"It would appear by your reasoning on the Afghan issue is that if faction A pokes and jabs at faction B and B finally declares war on A that A must stand aside and not defend itself. We can rightfully hold A responsible for the creation of a state of war but that does not require A to lie down and die. Our call for the turning over of those that planned and orchestrated the events of 9/11 I feel to be well within libertarian principles."

My second critic wrote as follows:

"I read with interest your response to Randy and find it very compelling. I follow you on the whole, but have some questions respecting the paragraph on Afghanistan.

"You say, because of our interventions into the region of the near east, ‘Any support of U.S. military action "against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan" thus cannot be justified on libertarian grounds.' At what point is a government justified in responding despite blow back?

"As I recall the events after 9/11, the perpetrators were identified (or identified themselves), and the ‘host country,' in addition to aiding them, refused to turn them over. Wouldn't this qualify as an act of war? I accept that our involvement in Iraq and Saudi Arabia by the first Bush galvanized the Al Qaeda network, but does this mean that Americans should not expect their government to respond to 9/11? If I am shot by a Cherokee while walking down a street in Oklahoma, am I not entitled to restitution and protection through the law... I think your conclusion regarding Afghanistan might be a bit hasty. If the Afghan government of the time chose to harbor and assist a near eastern aggressor within their midst, regardless of what motivated Bin Laden, aren't the Taliban then complicit in the aggression? I'd be interested to know more about your thinking on this however."

My short answer to these critics is that there is no country that is now justified in invading any other country because of the World Trade Center attack of 9/11, but if there were, it would be the Afghans who would be more justified in committing further terrorist acts in the US than we would be in killing further innocents in that nation in this terroristic manner.

In my view complete justice would require that the US (well, those individuals responsible) pay reparations for initiating these murderous hostilities. We killed far more innocent people abroad than the 3,000 guiltless Americans who perished in New York City on 9/11, a day that will long live in infamy.

The problem we face in making sense of these horrible events is bias. We are all naturally biased in favor of "our" side: Americans in favor of their fellow citizens, and foreigners on their own side. In an attempt to obviate this, let us no longer speak of groups such as the United States, Al-Qaeda, Afghanis, Iranians, Iraqis, Arabs, Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, etc. Instead, let us attempt to look at this matter through less jaundiced eyes, in a more dispassionate manner.

Accordingly, let us speak not in terms of the above categories, but instead, for simplicity's sake, of A and B. Let us posit that A begins our little drama by murdering 5 of B's children. Now, the just thing would be for B to capture A, and to subject him to the full penalties provided by law for such an outrage. However, B does something very different, and totally unjustified. He murders one of A's children. Why so few? Let us stipulate that A is much more powerful than B, and that the murder of only one of A's innocent children was the "best" he could do.

Assume, that even though A is more powerful than B, both are so well entrenched that justice will not easily be meted out to either of these murderous scoundrels. So now what? What insights does libertarian theory afford us in this context? Several conclusions may be drawn, I think.

One, neither party should be encouraged to invade the territory of the other. To do so, given that both are strong enough not to be brought to the bar of justice, would only mean the senseless killing of still others, neighbors of A or B, whichever is the victim of subsequent hostilities. However, if we take a God's eye point of view, and entertain the contrary to fact conditional that one but only one of these nefarious characters can indeed be punished for the murder of the others' child(ren), then it is clear that A must be brought to justice. There are two reasons for this. The minor one: A killed far more innocent children than did B. Major reason: A was the first to engage in murder; in the street vernacular, he "started up." B is no saint. He, too, spilled innocent blood. But he retaliated, he did not begin. There is surely a lower rung in hell reserved for those who begin such dastardly chain reactions than those who "merely" follow suit. I thus respectfully disagree with Murray Rothbard, who says:

"If Smith and a group of his henchmen aggress against Jones and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Jones's cause. But Jones has no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of his "just war": to steal others' property in order to finance his pursuit, to conscript others into his posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of his struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones should do any of these things, he becomes a criminal as fully as Smith, and he too becomes subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality."

As I see matters, although both his "Smith" and my "A," on the one hand, and also his Jones, and my "B" on the other, are all vicious depraved despoilers of children in my view, the former pair are more guilty than the latter pair.

Rothbard's failure, as I see it, is not sufficiently distinguishing between he who first engages in an entirely unwarranted action, and he who only then follows suit. Both are evil. But there is still a difference between them. Jones is not as fully a criminal as is Smith. They are both, of course, guilty of first-degree murder. But, surely, a careful analysis can see at least a "dime's worth" of difference between them.

Who is A and who is B? As would be obvious to any disinterested, impartial, judicial observer, we, the U.S. must take on the role of A, and various Muslim nations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can only fairly and properly be cast as the B of our little morality play. Long before 9/11 took place, our own country was busy killing innocents abroad in those parts of the world. Thus, if the U.S. is justified in going into Afghanistan to hunt for Osama bin Laden, and other perpetrators and aiders and abetters of the crimes of 9/11 in New York City, then they are even more righteous in doing precisely the same thing to us.

If anyone doubts that America started up and the "terrorists" (note scare quote marks here) were guilty of the slightly lesser charge of retaliation, consider the following:

"In 1996 then-UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, in reference to years of U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iraq, ‘We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?'

"To which Ambassador Albright responded, ‘I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.'"