The kind of debate that makes you roll your eyes.

In winter of 2003, Will Wilkinson took a non-committal position against the war in Iraq, a position which did nothing to reveal the dangers of using unilateral military force to bring a government and country to its knees in the name of liberation, freedom, liberalism, and other nostalgia-tainted words. Now he takes Max Borders to task for his seemingly misguided "contractarian position" supporting the war in Iraq. In fact, Matthew Yglesias notes the more sound foreign policy position when he writes:

What remains is the "democratic domino theory" but the notion that anything even remotely resembling libertarianism could underwrite an effort to conscript huge quantities of resources from the American public and deploy them in an attempt to wholly remake the social and political order in a foreign country is too absurd to merit a rebuttal. This is an argument properly directed at egalitarian liberals, and we have reason to be asked to produce some specific arguments about why the dim prospects for succeeding at this were ex ante knowable (such arguments can, I think, be fairly easily produced) and/or why, given the opportunity costs, nation-building in Iraq was not a wise place to deploy the resources in question (this argument, I think, can be produced very easily). As long as the conversation is supposed to be proceeding on the shared basis of libertarianism, however, one hardly needs to say anything. It's coercion, it's planning, it's every non-libertarian thing under the sun.

While Max should certainly be criticized for his erroneous views (which Daniel McCarthy does far too emotionally), Will should also be criticized for his waffling and wish-washy positions. Sure, it's great to wait to until you see the results of the war become taking a serious principled position on it. But it is also futile and useless-- it doesn't save lives, and it only saves the margins of ego. Better to be proven wrong about your criticism of a war than to hedge your bets. You can only afford to waffle about war when you aren't being forced to fight in the trenches.