Pro-War Libertarians?

Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Randy Barnett, a self proclaimed libertarian in which he chided anti-war libertarians as giving libertarianism a bad name. He specifically had it in for Ron Paul whose candidacy, he thought, would set back the cause of libertarianism by scaring off the pro-war folks.

The logic was so perverse that I was moved to write a Letter to the Editor. Alas, my letter was not published so I am reproducing it below for your reading pleasure.

Start letter:
Randy Barnett in "Libertarians and the War", (7/17/2007) sure has a funny idea of Libertarian philosophy and moral standards.

The first principle of a libertarian is non-aggression. One must never initiate force against another. Clearly this leaves plenty of room for self defense, where the other party initiated the force. So, to determine the morality of the Iraq War, we must ask ourselves if the force we applied to Iraq and its people was, in fact justified as self defense. If it was not, it is mass murder.

Mr. Barnett attempts to paint a picture where our nation, having been attacked by a handful of Muslims on 9/11 and some earlier incidents where the number of aggressors was small, can now attack all or any of 800 million Muslims in the world and call it self defense.

I think not! This is using the principle of group guilt. This is the same principle used by Hitler to massacre Jews and Stalin to kill any anti-communists he could find. This is not a fit principle for this nation or any nation that claims the moral high ground.

We also know that the first excuse given for the invasion, to defend ourselves against the imminent use of Weapons of Mass Destruction was not just false, it was known false by our government as it was being claimed. We are probably approaching one million dead souls from this war and all that blood is on the hands of this administration.

Anyone who self identifies himself as a Libertarian but thinks the invasion of Iraq was justified needs a refresher course in our principles. Congressman Paul understands these principles quite well and none of the other Republican candidates even comes close.