Anti-War Libertarians: Wrong On Principle

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars are for American libertarians as the Kosovo war was for American leftists and the Vietnam war was for American jingoists: it's the first time in their living memory that the circumstances of an American war have squarely challenged their spinal reflex to support or oppose them. These wars separated the critical thinkers from the dogmatists in the respective groups. The critical thinkers didn't always take the side opposite the dogmatists, but the arguments they used made it easy to tell them apart.
As I debate Libertarians who oppose America's liberation of Iraq, I'm building a taxonomy of the various arguments they employ.  Here are the ones I've seen so far, in rough order of decreasing weakness. The first five are just lame, and the next seven (in italics) are the ones whose use signals misguided dogmatism.

1. ChickenHawk: If you've never personally faced danger or risked loss in this or any war, then you cannot argue this war was justified.
2. Blowback: Invading Iraq might increase the danger you personally face (e.g. from terrorism), so you shouldn't argue that the invasion was justified. [renamed from "Chicken" 2009-12-23]
   
3. Mercenary:  You just want to invade Iraq to get a discount on oil, or some other mercenary benefit. [added 2009-12-22]
   
4. Patriotic: Americans would be justified in resisting a foreign invasion, so Iraqis are justified in resisting American invasion.
5. Miss Congeniality: Invading Iraq decreased America's popularity abroad, so we shouldn't have invaded.
6. Monday Morning Quarterback: The aftermath of the invasion isn't going as well as expected, so we shouldn't have invaded.
7. Sovereigntarian: The state of Iraq did not initiate force against the state of America, and/or/thus invading Iraq was a violation of international law.
8. NonCoercitarian: America's military is funded with coercive taxes, so anything it does is wrong.
9. AmericaFirstItarian: The duty of America's military to defend human liberty stops completely at the current borders of the American state.
10. CleanHandsItarian: America does not have clean enough hands at home or in the past abroad to try to increase liberty by force abroad now, even by toppling a murderous aggressor.
11. WhiteGloveItarian: If a policy is likely to result in the death of even a single innocent, then that policy is immoral no matter how much it otherwise increases human liberty, or how much one attempts to avoid such deaths.
12. Perfectionist: The new Iraqi polity isn't even close to anarcho-capitalism or libertarian minarchism, so we shouldn't have invaded.
13. Fatalistic: Invasions have never increased liberty and will never increase liberty, so we shouldn't have invaded.
14. Slippery Slope: If we invade Iraq under these circumstances, then there other countries we should be invading too.
15. Pessimistic: We should have known that the invasion would yield too little liberty at too much cost, so we shouldn't have invaded.

These arguments are all easy to rebut.

1. ChickenHawk: An obvious instance of the genetic fallacy.
2. Blowback: This is as dumb as all the pro-war arguments that end with "then the terrorists win".  What's right is right, period.
   
3. Mercenary:  Keep telling yourself that, if that's what it takes to rationalize my disagreement with you.
   
4. Patriotic: It's just silly to pretend that all nation-states are necessarily interchangeable in the moral calculus of whether nations can be justly invaded.
5. Miss Congeniality: It's absurd for a Libertarian in America to argue that what is unpopular must therefore be wrong.
6. Monday Morning Quarterback: Because time travel is not available, the only interesting content of this argument is the part that overlaps with the Pessimistic argument. However, advocates of the Fatalistic argument need to press the MMQ argument to keep the Fatalistic from being further undermined by history.
7. Sovereigntarian: It's absurd for a libertarian to invoke this argument, since libertarians believe that rights inhere in individuals and not in collectives like states.
8. NonCoercitarian: This is a solid argument for an anarchist, but not for other libertarians. Anarchists are not optimal libertarians, because they value their personal first-use-of-force virginity over the actual minimization of aggression in the real world.
9. AmericaFirstItarian: This argument depends on either facile xenophobia, or on anarcho-capitalists' idea that explicit mutual-defense contracts are the only valid exception to their every-man-for-himself  law of the jungle. True lovers of liberty deny that tyrants should only be opposed by their victims.
10. CleanHandsItarian: True lovers of liberty don't automatically reject liberation just because the liberators fall short of some ideal. Only reality-impaired conspiracy theorists think that America invaded Iraq for discounts on Iraqi oil.
11. WhiteGloveItarian: Once the absolutist version of this argument is refuted with the obvious sort of thought experiment, what remains is in fact the Pessimistic argument (below).
12. Perfectionist: It's silly to measure Iraq's liberty by a standard that even America fails to meet.
13. Fatalistic: U.S. military force has replaced tyranny with liberty or at least self-determination in the Confederate States of America, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Japan, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Kurdistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq.  It's true that most invasions in human history have been inimical to human liberty, but America at the dawn of the 21st century is not your typical invader.
14. Slippery Slope: Saddam's regime killed over a million people, invaded one neighbor, annexed another by force, fired ballistic missiles at two more, and defied UN disarmament mandates after building a track record of 1) harboring terrorists, 2) using chemical WMDs in a war of aggression and in genocidal attacks on its own citizens, and 3) pursuing nuclear WMDs. Drawing a bright line with only Saddam on one side is easy.
15. Pessimistic: In Kurdistan and Afghanistan we had existence proofs that the U.S. military could depose tyranny in the Islamic world and replace it with increased liberty and reasonably stable self-determination. Unfortunately for Libertarians who fetishize the party's platform and misinterpret the party's pledge as a declaration for anarchism, the Pessimistic argument is unavailable because it makes a merely empirical case and admits the possibility of a prudently liberty-increasing invasion.

