Individualists and anti-collectivists should be opposed to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran

Sayyid Qutb was not a cleric. He was a philosopher. Osama's close friend, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, publicly declared that they had studied under Sayyid's brother (whose career essentially consisted of promoting Sayyid's ideas,) and that Sayyed was the man who had "most influenced" their generation. Osama might state those as some of his reasons (I am unaware, however, that the US is occupying Saudi Arabia, can you find a source?). Our support for Israel is of course bad military doctrine and should cease immediately regardless of the moral arguments for and against (which are complex because Israel's enemies are really really evil, and Israel itself is also really really evil :D). This does not mean these are his original reasons however. His teacher in spirit, Qutb, came up with his ideas after a visit to America and a look at all the sex and money that shocked his Muslim sensibilities. Such foreign policy matters (some of which were legitimate) of course are the personal reasons for many lower- end recruits of the enemy, but they are not the reasons of the leaders. If they were Osama would be bound to be consistent with them, and thus NOT try to create a world state by Sharia law. You claim to be a reader of Ludwig von Mises. Why then do you share the odd delusion that the post- WWI sanctions lead to the rise of Nazism? As Mises points out in Omnipotent Government, the sanctions in question were never enforced, and indeed if they had been Germany would have had more difficulty raising a military threat. The essential intellectual characteristics of Nazism (socialism + racism + living in a relatively overpopulated state) were the norm of German society not just after WWI, but through much of the 19th century as well. The only essential difference the Nazis brought to the table was resolve and acumen. If the causes you describe were accurate, the essential policies our enemies take would be consistent with those causes. They are not, and so what I am arguing to perpetuate is not the causes of terrorism. I do not advocate slaughtering "one terrorist and fifty innocents," I advocate slaughtering one terrorist and whoever helps them commit terror. If a man shelters our enemy in his home, knowingly, he is not an innocent, he is ipso facto another enemy. If he does it unknowingly, he'll get out of the way once he realizes who he let into his home-- and in the future he'll learn to be more wary of his guests. We are not responsible for the fact that our enemy hides among civilians, he is and so are any civilians who enable it. There are of course occasional murders, Haditha for example, and the parties involved should be punished, but these occur not just in a war zone but also in everyday life. Those who would place their bodies in front of our enemy to protect him are as guilty as he is himself. There are Iraqi innocents, but they are not the ones being killed in the course of legitimate military action. I'm not holding people guilty because they don't flee their property, I'm holding them guilty because they let our enemy on their property in the first place. If that enemy forced his way on, he is the one at fault and he is the one who should be made to compensate for the damage to property once they do flee (there is no other response to an aggressor, of course, than fight or flee). Besides, no legitimate private property exists in Iraq except that established since the US invasion, Saddam ran a socialist state. The only people who were considered to "own" anything significant were those who got it by helping Saddam, thus being eo ipso our enemy. What we can do to minimize the risk to innocents, of course, is open up immigration. There are thousands of Iraqi refugees waiting, who have been helpful to our cause, and the government should rightly be condemned for barring their entrance. It is entirely possible to voluntarily fund a war with profits attendant that war, once it is established that the war itself can be voluntarily funded. Because the war profits would exist in the absence of taxation, they just wouldn't take the form of fiat money. US bombs aren't dropped, as far as I know, on private property or whatever semblance of it remained in Iraq. They were dropped on military targets. Just because wars pit an "us" versus "them" does not make them collectivist in any meaningful sense. Because a group gains legitimacy through the voluntary membership of each individual in it. The question of whether something is collectivist is not whether it references a group, but whether a group is considered to matter beyond it's component individuals rights. My support for this war goes as far as and no further than the rights of the individuals that make up the war effort.