Yeah, I know I’m arriving pretty late to this little ball, but I thought I should do an LFB column on the topic…

With the Taliban in tatters and UBL reduced to bouncing on stalagmites for kicks, it’s becoming increasingly clear to GOP strategists that actual ground fighting in our perpetual war for perpetual peace may not be going on come November of 2004. So rattle the sabres, circle the pundits, and let slip the blogs of war: George II is ramping up for Gulf War II.

If you’ve been following the news these past few weeks, you can probably recite the litany of arguments for and against invasion backwards in English, Farsi, and Pashto, but still, a quick recap won’t hurt. The hawk line is that Saddam Hussein has just become an Incredibly Pressing Threat to National Security again. Apparently he’s due to get a horde of bioweapons and enriched plutonium next Tuesday, and will waste no time lobbing them at Israel or having al-Qaeda goons sneak them into the U.S. Also, he’s a bad man, and we all know that the primary mission of the U.S. military in these dark times is to wander the earth like Kwai Chang Caine doing good deeds.

As a rule, the worst despots have funny moustaches, but it seems worth asking what further reason we have to think Saddam poses a serious threat. It’s not quite cricket to question the satanicness of the satan du jour, but does anyone else find it odd that the same little thug who’s been dictator-ing away free from U.N. oversight for four years now is suddenly a grave danger? He’s clearly had chemical and biological weapons before (he may have them yet), and for quite a while we were willing to rely on the logic of deterrence. I know, all enemies of the U.S. are supposed to be, ipso facto, insane and therefore not subject to deterrence. But I defy anyone to seriously claim that Hussein is less mad (or less aware of MAD) than the fingers once on the nuclear buttons in China or the U.S.S.R. In point of fact, Saddam has rather boringly behaved as game theorists might predict: he refrained from deploying chemical weapons during Gulf War I (knowing it would trigger his ouster), but did resort to them in the Iran/Iraq war when Iran breached his borders. That is, in other words, when he had nothing to lose.

Now, deterrence requires accountability, and the pro-war oracles don’t envision anything so suicidal as a direct Iraqi attack on the U.S. or Israel. Rather, the theory goes, a Legion of Doom style alliance between Hussein and al-Qaeda will lead to agents of the latter smuggling weapons into the U.S. This makes little strategic sense: it’s hard to see the upside for Hussein in such a proposition. A random, unattributed attack would carry a risk of being traced, and win Iraq little if it were carried out. In order to use it as a blackmail lever — one of uncertain effectiveness — beret-man would have to reveal what he’d done. Also, let’s recall that Hussein isn’t cut from the crazed martyr cloth. He’s more your old fashioned power-and-survival style thug, and as an Arab nationalist, has been called a “bad Muslim” and otherwise sharply criticized by bin Laden and company. (He’s so secular — Baghdad’s practically San Francisco!) So financing that particular nest of scorpions also seems like a dicey proposition. Notice that reported sightings of al-Qaeda operatives have all been in the Kurdish north. Let’s play “dictator for a day”: where do you, as pseudo-Saddam, stick shady terrorists you’ve entrusted with biological weapons? If your answer is not, in fact “deep in territory under the control of people who want me eviscerated,” mark a point against the al-Qaeda/Iraq nexus theory.

Let’s say that, despite all that, we want to hew to a hawkish version of the green-beloved precautionary principle: if there’s any risk of a harm, “regulate” via invasion. What does the apres-regime-change regime look like? Ah, there the fun begins. Ethnic Kurds in Iraq are unlikely to share the Pentagon’s vision of a unified Iraq, and will push for an autonomous Kurdistan, either as part of a federal Iraq, or a sovereign entity. Iran is terrified that this might give some of the eight million Kurds within its borders funny ideas. Ditto Turkey and Syria. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is less than sanguine about a the prospect of a southern Shia majority which may prefer to align itself with Iran than submit to one more Sunni strongman — this time hand-picked by the U.S. Just about everyone seems to agree that a successful invasion would, after all, require long term (that is, decades) American occupation of a sizable chunk of the Muslim world. If you thought capping an archduke could start some fireworks, wait until this bit of fecal matter strikes the whirling blades.

The preceding arguments should be familiar enough by now, but the invasion debate raises a more general question, recently articulated by Brink Lindsey. There is, Brink says, no “invisible hand” in international affairs akin to the sort that makes non-intervention a reasonable default position in domestic economies. So (he asks) why should we think that in the former case, as in the latter, the unintended consequences of intervention will be worse than those of inaction? To turn the question around a little: donâ??t we â??interveneâ? in domestic markets in one very specific way when we establish the legal and property framework within which that invisible hand operates? And isnâ??t that precisely the sort of â??interventionâ? we do internationally when we attempt to rein in rogue states?

Well, no, it isnâ??t. In the absence of the rule of law and traditional liberal rights, the invisible hand may not function internationally as well as it does in robust markets, but it is not altogether absent: equilibria are established over time. Sometimes these are so unstable or inherently awful that almost anything would clearly be better. Itâ??s possible that tomorrow, photos will be released of Saddam and Usama sharing a tall milkshake with two straws. If that happened, Iâ??d be duly embarrassed, and revise my assessment of the Iraqi threat. Under most conditions, though, the power vacuum created by the dramatic sort of regime change the administration envisions triggers a process of re-equilibriation at least as dangerous as the status quo. Deposing a dictator establishes a kind of political arbitrage opportunity, which political entrepreneurs are eager to exploit. In these cases, though, the transaction costs typically involve guns, bombs, and other implements of commerce in destruction. As post-invasion uncertainty rises, parties on the ground rush to exploit perceived differentials in local knowledge, and we see the same kind of flurry you would on a stock floor when a hot bit of news leaksâ?¦ if the NASDAQ allowed traders to carry grenades. This is good in markets, because each act of arbitrage increases efficiency, and involves exchanges to mutual benefit. Exchanges of artillery lack this attractive feature. As we refrain from intervention domestically in the interest of encouraging productive trade, we should be guided by a defeasible presumption of non-intervention on the international stage in the interest of preventing this undesirable variety.