Murray N. Rothbard, “Why the Intervention in Arabia?” (1990)

This essay from Making Economic Sense is a compact antiwar polemic written during Operation Desert Shield. Rothbard’s central question is why the Bush administration committed vast U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia when its stated objective kept shifting among defense of Saudi Arabia, liberation of Kuwait, punishment or removal of Saddam Hussein, protection of democracy, prevention of nuclear danger, and protection of oil consumers.

Why the hysteria? Why the most massive military buildup since Vietnam, and the placing of almost our entire army, air force, navy, marines, and a chunk of reserves in this one spot on the globe where there is not even a U.S. treaty obligation?

Rothbard’s method is sequential demolition. He grants none of Saddam Hussein’s virtues, but argues that official analogies and moral slogans do not justify war. The “big guy, little guy” argument, he says, imports a domestic-police metaphor into international politics and then violates the very limits that make policing legitimate. A policeman may pursue a criminal; he may not blockade or bomb a whole population.

Cops operate on the crucial principle that innocent civilians do not get killed or targeted in the course of trying to apprehend the guilty.

The deeper theoretical move is Rothbard’s distinction between private property and state borders. Private ownership can arise from production, exchange, and identifiable title; political boundaries are usually the result of conquest, dynastic settlement, or diplomatic accident. This lets him reject the claim that every violated frontier automatically deserves American military enforcement.

Government boundaries are not productive acquisitions, as is private property.

From there, Rothbard stresses selectivity. If Washington were defending democracy, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia would be odd clients, since he portrays them as royal oligarchies rather than popular governments. If it were defending international law, its own invasion of Panama would be an embarrassment. If it were opposing brutality, Saddam’s crimes had been tolerated when Iraq served U.S. purposes against Iran. The same point applies to alliances: regimes previously denounced as tyrannical or radical could be redescribed as partners once they aligned against Baghdad.

Rothbard also rejects the nuclear-danger argument as a case of selective panic. A possible future Iraqi bomb could not explain a military emergency, he argues, when the United States had long coexisted with Soviet nuclear power and tolerated nuclear weapons or programs among states such as Israel, India, and Pakistan. The issue, for him, is not that proliferation is harmless, but that the level of alarm depends on political alignment rather than consistent principle.

The oil-price explanation receives similar treatment. Rothbard argues that if Washington’s purpose were merely to protect consumers from high prices, its behavior would be unintelligible: politicians had accepted or promoted policies that raised fuel costs, and the military crisis itself helped drive prices upward. The real issue, he suggests, is not cheap oil as such, but control over oil’s supply, management, and revenue channels.

The essay’s positive explanation is therefore political-economic. Rothbard links Saudi and Kuwaiti oil to Western corporate, banking, and state interests: Aramco, Export-Import Bank support, U.S. military basing, pipeline finance, Bechtel construction, Gulf Oil/British Petroleum concessions, and major royal deposits in New York banks. Iraq, by contrast, appears as an outsider to this network.

Iraq, on the other hand, has long been a rogue oil country, in the sense of being outside the Rockefeller-Wall Street ambit.

The result is an inversion of the official story. Rothbard does not deny that the crisis concerns oil; he denies that it is a democratic or consumer-protection war for cheap energy. In his reading, the intervention defends an established Saudi-Kuwaiti and Western financial order against a disruptive regional power. The essay is thus characteristic Rothbard: it treats wartime humanitarian rhetoric as a screen for state power, refuses to sacralize existing borders, and asks which ruling and corporate interests benefit from mobilization.