Each of these arguments and counter-arguments are more complex than is summarized above, but anti-interventionist Libertarians all too often act as though the counter-arguments don't exist.  That's  intellectually inexcusable.

Democracy Does Not Scale Well

Arnold Kling quotes an argument by Terry Anderson and Peter Hill that democracy does not scale well:

"It is always costly to ensure that agents [government officials] act on behalf of the citizens and that they do not use their power to extract rents from their constituents...  The costs of monitoring agents increase not only with the geographic size of the collective but also with the number of people in the collective. This is because in a larger collective each member captures a smaller share of the [benefit] created by collective enforcement and therefore has less incentive to monitor the agent...With the stake in the collective inversely related to group size, we can expect less monitoring and more rent seeking and rent extraction as group size increases."

In 1790, the largest state in the union, Virginia, had a population of under 700,000. Today, Montgomery County has a population of over 900,000. Our nine-member County Council answers to about the same number of registered voters as the entire House of Representatives of the United States at the time of the founding of the Republic. We cannot have an accountable democracy with such large political units.

He goes on to propose a hypothetical reform in which we 1) increase the membership of Congress to decrease the number of voters each member represents, and 2) have the members be chosen by state legislatures.

It's an interesting thought experiment, but if granted a single Constitutional wish it wouldn't be my choice. Instead, I'd enshrine two principles about the scope and purpose of each level of government. The first is that no level of government should do something that can be done by a more-local level of government. The second is that no level of government should do something that can be done by private markets, as determined by the standard textbook analysis of rivalry and excludability.

Why Truman Had To Drop The Bomb

Richard B. Frank in the Weekly Standard debunks the myth that Truman didn't need to drop the bomb on Japan.  "Between a quarter million and 400,000 Asians, overwhelmingly noncombatants, were dying each month the war continued",  which implies that the atomic bombings saved not only the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese and American soldiers, but also hundreds of thousands of Asian noncombatants.

---

[Ex post facto critics of the atomic bombings] share three fundamental premises. The first is that Japan's situation in 1945 was catastrophically hopeless. The second is that Japan's leaders recognized that fact and were seeking to surrender in the summer of 1945. The third is that thanks to decoded Japanese diplomatic messages, American leaders knew that Japan was about to surrender when they unleashed needless nuclear devastation. The critics divide over what prompted the decision to drop the bombs in spite of the impending surrender, with the most provocative arguments focusing on Washington's desire to intimidate the Kremlin. [....]

When scholars began to examine the archival records in the 1960s, some intuited quite correctly that the accounts of their decision-making that Truman and members of his administration had offered in 1945 were at least incomplete. And if Truman had refused to disclose fully his thinking, these scholars reasoned, it must be because the real basis for his choices would undermine or even delegitimize his decisions. [...]

Collectively, the missing information is known as The Ultra Secret of World War II (after the title of a breakthrough book by Frederick William Winterbotham published in 1974). Ultra was the name given to what became a vast and enormously efficient Allied radio intelligence organization, which secretly unveiled masses of information for senior policymakers. [...]  The three daily summaries were called the "Magic" Diplomatic Summary, the "Magic" Far East Summary, and the European Summary. ("Magic" was a code word coined by the U.S. Army's chief signal officer, who called his code breakers "magicians" and their product "Magic." The term "Ultra" came from the British and has generally prevailed as the preferred term among historians, but in 1945 "Magic" remained the American designation for radio intelligence, particularly that concerning the Japanese.)  [...]

