Sullivan makes an absolutely brilliant point about the VT killings:
Imagine that this kind of massacre happened every day. Imagine a police force that was far too small to even respond to most of them. Imagine this occurring repeatedly for years until the perpetrators and their accomplices became the de facto power-brokers throughout the land. Imagine the shootings also being accompanied by the brutal torture of victims. Imagine families never having finality on whether their own siblings or parents or children have been murdered or not.
This is Iraq today. Now think of the justified rage many feel at the VT campus police chief and university president for misjudgments. Now imagine them presiding over several more massacres in the same place. Ask yourself: why do we not feel as enraged by those responsible for security in Iraq? Are those victims not human beings too? Are they not children and mothers and fathers and sons? Are we not ultimately responsible for them, having destroyed the institutions of order in their country? Now go watch John Bolton tell the victims to go help themselves.
Our society has a very strong commitment to law and order — perhaps a bit too strong, given the explosion of violent raids in the last decade. We weep for events like VT because they are so rare. But we are now seeing in Iraq that such violence is the natural state of man in the absence of law and order.
I’m a libertarian. One the common slurs hurled against libertarians is that we are anarchists. But we aren’t. Every real libertarian knows that the most important aspect of government is that it establish law and order. Because without law and order, all the rest — freedom, property rights, wealth — mean nothing. Even a broken and bent law and order is better than chaos. Which would you rather have — the horrid dictatorship of Venezuela or Iran or pre-war Iraq? Or the awful chaos of Haiti? That’s why libertarians support things like martial law in emergency situations. Because law and order is the first and primary duty of government.
A couple of weeks ago, Sullivan posted an article that disputed the leftist assertion that natural man is not violent, but peaceful. I would say that Iraq has illuminated a similar delusion on the theocon right. All they had to do was create democracy and peaceful westernized society would flow from it. But democracy is not a source of law and order — it’s a check on it. It’s not a way of running government, it’s a way of holding government accountable for its actions. You have to build a lawful society first. Then you put in the mechanisms to keep it under control.
Our foreign policy — hell, our entire nation — is being run by dorm room bullshit session. It’s being run by a bunch of guys sitting around talking up great ideas of how society could be run (abstinence only education, democratization of the Middle East, ramped up drug war, massive spending) rather than the complex reality of how society is — the complexity that tells libertarians and federalist to screw big ideas and just establish law, order and freedom. And the tragedy is that they have tried these big idea on a multi-ethnic nation with devastating results.
It could be worse. The last people with grand ideas for running society were the Maoists. But there was a better way. And hopefully in January 2009, we’ll start looking for it.
As we recover from the most deadly shooting in American history, let’s be grateful these things are so rare, that we live in a society that is relatively peaceful and lawful. And let’s make sure we keep it that way.