Harland Harrison wrote: HH> The voters finally want out of Iraq. The LP should support them. <HH
The voters originaly wanted to liberate Iraq, and still would say we were right to liberate Kuwait and chase Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. Should the LP "support" them on those two issues, or are you only a fair-weather demagog? It's naive to believe that Iraq is a good wedge issue for the LP. Recent history provides a natural experiment that refutes this naivete almost perfectly. 2004 LP presidential nominee Michael Badnarik ran as an anti-war candidate, but didn't grow the standard Libertarian vote share at all. If anti-interventionism can grow the LP, then Nader's 3 million voters from 2000 should have been available to the anti-war candidates in 2004, because both major-party candidates favored continuing the war. Together Nader and Green rival Cobb reclaimed at most 700K of those 3 million, and so with at least 2.3M anti-war voters up for grabs, Badnarik increased the 2000 LP presidential vote by only 13K! Thus it seems that an anti-war stance can bring us only about 1% of the non-LP anti-war vote, which itself is less than 3% of voters. It's hard to imagine better empirical evidence that foreign policy is not the lever to grow the LP. HH> Democrat Tom Lantos sold that war with a lie about babies thrown out of incubators. This time the White House ponied up the lies, and Lantos pushed the Iraq resolution through the House for them. When Ron Paul thought the Constitution required a Declaration of War to go to war, Lantos called him "frivolous". <HH Readers curious about your focus on Lantos and the wars he supports will be interested to know that Lantos was the candidate you ran against in 2004. Art I Sec 8 grants Congress the power "to declare war" and "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying [that power] into execution". Public Law 107-243 (the Iraq War Resolution of Oct 2002) said "the President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to [...] enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." In the text of the resolution, Congress explicitly mentions its "war power" when discussing its authority to enact this law. Whether Congress believed it was exercising its Constitutional war power is not even a close question. You earlier said that "it is not necessary to delegate the power to declare war", but it would be, well, frivolous to claim that the "necessary and proper" clause authorizes a law only if that law is literally the only way to excercise the congressional power in question. HH> The LP was right before, and the anti-war position turns out right again. <HH The knee-jerk "anti-war" position was wrong on liberating Kuwait, and wrong on chasing Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. For someone to have been "right" on deposing Saddam, he would have had to make one of two predictions before the invasion: 1) Despite the stability in Kurdish Iraq under U.S. military protection, and despite the surprising success America had in deposing the Taliban, a sectarian civil war would be more likely than not to eventually undermine our effort to liberate the rest of Iraq -- a region much more secular, prosperous, and literate than Afghanistan. 2) Saddam in fact had neither a nuclear WMD program nor the capability and intention of reconstituting the pre-1991 program that we found out in 1995 he had so successfully hidden from the West. On my blog I document an intensive but fruitless search for any Iraq Cassandra who credibly registered either of these two predictions. Indeed, the Iraqi people themselves were still failing to make the first prediction a year after the invasion. In an April 2004 CNN/Gallup nationwide poll of Iraqis, 42% "said Iraq was better off because of the war", and 61% "said Saddam Hussein's ouster made it worth any hardships." In a nationwide poll of Iraqis completed in Mar 2004 for BBC by Oxford Research International, "56% said that things were better now than they were before the war". If you're claiming that the LP knew in 2003 about a bloody Sunni-Shia civil war that the Iraqis themselves in 2004 apparently still didn't see coming, then I'd love for you to document that amazing prediction.
