Libertarians have long known that J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary brilliance provides us with many lessons for the real world, however, leave it to a neoconservative-inspired modernist to dismantle and reconstruct Tolkien’s “power is evil” moral in an attempt to authenticate the Iraq fiasco.

At the climax of director Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” an exasperated King Theoden of Rohan contemplates the destruction of his people by the brutal Uruk-Hai army, monsters 10,000 strong, when it barges through the gates of Helm’s Deep, a previously impenetrable fortress and sanctuary for the people of Rohan.

Theoden, bloodied and bewildered, buckling under the weight of dire circumstances, turns to his fellows and asks, “What are we to do in the face of such reckless hate?”

Last month in northern Iraq, a suicide bomber drove 100 pounds of explosives toward a gate 100 yards from dozens of peacefully sleeping U.S. servicemen. Alert sentries from the 101st Airborne Division fired rounds from the guard tower and prematurely detonated the cargo before it unleashed its apocalypse.

After the well-deserved plaudits and praise subside — the slaps on the back — one wonders if in the still hours of the night, when visions of that car flash with too much vividness inside the heads of those blessed sentries, they will wonder what King Theoden wondered.

Perhaps the author is totally dishonest, or merely ignorant to the fact that in the former situation – the attack on Rohan – King Theoden speaks of an aggressor army embarking upon an offensive to maliciously destroy his people. Conversely, in the latter situation, the U.S. is the aggressor, akin to the brutal Uruk-Hai army, creating death, destruction, theft, and mayhem in a foreign country, for reasons that come and go as fleetingly as porch peddlers on solicitor duty. Such intellectual duplicity is what one comes to expect from those who support the US’s hegemony and wars. So now, Tolkien’s anti-statism is disregarded, and his morality lessons are used to convey concurrence with statism, warfare, and the conquering of foreign peoples.As Tolkien said (from Alberto Mingardi and Carlo Stagnaro’s Tolkien vs. Power):

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to `unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word state (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!” (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 1995, p. 63.; See NYT Review.)

A philosophy as clear-cut as this should not be distorted to provide moral clarity for our invading troops.