liberties and even American culture, warfare takes a massive toll. Foreigners tortured and killed, our sons and daughters maimed and traumatized, our economy wrecked and our culture degenerated to a base worship of violence.

There is no greater enemy to humankind than the state, and war is its most dangerous implement. Before freedom is attained in this country or any other, the war-industrial machine must be smashed, slashed, repealed and abolished out of existence.

Just ask Rothbard.

Will Porter is a journalist and commentator with a focus on American foreign policy Mid East affairs. He is a staff writer for the Daily Sheeple, a blogger at the Libertarian Institute and a contributor at Antiwar.com