I recently stumbled across an old correspondence I had forgotten about with J. Neil Schulman. It started with Huebert’s great article, A Great Institution in Freefall. This was in 2002, post-9/11, but before the Iraq war. In this piece, Huebert criticized FEE‘s controversial plan to have former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as the keynote speaker and guest of honor at their annual trustees’ dinner.
In my blogpost The Decline of FEE–Part II: Schulman’s Reply I commented on and criticized a letter Schulman wrote to Huebert in response. Schulman wrote a letter back to me, cc’ing dozens of the libertarians I didn’t know, and I replied briefly here. This debate spawned the WarLibertarians YahooGroup, which is now inactive but which has a lively set of initial discussion by pro- and anti-war libertarians.
I continue to find fascinating Schulman’s letter. It was written in July 2002, before the Iraq war, in condemnation of libertarian “pacifists”. Re-reading it tonight, I was thinking to myself, boy, I bet Neil’s had second thoughts given the way the Iraq war has turned out.
But a quick google search found Neil’s It’s Way Past Miller Time for the War in Iraq, posted just a couple weeks ago. As best I can tell, it is–astonishingly–a defense of the Iraq war. Writes Schulman:
…Operation Iraqi Freedom was a total victory … Whether you want to say that the United States had its victory when Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government collapsed — or when, with his sons already dead, Saddam Hussein was captured by American forces, or when the Iraqis voted themselves a new government, or when Saddam Hussein no longer had a functioning head that could resume office — we won that war. … President Bush, it’s way past Miller Time. You won, and won, and won, and won, and won. … Mr. Bush, you’re the President who Won the War on Terror.
What can one say to this but … wow. Talk about sticking by your guns. (Note that Schulman in that piece links the 9/11 attacks with our war on Iraq … even Bush refrains from making that comparison lately.)One curious thing about Schulman’s latest piece: he writes: “The presence of Infidels in the Middle East is what drives Islamic terrorism.” Therefore, since the “War on Terror” has been “Won,” he asks Bush to “Please brings our troops home from Iraq”. Waitasec. Schulman is admitting that “The presence of Infidels in the Middle East is what drives Islamic terrorism“?! The kind of statement by Ron Paul that got him hectored by Mr. Anti-Terror Rudy Giuliani? And the same kind of statement that Schulman lambasted me for making in his letter: I had written:
Let me make it clear, Neil–any libertarian worth his salt of course condemns and opposes the murder of innocent Americans by crazed Islamic terrorists. … Some of us even, gasp, support retaliation–yes, by the feds–against those acting in concert with those terrorists and posing a threat to innocent Americans. Of course this support is reluctant because, as libertarians, we recognize what a dangerous entity the feds are, and that much terrorism has been generated–but not justified!–by American imperialism.
Now note that though I acknowledged American imperialism helps “generate” terrorism, I bent over backwards to make it clear that it does not justify it. Yet in Schulman’s reply to me, responding to these words of mne, he writes,
And you consider yourself a patriot? There is NOTHING the United States did that justified hijacking American passenger jetliners and crashing them into office buildings. That is blaming-the-victim horseshit.
Well, Neil, I specifically said it did not justify it. And I suppose your latest comment, “The presence of Infidels in the Middle East is what drives Islamic terrorism“, is also “blaming-the-victim horseshit”. Well, I think he’s half-right.
Update: Someone clued me in on a bit of recent history in this regard that I had been unaware of: “I guess you missed all the excitement a few months back, when Schulman essentially destroyed the old Konkin email list (of which he was the moderator) by flaming and/or banning anyone who dared challenge his warhawkery — thus prompting mass defection to a new list. There was lots of blogsophere discussion thereon:”
- Wally Conger’s Maintaining principles, changing banners
- comment by “Jeremy” on the “paxx:blog”
- is MLL dead? on the freeman’s interweblogosaur
- Long Live Secession, on Roderick Long’s Austro-Athenian Empire
- The Readiness is ALL, also on Austro-Athenian Empire
