Having recently cast aspersions on his attitude toward constitutional law, I now take up the challenge of defending Barr against John Tabin, who was at the Libertarian debate hosted by Reason last night:

Dave Weigel asked the candidates if they favored any of the US interventions since the first Gulf War, and Bob Barr flatly said no. I asked him afterwards if that meant he was now against the war in Afghanistan. He answered that he didn’t have time to get into it during the debate, but he had “no problem at all going into Afghanistan” (though he seems to be against staying there now) — he just doesn’t consider it an “intervention.” That, of course, makes no sense.

It strikes me that, whatever Barr’s internal logic, there’s a quite sound case to make that the conquest of Afghanistan was so qualitatively different from every other post-Desert Storm operation that it makes no sense to consider it and all the others together as interventions. Aside from the blanket international support the US enjoyed, the main legal point to make is that, in Afghanistan, state-sponsored terrorists intimately entangled with the regime launched a spectacular and deliberate attack on United States soil — a situation neither identical nor even really analogous to those precipitated by Mohammad Farah Adid, Slobodan Milosevic, or, uh, Saddam Hussein. If retaliating to such an attack in full accordance with international law is ‘intervention,’ but so is launching an attack without recourse to international law, then it is I who will need the intervention, because the complete collapse of all meaning in the English language will in short order have driven me deep into drink.

(Photo of post-intervention Belgrade courtesy of Flickrer pirano.)