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President Donald Trump has announced that he plans new missile strikes against the Syrian regime in response to an alleged chemical attack on Syrian civilians in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus.

The US has offered no evidence of the attack, since, as the Financial Times has admitted, confirmation of any such attack could take weeks. Moreover, confirming the attack took place at all is not the same thing as confirming that the Syrian regime was responsible for it.

The Trump administration, apparently, has little interest in such technicalities. Advocates for immediate military intervention argue that evidence could be lost in the meantime.

So the absence of evidence is evidence.

But, as Tucker Carlson noted in an important segment at Fox News, even if it can be proven that the Syrian regime is responsible for the attack, it's unclear how a new attack on Syria will "make the US safer."

The administration and its pro-war backers do not appear to even be making this case, as it is quite apparent that the Syrian regime is no danger to the United States, whatsoever. The regime's tiny air force and virtually-non-existent navy pose no threat to a country with a navy ten times larger than any other navy, and which spends more on military projects than the next eight most militarized regimes combined. As President Dwight Eisenhower understood — as he cut military spending in the face of a resurgent Soviet Union — the US's huge nuclear arsenal renders threats from regimes like Assad's utterly moot.

But even if none of this were true, the burden is still on the US government to affirmatively demonstrate that Assad's Syria is a threat to the American voters and taxpayers.

This will not happen, however, because that's not how foreign policy is made in the US. There will be no meaningful debate in Congress, and nothing more than accusations and innuendo will be issued from the administration and other organs of the executive branch. "Trust us, we wouldn't lie" will be the central claim of the American war promoters. Americans will, yet again, be told to sacrifice both treasure and freedoms to satisfy the latest schemes of the American military establishment.

Given that only a portion of the population will buy any claims that Americans are in danger, we'll hear vague platitudes about humanitarian missions, and how the Syrian regime must be stopped for the sake of decency. We heard the same thing in both Iraq and Libya before regime change was effected there in the name of humanitarianism. In both cases, however, the region was only made less stable, and more prone to radical Islamism. The result has been anything but humanitarian or decent. Nor can advocates for war supply any answer to the question of what will replace Assad's regime. The most likely candidates are radical Islamists. Moreover, so long as the US continues to ignore the humanitarian disaster in Yemen being perpetrated by American ally Saudi Arabia, any claims of "humanitarian" intent are dubious at best.

The real motivation behind the latest drive for war might be found by employing a strategy recently suggested by Lew Rockwell, who notes:

When you hear the words "national security" or "national interest" used by people in Washington, I think it's important to substitute "imperial" for "national." So is it in the national interest of the United States to bomb Syria? No. Is it in the imperial interest of the American Empire to do so? Yes.

In other words, the US state and many of its allies stand to benefit significantly from war with Syria. As Randolf Bourne pointed out a century ago, "war is the health of the state," and yet another war will help the American regime justify larger budgets, larger deficits, more taxes, and more state power in general.

For this reason, there has always been a close connection between the ideology of laissez-faire liberalism, and the ideology of peace. In the 19th century, it was free-market liberals like Richard Cobden and his friend Frédéric Bastiat who regarded economic intervention, slavery, and war as all part of one authoritarian package. This mantle was later picked up by the great liberal economist Ludwig von Mises, and then by his student Murray Rothbard.

Even in the cases where defensive war might have been justified, the costs of war, the liberals understood, have been far more grave than our rulers would have us believe. War is always a disaster for life, for liberty, and for the quality of life for those who survive. The only exception, it seems, are those organs of the state that benefit so handsomely from armed conflict.

But, on the matter of war, the position of the liberals — those we now know as "libertarians" — have long been firmly on the side of peace whenever possible: