I picked up this biography of anti-slavery agitator William Lloyd Garrison in a used-book store a few weeks ago and it is truly inspiring. I recommend it to any lover of liberty.

While I’m not the moralist Garrison was (though if there’s any political issue deserving of stern moralism, slavery would certainly be it), his approach to politics has a lot to recommend it. For example, he didn’t vote for a single politician until Lincoln’s bid for reelection, by which time it was clear he was committed to ending slavery.

Garrison saw it as a tacit endorsement of a system perpetrating evil. But he did take pains to commend mainstream politicians when they took positions he favored, even if they may have fallen far short of the immediate abolition he so fervently advocated week after week in “The Liberator.”

In other words, Garrison attempted to nurture anti-slavery feeling until it could enter the realm of mainstream politics. There was no point, in his view, of attempting politics when the game was so far removed from where he thought the issue should be joined.

He also resisted other abolitionists’ attempts at third parties (the Free-Soil and Liberty parties, to jog a few cobwebs from your U.S. history survey class). His view was that abolitionists made for lousy politicians, and couldn’t possibly compete for office without toning down their radicalism, so why bother?

All of this makes a lot of sense to me, and I think applies very well to today’s liberty movement. Why support a lousy third party like the LP, which (1) won’t win in our two-party system and (2) only feeds egoes and distracts from the real work of promoting liberty.

What it takes to make progress is the heavy intellectual lifting the libertarian think tanks and litigation work that groups like Cato, Heartland, Reason and the Institute for Justice do.

And, too, maybe a little more outrage. On a lot of issues, we don’t quite have the black-and-white crystal clarity of an issue like slavery or civil rights, but there’s a lot of hurt and suffering out there done at the pleasure of our government and at the bidding of our politicians. That’s something to be outraged about. And I don’t think there’s any shame in saying so, in a way that can be felt and appreciated by people without doctorates in economics.

(Also posted to Circle Bastiat.)

The perverse results of the president’s decision to invade Iraq should now be obvious to everyone. There was no weapons threat and no Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.

Now, Al Qaeda operatives are streaming into Iraq with the help of Iran and cooperating with remnants of the Hussein regime in a head-on attempt to damage and humiliate the United States. Furthermore, the ranks of viable recruits is as long as the list of newly radicalized Muslims in the whole of Iraq.

We are lucky only that they appear to have — for the time being — chosen Iraq as their prime target rather than “the homeland.” Still, the national-security benefit of the Iraq war is still highly dubious. Instead of attacking Al Qaeda at “the time of our choosing,” they have American soldiers on their heels, nervous that around every corner is another disaster.

The Hussein regime was successfully contained, but the anarchic Iraq of today is a greater threat than ever to U.S. security. The president’s policy of unncecessary, preemptive war created this dilemma. This is the worst of all: Now the battle against Al Qaeda must share time, energy, and increasingly scarce resources with the ungainly attempt to remake an ethnically and religiously fractured country which has known only oppression and a Soviet-style economy into a functioning, democratic, tolerant society devoted to free enterprise and the suppression of terrorism.

To stay means serving as a target and recruiting tool for anti-American terrorists while sucking up the military resources so badly needed to fight the terror war on the homefront and elsewhere around the globe. To leave quickly probably means making Iraq just another client state with a questionable devotion to fighting terrorism and yet another example of the United States’ lackluster devotion to democracy in the Middle East.

There is, as Justin Raimondo writes, “no U-turn on the road to empire.” Other than that, it’s been a splendid little war.

To maneuver ourselves out of this sticky situation would take the intelligence of a rocket scientist and the delicate touch of a brain surgeon. Whatever else might be said about Dubya, he doesn’t possess those qualities. He doesn’t possess even the inclination to reflect that he was wrong to have fought this war.

I don’t know what the best way out of this box is. Frankly, I’m too disgusted to even bother trying to conjure the ideal solution anyway, since it’s so painfully obvious that Dubya & Co. are impervious to the colossal nature of their mistake. Of course it’s good that Hussein is gone. The war can’t be said to have been a total failure because it did achieve the ouster of his regime, but U.S. security should be the first objective of U.S. foreign policy (an exotic idea, I know), and this war has done nothing to further U.S. security and done just about everything to endanger it.

I only hope at this point Iraq doesn’t go as badly as it can, not too many American soldiers come home in bodybags, and that Dubya & Co. don’t get the notion that another little war — this time with Iran — is the way to take their Iraq troubles off the front pages.

(Also posted to Stand Down.)