When a complete set of the "Magic" Diplomatic Summary for the war years was first made public in 1978, the text contained a large number of redacted (literally whited out) passages. The critics reasonably asked whether the blanks concealed devastating revelations. Release of a nonredacted complete set in 1995 disclosed that the redacted areas had indeed contained a devastating revelation--but not about the use of the atomic bombs. Instead, the redacted areas concealed the embarrassing fact that Allied radio intelligence was reading the codes not just of the Axis powers, but also of some 30 other governments, including allies like France.

The diplomatic intercepts included, for example, those of neutral diplomats or attachés stationed in Japan. Critics highlighted a few nuggets from this trove in the 1978 releases, but with the complete release, we learned that there were only 3 or 4 messages suggesting the possibility of a compromise peace, while no fewer than 13 affirmed that Japan fully intended to fight to the bitter end. Another page in the critics' canon emphasized a squad of Japanese diplomats in Europe, from Sweden to the Vatican, who attempted to become peace entrepreneurs in their contacts with American officials. As the editors of the "Magic" Diplomatic Summary correctly made clear to American policymakers during the war, however, not a single one of these men (save one we will address shortly) possessed actual authority to act for the Japanese government.

An inner cabinet in Tokyo authorized Japan's only officially sanctioned diplomatic initiative. The Japanese dubbed this inner cabinet the Big Six [...] . In complete secrecy, the Big Six agreed on an approach to the Soviet Union in June 1945. This was not to ask the Soviets to deliver a "We surrender" note; rather, it aimed to enlist the Soviets as mediators to negotiate an end to the war satisfactory to the Big Six--in other words, a peace on terms satisfactory to the dominant militarists. Their minimal goal was not confined to guaranteed retention of the Imperial Institution; they also insisted on preservation of the old militaristic order in Japan, the one in which they ruled. [...] Togo added: "Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians' mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender."

This last comment triggered a fateful exchange. Critics have pointed out correctly that both Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew (the former U.S. ambassador to Japan and the leading expert on that nation within the government) and Secretary of War Henry Stimson advised Truman that a guarantee that the Imperial Institution would not be eliminated could prove essential to obtaining Japan's surrender. The critics further have argued that if only the United States had made such a guarantee, Japan would have surrendered. But when Foreign Minister Togo informed Ambassador Sato that Japan was not looking for anything like unconditional surrender, Sato promptly wired back a cable that the editors of the "Magic" Diplomatic Summary made clear to American policymakers "advocate[s] unconditional surrender provided the Imperial House is preserved." Togo's reply, quoted in the "Magic" Diplomatic Summary of July 22, 1945, was adamant: American policymakers could read for themselves Togo's rejection of Sato's proposal--with not even a hint that a guarantee of the Imperial House would be a step in the right direction. Any rational person following this exchange would conclude that modifying the demand for unconditional surrender to include a promise to preserve the Imperial House would not secure Japan's surrender. [...]

The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender. Ultra was even more alarming in what it revealed about Japanese knowledge of American military plans. Intercepts demonstrated that the Japanese had correctly anticipated precisely where U.S. forces intended to land on Southern Kyushu in November 1945 (Operation Olympic). [...]

From mid-July onwards, Ultra intercepts exposed a huge military buildup on Kyushu. Japanese ground forces exceeded prior estimates by a factor of four. Instead of 3 Japanese field divisions deployed in southern Kyushu to meet the 9 U.S. divisions, there were 10 Imperial Army divisions plus additional brigades. Japanese air forces exceeded prior estimates by a factor of two to four. Instead of 2,500 to 3,000 Japanese aircraft, estimates varied between about 6,000 and 10,000. [...]

The Navy was convinced that an invasion would be far too costly to sustain the support of the American people, and hence believed that blockade and bombardment were the sound course. The picture becomes even more complex than previously understood because it emerged that the Navy chose to postpone a final showdown over these two strategies. The commander in chief of the U.S. fleet, Admiral Ernest King, informed his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1945 that he did not agree that Japan should be invaded. He concurred only that the Joint Chiefs must issue an invasion order immediately to create that option for the fall. But King predicted that the Joint Chiefs would revisit the issue of whether an invasion was wise in August or September. Meanwhile, two months of horrendous fighting ashore on Okinawa under skies filled with kamikazes convinced the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz, that he should withdraw his prior support for at least the invasion of Kyushu. Nimitz informed King of this change in his views in strict confidence.

