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The US government was formed by killing people and blowing [censored] up?
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in a sense, yes.
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What I mean is those things are all confounding variables. If we compare dictatorship to democracy when there are a ton of other significant variables differing in the two circumstances then the comparison isn't valid.
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but we're talking about democracy and dictatorship over the exacts same set of people in the exact same region in very similar times.
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Yeah, but a foreign military is going to have a much harder time dealing with another country's disputes than a local military that's been around for a long time and that most of the people consider legitimate.
I don't know the exact cause of the chaos in Iraq and I think pointing to any one thing as "the cause" is a mistake.
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Even Petreus who has all the bias to say the military is the solution has admitted in his congressional testimony that the cause of violence in iraq is the fight over the political forum.
I personally think the US military helps exasperate the problem but even if they werent there, those problems would remain due to the democracy's failure.
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What book would you recommend that explains how laws can be private? What is a private law anyway? Isn't law public by definition. I think you mean the enforcement would be private. But can they enforce whatever laws they're paid to enforce (e.g. something like "Sunis can't worship freely and can't insult that guy that the Shi'ites like so much")? Who comes up with the laws? It doesn't seem fundamentally different from state coercion to me.
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since the thread is about David Friedman we'll stick with his works although many others write on this topic, not at always from the same perspective. If you want some more stuff let me know.
http://daviddfriedman.com/Libertaria...pter%2043.html
http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/L...vate_good.html
http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html
http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/A...d_Eff_Law.html
http://daviddfriedman.com/laws_order/index.shtml