War and the Individual

A basic tenet of Libertarianism is that “The Individual is Sovereign”.
People are not bees in a hive or ants on a hill – interchangeable, insignificant beings whose purpose is to blindly serve, even die for, the colony. Our value is in being individuals, not mere pieces of the whole. You are important because you are a separate, individual human being, not because you are part of 300 million Americans.
By necessity, we individuals – we citizens – form governments to handle those tasks we cannot reasonably handle on our own or in voluntary cooperation with others. What and how numerous those tasks should be is a matter of separate debate, but the point is that with humans, the colony – the nation, society and its leaders – should exist to serve the citizens and not the other way around.
And so, for war to be valid, it must stem from a direct physical threat to the citizenry, and not because of a leader’s whim or a supposed affront to “the nation’s honor”. There must be an identifiable enemy threatening those citizens, and not a nebulous boogey-man like “international terrorism”. There must be an effective, rational plan in place to neutralize that enemy along with a pre-determined definition of victory, not an open-ended mission which can be continually modified to prolong and expand the conflict.
If these parameters are not solidly identified, a nation should never ask its soldiers – valuable, individual human beings all – to go in harm’s way. They are not ants to be sacrificed for the supposed good of the colony; they are honorable men and women who have volunteered to defend their families, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens. They are in uniform to protect our people and our borders, not to occupy foreign lands like Iraq and Afghanistan based on misinformation and outright lies from the political überclass.
Honoring these soldiers’ service and bravery by bringing them home alive and well will be my Job #1 in Congress.