In August, the Ultra revelations propelled the Army and Navy towards a showdown over the invasion. On August 7 (the day after Hiroshima, which no one expected to prompt a quick surrender), General Marshall reacted to weeks of gathering gloom in the Ultra evidence by asking General Douglas MacArthur, who was to command what promised to be the greatest invasion in history, whether invading Kyushu in November as planned still looked sensible. MacArthur replied, amazingly, that he did not believe the radio intelligence! He vehemently urged the invasion should go forward as planned. (This, incidentally, demolishes later claims that MacArthur thought the Japanese were about to surrender at the time of Hiroshima.) On August 9 (the day the second bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki), King gathered the two messages in the exchange between Marshall and MacArthur and sent them to Nimitz. King told Nimitz to provide his views on the viability of invading Kyushu, with a copy to MacArthur. Clearly, nothing that had transpired since May would have altered Nimitz's view that Olympic was unwise. Ultra now made the invasion appear foolhardy to everyone but MacArthur. [...]

With the Navy's withdrawal of support, the terrible casualties in Okinawa, and the appalling radio-intelligence picture of the Japanese buildup on Kyushu, Olympic was not going forward as planned and authorized--period. But this evidence also shows that the demise of Olympic came not because it was deemed unnecessary, but because it had become unthinkable. It is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs in this circumstance. Japanese historians uncovered another key element of the story. After Hiroshima (August 6), Soviet entry into the war against Japan (August 8), and Nagasaki (August 9), the emperor intervened to break a deadlock within the government and decide that Japan must surrender in the early hours of August 10. The Japanese Foreign Ministry dispatched a message to the United States that day stating that Japan would accept the Potsdam Declaration, "with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler." This was not, as critics later asserted, merely a humble request that the emperor retain a modest figurehead role. As Japanese historians writing decades after the war emphasized, the demand that there be no compromise of the "prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler" as a precondition for the surrender was a demand that the United States grant the emperor veto power over occupation reforms and continue the rule of the old order in Japan. Fortunately, Japan specialists in the State Department immediately realized the actual purpose of this language and briefed Secretary of State James Byrnes, who insisted properly that this maneuver must be defeated. The maneuver further underscores the fact that right to the very end, the Japanese pursued twin goals: not only the preservation of the imperial system, but also preservation of the old order in Japan that had launched a war of aggression that killed 17 million.

This brings us to another aspect of history that now very belatedly has entered the controversy. Several American historians led by Robert Newman have insisted vigorously that any assessment of the end of the Pacific war must include the horrifying consequences of each continued day of the war for the Asian populations trapped within Japan's conquests. Newman calculates that between a quarter million and 400,000 Asians, overwhelmingly noncombatants, were dying each month the war continued. Newman et al. challenge whether an assessment of Truman's decision can highlight only the deaths of noncombatant civilians in the aggressor nation while ignoring much larger death tolls among noncombatant civilians in the victim nations.

There are a good many more points that now extend our understanding beyond the debates of 1995. But it is clear that all three of the critics' central premises are wrong. The Japanese did not see their situation as catastrophically hopeless. They were not seeking to surrender, but pursuing a negotiated end to the war that preserved the old order in Japan, not just a figurehead emperor. Finally, thanks to radio intelligence, American leaders, far from knowing that peace was at hand, understood--as one analytical piece in the "Magic" Far East Summary stated in July 1945, after a review of both the military and diplomatic intercepts--that "until the Japanese leaders realize that an invasion can not be repelled, there is little likelihood that they will accept any peace terms satisfactory to the Allies." This cannot be improved upon as a succinct and accurate summary of the military and diplomatic realities of the summer of 1945.

The Microcapitalism Meme Is Spreading

Yahoo hosted yet another interesting non-Internet-related speaking event today (three days after some congressional staffers visited, a week after Freakonomics, and three weeks after the Governator). Berkeley's Eric Brewer was a co-founder of Yahoo's Inktomi search engine, and spoke about Technology and Infrastructure For Emerging Regions. It's nice to see a Berkeley professor echoing Hernando De Soto's market-oriented analysis of dead capital -- third-world capital like squatter's land that cannot be borrowed against because the legal system doesn't recognize title to it. Being a technologist and not an economist, Brewer however did botch the definition of a public good. Economists define it as a non-rival non-excludable good that benefits almost everyone in a polity. But Brewer described a public good as "things financed by taxes", and gave education as an example. Education is in fact far from being a pure public good, since the positive externalities of education (the benefit to the rest of the economy) pale in comparison to the positive internalities (the benefits to the student). Despite this mistake, Brewer's talk (and recent paper) is full of good examples of how microcapitalism is better than philanthropy at helping the developing world.