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It's a War on War

The libertarian meltdown over the continuing occupation of Iraq continues.

...Beito's crticism was that -- as Gene Healy has also noted in the comments section of this site -- it's more than a little disengenuous to say that the federal government isn't competent enough to, for example, manage AFDC or education or Social Security, but that it is capable of rebuilding from scratch an entire country -- particularly one with no tradition of the necessary sustaining institutions to preserve a liberal democracy.

Worse, if you believe that neocons are dictating foreign policy, we're not merely attempting to build an entire country, but the entire Middle East.

Libertarians rightly believe that on the domestic front, government meddling rarely acheives its stated ends, that it usually makes things worse, and that it inevitably effects all sorts of nasty and unintended consequences.

I can't understand why some of us then jump ship when it comes to foreign policy, and believe that if we just spend enough money, send over enough guns, and hire enough smart people to do all the planning, we can create a functioning, liberal, civil democracy out of whole cloth, topple theocracies where there's no desire for democracy, and generally change the hearts and minds of millions of people at the point of gun.

It's just not going to happen, gang. And lots more people are going to die while we try.