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If Lew Rockwell is indicative of mainstream Libertarian thought it should be no wonder that the Libertarian position remains on the fringe.

I mean, do we as a nation (with a Constitutional mandate that our elected government provide for the common defense) go and take out these terrorist regimes or do each of us go and buy our own F-16s and fight?

Conspiracy thinkers make me sick to my stomach, and Lew Rockwell and his site is chief on my list of conspiracy thinkers.

Conspiracy thinkers make me sick to my stomach,...

Yeah, me too. Someone's gotta tell all those prosecutors to stop charging people with "Conspiracy to..." We all know that conspiracy doesn't exist. Don't we? ;^)

Two things to keep in mind here: 1) There is always a danger that once government siezes control of something and limits liberty, it's difficult, if not impossible to reclaim it. We must be careful of the measures we consent to. 2)Neutralizing the terrorist threat is important, but we must allow these efforts turn into an exercise of empire building. The last thing we need is to set up more permanent outposts around the globe. Let's do the job and come home.

The terrorist threat must be neutralized. However, we need not turn into a rigid police state to remain secure. We all know about trading liberty for security. I think we could learn a lesson from the Israelis:

In 1972, the Israeli Mossad initiated one of the most ambitious covert counterterrorist campaigns in history. Golda Meir and the Israeli cabinet's top secret 'Committee-X' devised a campaign in retaliation for the massacre of eleven Israeli's during the Munich Olympic games. Meir tasked the committee with devising an appropriate response to the Munich massacre. The panel concluded that the most effective response was to authorize the assassination of any Black September terrorists involved in the Munich incident. The Mossad assumed the responsibility for implementing the panel's directive. To accomplish the directive, the Mossad developed several assassination teams, each with specific mission parameters and methods of operation. The Mossad headquarters element developed one team utilizing staff operations officers supported by recruited assets of regional stations and managed through standard Mossad headquarters' procedures. A second unit recruited staff officers and highly trained specialists and set them outside the arm and control of the government. The theory was to support this team financially through covert mechanisms and let them operate with complete anonymity outside the government structure. The assassination team deployed through normal channels failed to complete their mission and publicly exposed the entire operation. The second team which operated with full decentralized authority and freedom of movement achieved significant success in fulfilling their operational objectives and never compromised the operation.

This effort was the basis for the movie "Sword of Gideon."Full text that the excerpt was extracted from.