"As democracy takes hold in Iraq, the enemies of freedom will do all in their power to spread violence and fear. They are trying to shake the will of our country and our friends, but the United States of America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins. The killers will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom." -George W. Bush, 2004 State of the Union Address

"Freedom" has long been a word frequently employed by the American politician to memetically infiltrate the brains of their victims. This proud tradition of bullshitting has been continued by our current Caesar, who applies the word as liberally as Michael Moore shovels a buffet on to his plate. Now, normally I probably wouldn't mind that much, but "freedom" happens to be a word quite dear to my heart. Secondly, even the words that politicians speak can occasionally contain meaning, or at least indicative of the beliefs of their writers. What are Bush's speech writers and their neo-conservative paymasters trying to say here?

Their conception of "freedom" is this: if you live in a country with a democracy, you are free. It doesn't matter what laws the democracy ends up passing. If the Iraqi government passes a law banning Jews from the country, George Bush will just give the world is his best smarmy smile and tell us "that's democracy" (and Hans Hermann Hoppe will applaud). The glorification of democracy is a far cry from the opinions of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who supposedly set the values upon which the United States government is based. They saw democracy as a tool to insure liberty, and were smart enough to come up with restrictions on it. Though the Bush administration has gotten some kind of Bill of Rights included in the Iraqi constitution, they hardly emphasize it. What's important is not actual freedom, but its appearance, which is created by the ritual of voting.

Some libertarians, like Tom Palmer and John T. Kennedy, get confused by all this freedom talk. This confusion is so great that it leads them to believe they live under the Badnarik administration, and the Iraq invasion will result in liberty of the Iraqi people. Unfortunately, they are wrong. The ideological motivation of the Iraq invasion, if there is any, is not about freedom, but about democracy, and that's what it will result in (unless they simply return to dictatorship). Democracy is not freedom, but freedom to, in this case the freedom to put a piece of paper in a ballot box while homicidal Sunnis try to blow you up. Poor confused Tom Palmer, he'll never be a full fledged member of the conservative club. When he turns his back at the Washington parties, the conservatives will always whisper over their fine wines and plates full of freedom fries: "there's the libertarian."

As much as some libertarians need to realize all this, the neo-conservatives of the Republican party need to stop talking about "freedom" and acknowledge what they really are: democrats.